A page of Kenneth Koch and Kate Farrell's Talking to the Sun
Read, further, her discussion of the study of grammar.
This post, from Jennifer Mackintosh's Wildflowers and Marbles blog, describes basically what we have done for language arts, from pre-K forward.
Ambleside Online also explains Charlotte Mason's method of teaching language arts in great detail.
The fundamentals:
Living books, always, from earliest childhood. Through the kindergarten year, you're sharing them primarily for the pleasure of reading and entering the world of a book together, and don't ask for narration or make a lesson of the experience. For very little children, poetry and nursery rhymes are particularly appropriate for mutual enjoyment, drawing the child into the delight of playing with language and hearing its rhythms and patterns.
In fact, from the beginning, reading poetry aloud for enjoyment, memorizing poems you love and reciting them, is an important part of your language-arts picture, helping your child to develop an ear for the sounds of the English language, its patterns and rhythms and beguiling words.
In pre-K and K, work on fine-motor skills to prepare for writing.
Narration begins around age 6 (or slightly later), in the first form, year, or grade of early primary.
Copywork begins about the same time that you begin narration. More about copywork. My own thoughts about copywork, from some years ago.
***Learning to read: the Joyful Shepherdess offers her Charlotte Mason reading program as a downloadable, printable Google Doc. It's very worth reading through her posts on this topic. Please note that Charlotte Mason did NOT advocate a whole-language approach to learning reading (a fairly common myth), but a common-sense combination of phonics, including the sounding-out of letters from an early age, with sight recognition.***
How does Charlotte Mason approach spelling? (more about that at Ambleside Online, and more again from Simply Charlotte Mason)
Composition/Writing:
One completely valid view
A really good, detailed, unpacked series of posts covering Charlotte Mason's methods for supporting the development of writing from the beginning through high school
What I think is important to note is that all the elements of this part of a Charlotte Mason education – everything related to literacy –are meant to work together. You have to have living books. You have to narrate, orally but adding written narration in the upper primary years. You have to do copywork consistently, and when it's time, transition into studied dictation. You can't do just some of this method and expect to see the fruit that you want.
But if you do, and you trust it, then you will see good fruit. I have seen it in my own children. Some have written more easily and readily and with more personal style: there is such a thing as innate talent. But all of them write competently and have held their own as high-school students in college classes that required writing. "Writing competently" encompasses spelling competently, though some of them are stronger spellers than others, and using the English language competently in terms of grammar. This, I think is the real goal.
Some recommended resources for language arts:
Learning to read:
Joyful Shepherdess's Charlotte Mason Reading Sequence, as noted before
I discovered this sequence long after my last child had learned to read, but was interested to note that many things Charlotte Mason recommended, especially in early childhood, were things I'd intuitively done with my own children when they were little: pointing out letters and words, making their sounds, sounding out street and business signs for them to read as we walked or drove around town.
Reading and Spelling Through Literature
An updated version of an older program, Reading Lessons Through Literature, which friends have used and recommend. I haven't heard much about this newer edition, but Kathy Jo DeVore's Lessons Through Literature programs have generally been very good, and very compatible with a Charlotte Mason education.
Logic of English
An Orton-Gillingham-based program, good for dyslexics, but extremely thorough and highly recommended by a number of CM parents. For some families, it may be almost too much program, but it certainly provides a thorough grounding in phonics. The program also includes handwriting. I have not used the program in its entirety – my children were older by the time it came along – but I have found Denise Eide's freestanding book, Uncovering the Logic of English, interesting and helpful, especially as a tool at my elbow in the years when we were doing studied dictation and working at a handful persistent spelling mistakes.
All About Reading
Another Orton-Gillingham-based program highly recommended b by many people I know, with a companion program, All About Spelling, which may provide extra remediation for those children who continue to struggle with spelling, and for whom copywork and dictation aren't quite enough to help spelling rules click. (more about that shortly)
Little Angel Readers
A simple phonics program very popular with Catholic homeschoolers. We used some of these readers in our own lessons when my youngest two were small, though we didn't ever use the workbooks. These are a basic "introduction to phonemes" series, starting with the short-a sound (cat, mat, Dan, Pat, Mass), and working up from those simple, introductory phonemes to more complicated ones.
