I have really struggled with our Language Arts selection for this year. Reese is a very reluctant writer. He's full of wonderfully imaginative stories, but when it comes time to put his pencil to paper, the thoughts get lost in the mechanics of writing & it's just been really hard.
So last year, when I found
Language Lessons for the Very Young, I was pleased with its gentle approach to Grammar, Writing, & Narration. We read & copied beautiful poetry, learned parts of sentences, worked on punctuation & capitalization, & really enjoyed it.
But (there's always a but, isn't there), I have this nagging in my head that says Reese needs to work on more
writing. Creative writing. Factual writing. It just seemed like one big elephant & I didn't like it!
After reading The Well Trained Mind, I looked into Classical Language Arts programs & found
Writing With Ease by Susan Wise Bauer. It is similar to the Language Lessons, but I feel like it digs a little deeper on most exercises. I much prefer the student pages, with handwriting lines, in this book. Children are given just straight, solid lines in Language Lessons on which to do copy work, and Reese's letters tend to travel a path of their own that way.
I wasn't ready to walk away from Language Lessons though, because it incorporates some beautiful aspects of the Charlotte Mason approach, my favorite being the picture studies. Sweet, beautiful works of art in incorporated into the lessons & Reese and I have had fun discussing them, analyzing them, trying to figure out what something in the background means. So this year, we will work through
Language Lessons for the Elementary Child along side Writing With Ease. My hope is that one feeds off the other & we can work with them together.
