Tag Archives: grammar

What works for Language Arts 2nd/3rd Grade

My twins have some special learning needs.

What does this mean for how I teach?

It means I have not found one language arts program that works for them yet.

They need A LOT of repetition and learn at a different pace than most curriculums.

We have been working slowly through First Language Lessons Level 1(grammar).

This plus All About Spelling(it teaches phonics rules) with easy readers was all the language arts my boys needed but I am finding that it is leaving gaps with my girls.

I tried out Brave Writer with them but quickly realized they were not ready for the 1st/2nd grade program yet.

The copywork and dictation was lost on them.

I was a little disappointed because I have loved this program for the boys but I will try again next year.

As of right now I have settled on buying several different readers in the same level. Plus doing All About Spelling, First Language Lessons, and The Good and the Beautiful.

The Good and the Beautiful Level One Reader, plus Abeka 1st grade readers.

This might be a bit redundant but they are getting a lot more repetition.

I have them on a Mon-Wed-Fri for language arts with reading on the off days.

What I have come to realize this year is that we can do what we can on those Mon-Wed-Fri days but if we don’t get something done I can just pick it up on Tue-Thur.

This might seem simple to you but I kept thinking of Tue-Thurs as our History/Science days and would not do the extra Language Arts on those days.

But we kept getting behind because my girls have good days and bad days so it can throw the whole week off.

Now we pick up where we left off.

Usually I do The Good and the Beautiful and First Language Lessons then leave spelling for the next day if needed. But The Good and the Beautiful’s lesson was long yesterday so I pushed First Language Lessons back also.

This is helping us keep moving forward and the pressure is off a bit on those harder days.

Do you have a child that needs more repetition than most curriculum’s give?

Grammar Gumshoes

grammargumshoes

I don’t know if I would say that grammar is my weakest subject but it is definitely up there in the running…

We do things like Super Grammar and other fun things, here.

But I am always on the lookout for something that will help make learning all of those rules fun.

I found this game at the local second hand homeschool shop, Bibliomania.

The boys really liked it, even though it pretty much just asks you grammar questions and you move forward.

Not as much gumshoeing as I thought but they still liked it.

grammargumshoes2

There are different levels of questions so I asked them the easy ones and they asked me the hard ones.

I lost.

Making Grammar and Spelling Fun.

Brian Cleary

Sometimes learning facts about any subject gets BORING.

Although I really like our curriculum that we use for Grammar and spelling, it is still curriculum.

We need to change it up once in a while.

These books by Brian P. Cleary are so much fun!

insidethebooks

The boys will read them over and over again!

We also watch a lot of “Schoolhouse Rock” on Disney’s youtube channel and Grammaropolis.

My boys could watch Grammaropolis’ video “Do you Qualify?” all day.

Veggie Tales has a really fun silly song about Homophones as well.

urwords

We really like Zip-It for spelling practice.

I give the boys a list of spelling words we are learning to choose from and they have to use one of those for their first word.

zipitgame

My youngest is really good at this game!

I like scrabble also.

dice

What do you do to make learning fun?