CHC's Little Stories for Little Folks
I used this sweet little series as our core reading program when my youngest children were learning to read. Like the Little Angel readers, it's basically just a series of extremely simple, extremely short stories, each one introducing a phoneme. You practice the sound, connecting it with the letter that makes it, then you sound out words using that sound and practice any sight words (like "the") that you're going to encounter in the story. Then you read through the story.
I generally buddy-read it with the child the first time or two through, and we would simply practice until the child could read it independently. Then we'd move on to the next one. With the exception of one child who struggled with some visual-processing and borderline-dyslexia issues, my children all launched quickly into independent reading, at which point we moved to reading some of their school books together in buddy-reading fashion (I read a paragraph, you read a paragraph) for extra practice and spot-teaching of unfamiliar phonemes.
Copywork:
For my youngest children, particularly, I used the Mead Primary Journals which leave a blank space for illustrations at the top.
Here is how I presented copywork:
1. Imagine the notebook open and laid flat on a table, so that it presents what is called a "double-page spread:" the back of the previous page on your left, the fresh page on your right.
2. With new writers (first grade), I would just start on whatever was the next blank page – left or right – and write a VERY SHORT SELECTION, no more than one to three words initially, on the top line, for the child to write on the line beneath.
3. As the writer became more proficient and could write, say, a short line or two of a poem, scripture verse, or passage out of a schoolbook, I would, again, choose the next blank, clean page, and write the passage on every other line, for the child to write on the line between each line of my own writing.
This way, the child isn't having to look back and forth and hold the words in his or her mind, which is a whole extra cognitive step. The aim is to help the child succeed at copywork, setting him up to make as few mistakes as possible, rather than otherwise. If he has to look back and forth a lot, he is likely to make more mistakes and become frustrated. I would present copywork this way at least through first grade, and possibly well into second, though the passages can become longer and more complex. At all times, give only what the child can do WELL, in no more than five minutes, but you'll find that that amount will increase over time.
4. When copywork presented this way has become easy and automatic, and the child, who is now in second or third grade, is ready to move into transcription – looking at the selection, visualizing a "chunk" of several words, and writing them accurately from memory – I would move to a new way of presenting the copywork. Instead of writing on the same page as the child, every other line, I would begin a new copywork selection on the lefthand side of a double-page spread.
Living books, always, from earliest childhood. Through the kindergarten year, you're sharing them primarily for the pleasure of reading and entering the world of a book together, and don't ask for narration or make a lesson of the experience. For very little children, poetry and nursery rhymes are particularly appropriate for mutual enjoyment, drawing the child into the delight of playing with language and hearing its rhythms and patterns.
In fact, from the beginning, reading poetry aloud for enjoyment, memorizing poems you love and reciting them, is an important part of your language-arts picture, helping your child to develop an ear for the sounds of the English language, its patterns and rhythms and beguiling words.
In pre-K and K, work on fine-motor skills to prepare for writing.
Narration begins around age 6 (or slightly later), in the first form, year, or grade of early primary.
Copywork begins about the same time that you begin narration. More about copywork. My own thoughts about copywork, from some years ago.
***Learning to read: the Joyful Shepherdess offers her Charlotte Mason reading program as a downloadable, printable Google Doc. It's very worth reading through her posts on this topic. Please note that Charlotte Mason did NOT advocate a whole-language approach to learning reading (a fairly common myth), but a common-sense combination of phonics, including the sounding-out of letters from an early age, with sight recognition.***
How does Charlotte Mason approach spelling? (more about that at Ambleside Online, and more again from Simply Charlotte Mason)
Composition/Writing:
One completely valid view
A really good, detailed, unpacked series of posts covering Charlotte Mason's methods for supporting the development of writing from the beginning through high school
What I think is important to note is that all the elements of this part of a Charlotte Mason education – everything related to literacy –are meant to work together. You have to have living books. You have to narrate, orally but adding written narration in the upper primary years. You have to do copywork consistently, and when it's time, transition into studied dictation. You can't do just some of this method and expect to see the fruit that you want.
But if you do, and you trust it, then you will see good fruit. I have seen it in my own children. Some have written more easily and readily and with more personal style: there is such a thing as innate talent. But all of them write competently and have held their own as high-school students in college classes that required writing. "Writing competently" encompasses spelling competently, though some of them are stronger spellers than others, and using the English language competently in terms of grammar. This, I think is the real goal.
