A Classical Education, part 3

Language arts has always been perhaps my least favorite subject in school. I would rather have a root canal than write a research paper. In fact in college, I dropped any class that required a paper and used my chemistry lab to satisfy the second writing requirement. (To be fair there were several pages of lab write ups a week.) Anyway, I didn't do a lot of research into language arts curriculum when we began schooling. I basically started with the recommendation in TWTM and then adjusted to make a better fit for our family.

In spelling and grammar, we follow the recommendations of the 2nd edition of TWTM. Both of my girls have been good spellers so we've accelerated their pace through the Spelling Workout series completing about 1 and 1/2 books a year. Jessie kept up this pace until reaching level G at which point she has switched to one lesson a week. I will probably slow Violet down next year to one level per year simply so she doesn't reach level G until 5th grade. In grammar, I really tried to like First Language Lessons for 1st and 2nd grade despite its scripted format, but just couldn't. Violet did no grammar for 1st grade, and this year has done a modified version of FLL that I put together which has worked fairly well for us. I'll probably sit down in the next couple of weeks and tweak the plans a bit here and there to improve them for Benny to use in a couple of years. For more info on what I did and why, you can read the FLL post I wrote last year on the topic.

Reading and writing are the two areas where I find myself disagreeing the most with TWTM framework. In reading, the suggested titles are tied to the four year history cycle. The first problem this creates is that some books simply don't fit neatly into given cycle. While this problem can be solved by reading the book in the time frame when it was written, it creates a massive amount of literature for year 4 relative to the other years. My solution has been to read historical fiction during the appropriate history cycle and to simply schedule other fiction as assigned reading based on my children's reading levels and interests. The second major disagreement I have with TWTM concerning reading is the recommendation to read abridged or children's versions of the classics at a younger age. We did own, and the girls enjoyed, several books in the Great Illustrated Classics series for awhile. I found that the girls would enjoy reading the books, but when they were reading well enough to try the unabridged versions, they didn't want to take the effort to enjoy the real books because they already knew the story line. Since then, I have sold all of those versions and decided to be much more selective about which books can be read using abridged or children's version. Our current list includes Shakespeare, Homer, and Pilgrim's Progress. (My kids love reading A Little Pilgrim's Progress which I consider excellent literature in its own right.)

Along with reading goes narration in a classical education. Here again I have chosen to differ with the recommendations in TWTM. When Jessie first started narrating, she would give me these lengthy, detailed, descriptive style narrations. Because I was following TWTM recommendations, I spent most of first grade trying to get her to shorten her narrations into more of a summary. The end result was that she stopped paying attention as closely as she had at first because she knew she only needed to remember the main points. The details and descriptions vanished, and she hated both narrating and history. I've spent the last two years trying to reverse this. We've switched to what would more of a Charlotte Mason style with our reading. The first goal being to get her to slow down her reading speed and give her complete attention to the text so that she gathers all the information that she needs in one reading. Second, I allow her to learn from the author instead of trying to use the text to get across the points that I consider important. Finally, I encourage the detail and description not only because it makes the narration more interesting for both of us but also because I think it helps her to be a better writer overall. I also tend to avoid written narrations until late in 3rd or 4th grade when my kids can write with greater ease. It helps keep them from hating reading and history.

Finally, the dreaded subject of writing. TWTM uses a combination of copywork, dictation, writing assignments from Rod and Staff grammar, and written narrations to form their writing program for grammar stage. Here again, I've relaxed the recommendations of TWTM to better fit our family. In Kindergarten, we work on letter formation and words. In 1st grade, we continue copywork using sentences and poems. This gives an introduction to capitalization and punctuation, but I usually find that the main focus is on spacing between letters in a single word and then between words. On second grade, we don't move on to dictation, but rather switch to cursive copywork for the year. This gives us another year to work on spelling skills. Otherwise I find writing becomes tedious when the child has to stop to sound out each word or ask how to spell certain words. Sure I could use a book like The Cat in the Hat for dictation, but I'd much rather stick to texts on the child's reading level and not below it. Sometime in third grade, we make the switch to dictation and continue it into fourth grade.

For additional writing, I find the writing assignments in the Rod and Staff grammar books to be a bit sporadic and not really very interesting. Because we don't do a lot of written narrations for history and science a la TWTM (to keep my kids from hating those subjects), we start using Classical Writing Aesopin 3rd grade. Although the program has a grammar and spelling component, I have chosen to only use the writing component for this level of the program. I'm happy with SWO and like that it can be done independently. For grammar, I find the CW program to not be a vigorous as Rod and Staff for grades 3 and 4. The program is a bit teacher intensive, but I find that it takes the guesswork out of teaching writing for me. I can clearly see what the goal for a particular level is and follow along with the suggestions for editing to work towards that goal. Writing for CW Aesop is the only work we do that goes through both a rough draft and a final draft stage. Because Jessie understands that editing and rewriting are part of what the program is designed to teach, she has been much more receptive to looking at her work critically than she would be if we tried to use the same techniques on her history narrations.

There you have it. Language arts a la the Narrow Gate Academy for K through 4th.