The main, and I feel most important, thing that I have done this year for Jillian to encourage her language arts skills is to give her lots of room and time for reading - both on her own and reading out loud with me.
Animal Stories - we did copywork and wrote summaries from these throughout the year.
- Among the Meadow People ::: free at The Baldwin Project
- Aesop's Fables (Children's Illustrated Classics)
Parts of Speech - introducing nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs
The "Four Kinds of Words" story (changed from gnomes to fairies for my fairy-loving child) and the lessons from Dorothy Harrer's An English Manual - the Second Grade chapter.
A Little Garden Flower's Second Grade book - This whole book is excellent, but one of the main things we took from this book for Language Arts was the daily practice of circling the parts of speech with a different colored pencils - assigning each part of speech a color and then consistently using that system all year. I saw this activity go from puzzling and intimidating to natural and almost second nature for Jillian through the course of the year. We'll be building on this in third grade.
Ruth Heller's World of Language Series:
- Merry-Go-Round: A Book About Nouns
- Kites Sail High: A Book About Verbs
- Many Luscious Lollipops: A Book About Adjectives
- Up, Up and Away: A Book About Adverbs
Names by Claire Dubrovic
If the names of things you'd know
Don't ask verbs; to nouns you must go!
Nouns
Mountain, hill and stone and rock
House and castle, ship and dock,
Lion, tiger, camel, horse,
Tulip, lily, nettle, gorse,
Thought, consideration, word and deed,
Love and kindness, help in need.
We've heard their names, what do they do?
Verbs
They lie and sleep, they do not wake.
Men plough and build, they cook and bake.
They feed and blossom, die and grow.
They roar and gallop, snort and blow.
They think and plan, they work and play.
They laugh and cry, they hope and pray.
Their name we know and what they do,
What are they like, we're asking you?
Adjectives
White and black and green and blue
Fragrant, prickly, dainty or tall,
Wild or gentle, big or small.
Beautiful, ugly, old or new
Gentle, helpful, friendly ever
Cruel, unkind, grumpy never.
Verb and noun and adjective
Understanding of the world they give.
Parts of Speech, Adverbs by Trevor Smith Westgarth
Adverbs add to the verb to tell how, when or where,
They give a better picture, and information share.
Adverbs like yesterday, immediately and then
All help us to understand a little more of "When?"
Adverbs like away, outside, above and there
Answer the question if you ask it "Where?"
Adverbs like quickly, clumsily or wisely
Describe the manner in which a thing is done precisely.
Additional Resources:
- Handwriting Without Tears
- Mad Libs
- Waldorf Reading for Homeschoolers :::: Barbara Dewey
- Lively Language Lessons ::: Serendipity
- The Waldorf Student Reading List
What resources have you been using to teach Language Arts?
Okay...so reading through all of that I'm feeling VERY intimidated about homeschooling. I want to homeschool but I don't really even know where to start since I was homeschooled with stuff like Abeka and Bob Jones university stuff...blah!!!!!!
ReplyDeleteOh, no Alyssa - I didn't mean to make it sound so complicated! We really do try to keep it simple.
ReplyDeleteThis list is a list of what we've been doing for months now, and we certainly don't do ALL of this every day or use EVERY resource at once. This is a re-cap of what we've been using for all of second grade, so please don't feel intimidated by it :-)
There's a great post at Simple Homeschool about creating your own homeschool here:
http://simplehomeschool.net/howtobuildyourfamilyshomeschool/
If I can clarify anything for you or answer any ?'s let me know!
Thanks!!!!! I'll check that post out. I"ve started doing some stuff with the kids...most *pre school* stuff they already know just through playing...shapes and colors, numbers and letters.
ReplyDeleteJust found your blog today... love what you are doing for language arts! We are mostly CM homeschoolers but I have recently become so very interested in Waldorf and have been devouring books and resources for the last six months. It's nice to see another CM/Waldorf homeschooler!
ReplyDeleteI have bookmarked a lot of your resources and just put lots of holds over at our library for some of the books you recommended!