Some recommended resources for language arts:
Learning to read:
Joyful Shepherdess's Charlotte Mason Reading Sequence, as noted before
I discovered this sequence long after my last child had learned to read, but was interested to note that many things Charlotte Mason recommended, especially in early childhood, were things I'd intuitively done with my own children when they were little: pointing out letters and words, making their sounds, sounding out street and business signs for them to read as we walked or drove around town.
Reading and Spelling Through Literature
An updated version of an older program, Reading Lessons Through Literature, which friends have used and recommend. I haven't heard much about this newer edition, but Kathy Jo DeVore's Lessons Through Literature programs have generally been very good, and very compatible with a Charlotte Mason education.
Logic of English
An Orton-Gillingham-based program, good for dyslexics, but extremely thorough and highly recommended by a number of CM parents. For some families, it may be almost too much program, but it certainly provides a thorough grounding in phonics. The program also includes handwriting. I have not used the program in its entirety – my children were older by the time it came along – but I have found Denise Eide's freestanding book, Uncovering the Logic of English, interesting and helpful, especially as a tool at my elbow in the years when we were doing studied dictation and working at a handful persistent spelling mistakes.
All About Reading
Another Orton-Gillingham-based program highly recommended b by many people I know, with a companion program, All About Spelling, which may provide extra remediation for those children who continue to struggle with spelling, and for whom copywork and dictation aren't quite enough to help spelling rules click. (more about that shortly)
Little Angel Readers
A simple phonics program very popular with Catholic homeschoolers. We used some of these readers in our own lessons when my youngest two were small, though we didn't ever use the workbooks. These are a basic "introduction to phonemes" series, starting with the short-a sound (cat, mat, Dan, Pat, Mass), and working up from those simple, introductory phonemes to more complicated ones.
CHC's Little Stories for Little Folks
I used this sweet little series as our core reading program when my youngest children were learning to read. Like the Little Angel readers, it's basically just a series of extremely simple, extremely short stories, each one introducing a phoneme. You practice the sound, connecting it with the letter that makes it, then you sound out words using that sound and practice any sight words (like "the") that you're going to encounter in the story. Then you read through the story.
I generally buddy-read it with the child the first time or two through, and we would simply practice until the child could read it independently. Then we'd move on to the next one. With the exception of one child who struggled with some visual-processing and borderline-dyslexia issues, my children all launched quickly into independent reading, at which point we moved to reading some of their school books together in buddy-reading fashion (I read a paragraph, you read a paragraph) for extra practice and spot-teaching of unfamiliar phonemes.
Copywork:
For my youngest children, particularly, I used the Mead Primary Journals which leave a blank space for illustrations at the top.
Here is how I presented copywork:
1. Imagine the notebook open and laid flat on a table, so that it presents what is called a "double-page spread:" the back of the previous page on your left, the fresh page on your right.
2. With new writers (first grade), I would just start on whatever was the next blank page – left or right – and write a VERY SHORT SELECTION, no more than one to three words initially, on the top line, for the child to write on the line beneath.
3. As the writer became more proficient and could write, say, a short line or two of a poem, scripture verse, or passage out of a schoolbook, I would, again, choose the next blank, clean page, and write the passage on every other line, for the child to write on the line between each line of my own writing.
This way, the child isn't having to look back and forth and hold the words in his or her mind, which is a whole extra cognitive step. The aim is to help the child succeed at copywork, setting him up to make as few mistakes as possible, rather than otherwise. If he has to look back and forth a lot, he is likely to make more mistakes and become frustrated. I would present copywork this way at least through first grade, and possibly well into second, though the passages can become longer and more complex. At all times, give only what the child can do WELL, in no more than five minutes, but you'll find that that amount will increase over time.
4. When copywork presented this way has become easy and automatic, and the child, who is now in second or third grade, is ready to move into transcription – looking at the selection, visualizing a "chunk" of several words, and writing them accurately from memory – I would move to a new way of presenting the copywork. Instead of writing on the same page as the child, every other line, I would begin a new copywork selection on the lefthand side of a double-page spread.
Again, envision the copybook laid flat on a table, so that two pages are facing up. You write the new selection for the day (again, no more than the child can write WELL in no more than five minutes) on the lefthand page, the back of the previous day's page. The child copies on the righthand page. By this time, you are encouraging him to look back and forth, from one page to the next, and to hold a few words at a time in his mind and copy them accurately without looking back at them. This practice lays a good foundation for studied dictation, which happens later.
