How We Homeschool: Reading and Language Arts
The foundation of all language arts in our home is that we really love books. I have always loved reading, my children love listening to audiobooks, we go to to the library weekly, and my husband and I both make an effort to read aloud to our children for at least a few minutes each day. We value reading, books, and read alouds, and it’s paid off with children who have good vocabularies and love books too!
For more on the value of reading aloud, check out the Read Aloud Revival - she is a homeschool mom has a free podcast, a web site with wonderful book lists, a book called the Read Aloud Family. I also really liked the book The Read Aloud Handbook by Jim Trelease.
In addition, here are the formal programs we use:
Reading:
My oldest daughter was my guinea pig through a few different reading programs, but we finally landed on All About Reading a couple years ago and I plan to use it with all my kids.
The pros: it’s systematic, good for kids with potential dyslexia (which is really hard to predict when you’re starting them out) and for typical kids too, it’s relatively “fun” (my kids roll their eyes sometimes at some of the games).
The cons: I don’t love the lengthy practice pages and the number of things I have to cut out for the “fun” activities (though I do appreciate them trying to change things up.
If I wasn’t going to do All About Reading, I would do the Logic of English as my second choice. Some of my children deal with dyslexia, and those are the two systematic homeschool programs I know of.
(I know a lot of people love Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons. Personally, I couldn’t stand it, but often libraries will carry it, so it’s an easy way to preview if it’s a good fit.)
Another option we briefly tried was Savvy Reading. This could be a good choice for some families! It’s a Zoom-style Reading class held 4 days a week (Mondays - Thursdays) - they have classes throughout the day so you can find a time that consistently works well for your child. They get to interact with classmates and a caring teacher. There’s no work for you to do! It’s self-contained (no homework) and meant to be a complete reading curriculum.
I had one child who really enjoyed it and one who didn’t care for it. Ultimately, it didn’t fit in my budget to continue for the child who enjoyed it, but I did have a good experience and would recommend if you’re looking for a more hands-off (from you) approach to reading lessons for your child.
Spelling:
We use All About Spelling. My children only recently started (you start Level 1 of All About Spelling when your kids reach Level 2 of All About Reading). So far we’ve liked it! We just do one “step” each week.
Literature:
The first couple years of homeschool, we read a lot of fairy tales from The Blue Fairy Book by Andrew Lang or Fairy Tales From Around the World by Andrew Lang (we call it “Rainbow Fairy.”)
We also read from Aesop’s Fables (I like the Milo Winter version), and we read Dangerous Journey (the picture book version of Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan.)
Last spring, we did a membership to Read Aloud Revival and followed along with their family book clubs. I really liked that, and intended to continue this fall, but at the last minute, we switched to reading African and African-American folk and fairy tales through Melanated Tales by Amber O’Neill Johnson at Heritage Mom.
I’m so glad we did! You read several delightful, interesting (but not too long!) fairy tales or folk tales. I never would have found the titles she’s recommended without her plan, but nearly all of them have been at the library (we’ve purchased a few favorites!) It’s an inexpensive download (maybe $10-15?) and it’s been well-worth it to have Literature completely planned out for me for the year, other than putting a few books on hold every month. She even has links for optional YouTube videos that we’ve enjoyed too!
Poetry:
We used to just read out of Tomie de Paola’s Mother Goose or Favorite Poems, Old and New (which is a wonderful poetry anthology!) That worked fine. However, the past year or so we’ve been doing something different:
We study three poets a school year. (I divide our school year into three 12 week chunks.) First we did A.A. Milne in the fall, now we’re on Emily Dickinson in the winter and we’ll do Langston Hughes in the spring. We read a biography of the poet if possible, then read 1-3 poems by that poet once a week.
In addition, every day as we mark off our calendar for the day, I read a poem from Sing a Song of Seasons: A Nature Poem for Each Day of the Year. I can’t believe how valuable it is to me to just have the poem selected and ready to go. It makes it so easy to know, “Okay, today is November 13, we’re reading the poem labeled November 13!” (My one complaint is the book is a tad bulky, but it’s to make room for the beautiful illustrations.)
I was concerned the seasonal poems would be too different from our Southern California seasons, but so far they’ve been okay.
Handwriting / Penmanship:
We use Handwriting without Tears (just the Handwriting program, not the Writing program). I’ve been happy with it, and see no need to do anything else. The price is reasonable and it’s very straightforward.
Writing / Composition:
At this age, my children are mostly focused on oral narration - they hear a story or reading from a book, and then they tell it back to me in their own words. Later, we’ll work on getting those thoughts down on the written page!