Free Language Arts Lessons

I was having a hard time explaining just exactly what a run on sentence was to the kids today. So I googled and found these cook Power Point presentations.

http://languagearts.pppst.com/commasplices.html

They explained it very clearly for the kids, and showed them the many different ways to fix them. Plus they were free...and I love free.

Writing and Spelling

Kelsea did Write Shop I with a group of friends a few years ago. I really like the way it's laid out. For each lesson the student writes a paragraph and learns a new skill. The lessons each have three tailor-made checklists: one for the student to use before they turn in their rough draft, one for the teacher to evaluate the work for the revision, and the third for the teacher to give a fair grade based on meeting the criteria for the lesson.

This year I am going to use Write Shop for Ishmael and Joshua. I'm going to schedule it over the course of two years. I'd rather take our time and learn from it slowly, especially since they are only in 4th and 5th grade.

Kelsea will start Write Shop II this year.

For spelling I am going to give Sequential Spelling a try. I like the look of it and that all of the kids will use it at the same time. Our family seems to do well with incremental studies. We've done four lessons now and so far it's going pretty well.

Easy Grammar

Easy Grammar is very deserving of it's name. The child starts off memorizing the list of prepositions. He goes on to identify the prepositional phrases and crosses them out of sentences. Then, finding the subjects, verbs, etc. are a piece of cake.

We reinforce this with Daily Grams. This gives them practice in capitalization, punctuation, parts of speech, and sentence combining. They are quick and easy lessons.

Currently I am teaching Joshua and Ishmael from the 5th grade book. I write grammar exercises on the small board.



I write the Daily Grams on the big board that fits over top of the small board.

(My big board has certainly earned it's keep.)

They copy it into their folder. Then we make the corrections together. This saves me so much time.


Kelsea is taking Easy Grammar Plus and Daily Grams (Junior High/Senior High). I really like that Daily Grams has the same pattern in every book. It makes it easy to do this as a class at different levels. Kelsea simply does the pages in her book that coordinate with the 5th grade book. So we are all working on prepositions, capitalization, etc together.

The Elusive Smile

Yesterday at the park I tried to get some nice pictures of my studious daughter. The writing class wanted inspiration for their poetry lessons so we went to the park (see yesterday's post). She worked so hard and her poetry was so lovely.

At least I tried....hehehe