A fundamental rule of thumb for both copywork and dictation is that if the child is consistently making more than two mistakes, the passage is too long or difficult, and you should scale back the length and complexity for a time before working back up. Children who feel consistently defeated by an exercise will not be motivated to like or persevere in that exercise. Success, on the other hand, is motivating. You want to stretch the child gently to do more, without ever overwhelming or defeating him.
I did at certain junctures use prepared copybooks for copywork. Our favorites were the Memoria Press series. I believe these now come in cursive as well as print editions, for those who wish to begin by teaching cursive.
We did also use CHC's handwriting series for extra practice in letter formation and some copywork.
Studied Dictation:
While you continue copywork through the upper primary and into the middle-school years, you also want to plan to add studied dictation to your language-arts schedule sometime during those years. Typically a child is ready for dictation when 1) reading is fluent and solid, and b) copywork, too, is a solid, easy habit.
Dictation, as you will have read, is Charlotte Mason's spelling program. Like everything else associated with her approach to language arts, it's a holistic way of solidifying a whole complex of skill sets related to using the English language in writing. And it is effective over the long haul.
One thing I noticed when my oldest daughter went to school, in the years we were living in England, was that although she dutifully memorized a list of spelling words every week and passed a spelling test, usually with a perfect score, she couldn't actually spell on her own. She was, and remains as an adult, an excellent memorizer, which was both a gift and a downfall when it came to spelling in school. She could look over the list on the bus on the way to school, ace the test . . . and promptly forget what she had memorized. Those correctly spelled words certainly never showed up in her own writing.
First of all, as her teachers in school assured us, this is fairly normal, particularly for a child who is read to at home, possesses an advanced spoken vocabulary, and has an ear for relatively complex syntax. When that child tries to write, naturally what she wants to say is going to be beyond her current skills for saying it. One marvelous teacher went out of her way to let us know that she considered our daughter's poor spelling, at seven or eight, to be not a deficit but a sign that she was willing to take risks to say things in writing that she didn't quite, yet, have the level of mastery to accomplish. Again, this was GOOD.
So spelling mistakes in a child's independent writing, through early primary, and even through upper primary, are not abnormal and are not signs that your methods aren't working or that you need an extra spelling program. Prior to beginning dictation, you can introduce copywork selections by pointing out difficult or "problem" words, and select passages that help a child practice phonemes or words that seem to give trouble.
I have really seen consistent fruit in the practice of studied dictation, even for my visual-processing/dyslexic child, whose spelling was not merely full of mistakes, but STRANGE. Outside therapy helped her a lot, but her spelling improved steadily over the years that we implemented studied dictation. I did use Uncovering the Logic of English for re-teaching some phonemes in the context of dictation – I might have her copy all the words in a particular phoneme family, for example, and put them up on a whiteboard for us to live with for a while – but we didn't do spelling lists with words out of context.
Resources I found helpful for dictation:
Simply Charlotte Mason's Spelling Wisdom series.
Wheeler's Graded Studies in Great Authors
Also available free on archive.org. These are mostly poetry selections, very nice and copy-worthy, arranged by phoneme, so as to offer practice in words using that phoneme. Appropriate for upper-primary and middle school.
A note about struggles with spelling, possibly related to dyslexia and other issues:
If by roughly age twelve and the start of middle school a child is still really struggling with spelling – not just making mistakes here and there, or finding -cei words like receive difficult, but really spelling poorly overall, this may be the time to do a couple of things:
*rule out dyslexia or a visual or auditory issue, if you have not done so earlier
*work through a program like All About Spelling, which has levels for older children which will not seem babyish
Even earlier, while it's normal for younger children to spell poorly, if your child's relationship with written language and phonemes seems not just immature, but kind of bizarre – my youngest child wrote flawrs for flowers, for example, as late as fourth grade – this is a sign that some therapeutic support is indicated, and that the child might need the extra support of a thoughtful program like Logic of English or All About Spelling. Friends with children who are diagnosed dyslexics have also reported great success with the Barton program, either self-tutoring at home or engaging a Barton tutor, while continuing to pursue the rest of their Charlotte Mason education using read-alouds and audiobooks (from Audible, Librivox, and Learning Ally), until children were ready and able to read independently.
Grammar:
Mater Amabilis uses the following sequence for grammar and usage, with editions reformatted and adapted for Catholic use by Hillside Education:
Grades 2-3: Emma Serl's Primary Language Lessons
Grades 4-5: Emma Serl's Intermediate Language Lessons
A fundamental rule of thumb for both copywork and dictation is that if the child is consistently making more than two mistakes, the passage is too long or difficult, and you should scale back the length and complexity for a time before working back up. Children who feel consistently defeated by an exercise will not be motivated to like or persevere in that exercise. Success, on the other hand, is motivating. You want to stretch the child gently to do more, without ever overwhelming or defeating him.
I did at certain junctures use prepared copybooks for copywork. Our favorites were the Memoria Press series. I believe these now come in cursive as well as print editions, for those who wish to begin by teaching cursive.
We did also use CHC's handwriting series for extra practice in letter formation and some copywork.
Studied Dictation:
While you continue copywork through the upper primary and into the middle-school years, you also want to plan to add studied dictation to your language-arts schedule sometime during those years. Typically a child is ready for dictation when 1) reading is fluent and solid, and b) copywork, too, is a solid, easy habit.
Dictation, as you will have read, is Charlotte Mason's spelling program. Like everything else associated with her approach to language arts, it's a holistic way of solidifying a whole complex of skill sets related to using the English language in writing. And it is effective over the long haul.
One thing I noticed when my oldest daughter went to school, in the years we were living in England, was that although she dutifully memorized a list of spelling words every week and passed a spelling test, usually with a perfect score, she couldn't actually spell on her own. She was, and remains as an adult, an excellent memorizer, which was both a gift and a downfall when it came to spelling in school. She could look over the list on the bus on the way to school, ace the test . . . and promptly forget what she had memorized. Those correctly spelled words certainly never showed up in her own writing.
First of all, as her teachers in school assured us, this is fairly normal, particularly for a child who is read to at home, possesses an advanced spoken vocabulary, and has an ear for relatively complex syntax. When that child tries to write, naturally what she wants to say is going to be beyond her current skills for saying it. One marvelous teacher went out of her way to let us know that she considered our daughter's poor spelling, at seven or eight, to be not a deficit but a sign that she was willing to take risks to say things in writing that she didn't quite, yet, have the level of mastery to accomplish. Again, this was GOOD.
So spelling mistakes in a child's independent writing, through early primary, and even through upper primary, are not abnormal and are not signs that your methods aren't working or that you need an extra spelling program. Prior to beginning dictation, you can introduce copywork selections by pointing out difficult or "problem" words, and select passages that help a child practice phonemes or words that seem to give trouble.
I have really seen consistent fruit in the practice of studied dictation, even for my visual-processing/dyslexic child, whose spelling was not merely full of mistakes, but STRANGE. Outside therapy helped her a lot, but her spelling improved steadily over the years that we implemented studied dictation. I did use Uncovering the Logic of English for re-teaching some phonemes in the context of dictation – I might have her copy all the words in a particular phoneme family, for example, and put them up on a whiteboard for us to live with for a while – but we didn't do spelling lists with words out of context.
Resources I found helpful for dictation:
Simply Charlotte Mason's Spelling Wisdom series.
Wheeler's Graded Studies in Great Authors
Also available free on archive.org. These are mostly poetry selections, very nice and copy-worthy, arranged by phoneme, so as to offer practice in words using that phoneme. Appropriate for upper-primary and middle school.
A note about struggles with spelling, possibly related to dyslexia and other issues:
If by roughly age twelve and the start of middle school a child is still really struggling with spelling – not just making mistakes here and there, or finding -cei words like receive difficult, but really spelling poorly overall, this may be the time to do a couple of things:
*rule out dyslexia or a visual or auditory issue, if you have not done so earlier
*work through a program like All About Spelling, which has levels for older children which will not seem babyish
Even earlier, while it's normal for younger children to spell poorly, if your child's relationship with written language and phonemes seems not just immature, but kind of bizarre – my youngest child wrote flawrs for flowers, for example, as late as fourth grade – this is a sign that some therapeutic support is indicated, and that the child might need the extra support of a thoughtful program like Logic of English or All About Spelling. Friends with children who are diagnosed dyslexics have also reported great success with the Barton program, either self-tutoring at home or engaging a Barton tutor, while continuing to pursue the rest of their Charlotte Mason education using read-alouds and audiobooks (from Audible, Librivox, and Learning Ally), until children were ready and able to read independently.
Grammar:
Mater Amabilis uses the following sequence for grammar and usage, with editions reformatted and adapted for Catholic use by Hillside Education:
Grades 2-3: Emma Serl's Primary Language Lessons
Grades 4-5: Emma Serl's Intermediate Language Lessons
Grades 6-7: Lingua Mater: Language Lessons From Literature
Grade 8: Warriner's English Grammar and Composition: Third Course (currently available only in used editions)
High School:
*If a student hasn't done Warriner's in 8th grade, then this can be done in 9th, or over two years in 9th and 10th
*I have also used Jensen's Grammar for review at this level. It's basic and kind of boring, but it does take a student through the language of sentence structure, for example, which is useful when you want to encourage a writer to vary his or her syntax.
Otherwise, our focus in high school is primarily on composition, not grammar, though at this level students are also learning at least one foreign language intensively, which provides a lot of reinforcement for English grammar.
Other holistic language programs which friends have used and recommended include English Lessons Through Literature.
Composition:
Grades 1-3: oral narration, copywork, Primary Language Lessons
Encourage, but don't force or assign, children to write in the course of daily life:
*making lists
*keeping a journal
*writing a story or cartoon
*emails and letters to grandparents, friends, etc
Grades 4-6: oral and written narration, copywork, studied dictation, Intermediate Language Lessons
Continue to encourage everyday writing, as in the earlier grades. This was an age when some of my children liked writing fan fiction. I discovered that one son, who's now a creative-nonfiction and fiction writer, could actually write a paragraph at nine or ten, when he showed me some Redwall fanfic he'd written. Oh, didn't know you could do that. Duly noted . . .
My youngest child, who really struggled with writing and spelling, had a penpal in Belgium, with whom she wrote back and forth assiduously from age nine to twelve or thirteen.
Grades 7-8: oral and written narration, copywork, studied dictation, Lingua Mater
At the middle-school stage, I have often opted, rather than using Lingua Mater, to dip into a formal composition program. I have used Susan Wise Bauer's Writing With Skill in a "tool-not-a-master" fashion (feeling free to dip in and out of it), to introduce pre-writing and outlining, as well as the idea of writing in different disciplines.
I also like and recommend BraveWriter's writing series and overall approach to writing. Many families subscribe to the Arrow and Boomerang programs in late elementary and middle school. My last two middle-schoolers worked through Help for High School as an introduction to essay formats and preparation for high-school writing. This program would be appropriate for advanced 8th-grade writers, as well as any time in early high school.
High School: oral and written narration daily, but also introduce finished essays periodically in various subjects. Useful resources:
Help for High School
*keeping a journal
*writing a story or cartoon
*emails and letters to grandparents, friends, etc
Grades 4-6: oral and written narration, copywork, studied dictation, Intermediate Language Lessons
Continue to encourage everyday writing, as in the earlier grades. This was an age when some of my children liked writing fan fiction. I discovered that one son, who's now a creative-nonfiction and fiction writer, could actually write a paragraph at nine or ten, when he showed me some Redwall fanfic he'd written. Oh, didn't know you could do that. Duly noted . . .
My youngest child, who really struggled with writing and spelling, had a penpal in Belgium, with whom she wrote back and forth assiduously from age nine to twelve or thirteen.
Grades 7-8: oral and written narration, copywork, studied dictation, Lingua Mater
At the middle-school stage, I have often opted, rather than using Lingua Mater, to dip into a formal composition program. I have used Susan Wise Bauer's Writing With Skill in a "tool-not-a-master" fashion (feeling free to dip in and out of it), to introduce pre-writing and outlining, as well as the idea of writing in different disciplines.
I also like and recommend BraveWriter's writing series and overall approach to writing. Many families subscribe to the Arrow and Boomerang programs in late elementary and middle school. My last two middle-schoolers worked through Help for High School as an introduction to essay formats and preparation for high-school writing. This program would be appropriate for advanced 8th-grade writers, as well as any time in early high school.
High School: oral and written narration daily, but also introduce finished essays periodically in various subjects. Useful resources:
Help for High School
For attention to sentence-level rhetoric, Einarsson's Traditional English Sentence Style is an excellent free program, appropriate for any level of high school
Jensen's Format Writing is fairly boring, but a useful resource for introducing various essay models, which are easy to adapt for whatever your student is reading and studying. These are your standard analytical, explanatory, compare-contrast, cause-and-effect kinds of essays. A typical assignment in my house might look like this: "Look over your written narrations in biology. Using your narrations as material, write an essay of roughly 500 words explaining the process of photosynthesis." Or "explaining how to find the radius of a circle," or "explaining the chain of events which led to the outbreak of the First World War." Or "evaluate Achilles (or Brutus, or King Lear) as a hero."
*Some families like to begin the classical progymnasmata, a series of lessons based on the imitation of classical rhetorical models, starting somewhere between grades 5 and 7. A program like this would largely take the place of Intermediate Language Lessons, Lingua Mater, etc.
Many classical curricula introduce these programs at what seem to me to be inappropriately early ages (for one thing, in either the classical or medieval eras, NO eight-year-old would be asked to write essays . . . but that's another conversation for another time). But you are certainly free to build them in at what would seem to me to be a far more ready age, somewhere around the start of middle school, as written narration begins to become a fluent habit. Recommended programs include:
Memoria Press's Classical Composition series
Classical Academic Press's Writing and Rhetoric series
Though "officially" these programs are written for younger children, friends report using them with great success even in high school.
Jensen's Format Writing is fairly boring, but a useful resource for introducing various essay models, which are easy to adapt for whatever your student is reading and studying. These are your standard analytical, explanatory, compare-contrast, cause-and-effect kinds of essays. A typical assignment in my house might look like this: "Look over your written narrations in biology. Using your narrations as material, write an essay of roughly 500 words explaining the process of photosynthesis." Or "explaining how to find the radius of a circle," or "explaining the chain of events which led to the outbreak of the First World War." Or "evaluate Achilles (or Brutus, or King Lear) as a hero."
*Some families like to begin the classical progymnasmata, a series of lessons based on the imitation of classical rhetorical models, starting somewhere between grades 5 and 7. A program like this would largely take the place of Intermediate Language Lessons, Lingua Mater, etc.
Many classical curricula introduce these programs at what seem to me to be inappropriately early ages (for one thing, in either the classical or medieval eras, NO eight-year-old would be asked to write essays . . . but that's another conversation for another time). But you are certainly free to build them in at what would seem to me to be a far more ready age, somewhere around the start of middle school, as written narration begins to become a fluent habit. Recommended programs include:
Memoria Press's Classical Composition series
Classical Academic Press's Writing and Rhetoric series
Though "officially" these programs are written for younger children, friends report using them with great success even in high school.
I have also assigned a senior research thesis to my children: a 20-page paper whose topic is determined in the fall of the senior year, researched through the winter, and written and polished in the spring.
A helpful resource for this kind of capstone project is Classical Academic Press's Senior Thesis program.
A helpful resource for this kind of capstone project is Classical Academic Press's Senior Thesis program.
Many families also like to use Homeschool Connections' many offerings in composition through the middle- and high-school years.
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Ultimately, I can't stress enough the importance of the whole of a Charlotte Mason education, in language arts as in anything else. You cannot pick and choose bits of her method and expect to see the same results. You cannot choose books of substandard quality, for example, and expect your child to develop organically as a reader and writer (I exclude learn-to-read books here – obviously they're going to be kind of limited as reading material!).
This entire education is oriented toward the development of the child's God-given intellect, which is indivisible from his soul, in reason, reflection, and clear expression of its thoughts. As Charlotte Mason herself notes, you cannot expect a child to write well when he has nothing to write about. In one sense, every element of this education is connected to language arts, because every element – history, geography, science, theology, even math – is meant to offer a child something to think about. A person who has something to think about, and has become acclimated, over time, to expressing those thoughts verbally, through speaking and writing, is a person who can write. If he thinks well, he will write well. It's both that complicated and that simple.
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Ultimately, I can't stress enough the importance of the whole of a Charlotte Mason education, in language arts as in anything else. You cannot pick and choose bits of her method and expect to see the same results. You cannot choose books of substandard quality, for example, and expect your child to develop organically as a reader and writer (I exclude learn-to-read books here – obviously they're going to be kind of limited as reading material!).
This entire education is oriented toward the development of the child's God-given intellect, which is indivisible from his soul, in reason, reflection, and clear expression of its thoughts. As Charlotte Mason herself notes, you cannot expect a child to write well when he has nothing to write about. In one sense, every element of this education is connected to language arts, because every element – history, geography, science, theology, even math – is meant to offer a child something to think about. A person who has something to think about, and has become acclimated, over time, to expressing those thoughts verbally, through speaking and writing, is a person who can write. If he thinks well, he will write well. It's both that complicated and that simple.