I
mentioned before that I bought a curriculum to supplement my Montessori reading and writing materials, but I haven't talked much about it since then. I noticed over at
What DID We Do All Day that MBT is going through a writing bootcamp with Me Too, and then I read her comments
here. I was surprised to see that we had similar reasons for purchasing curriculum to supplement. She used
Handwriting Without Tears,
All about Spelling and
Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading. Since I'm
lazy resourceful I decided to also use HWT and OPG to supplement. However, I found that I wasn't able to put lessons together efficiently enough to keep forward momentum. Thats where
Logic of English helped me so much. We are doing the
Foundations Level A book right now.
Instead of having two or three books to pull from and create activities, it instead gives you prepared lessons that integrate all three areas - reading, writing and spelling. I did NOT want a traditional workbook, as Link is usually not interested. There is a workbook, but it is not something that he does on his own. Rather it is an aid that he uses while we do the activities together. Each lesson has maybe one or two pages that we use for phonics and one page to practice his writing. (In case you are wondering, the OPG does have lessons, we just weren't crazy about them.) I will still use HWT, because I do want him to learn print too.
The main thing I'd like to say about it is that
he likes doing it! We still do sound boxes and sound sorts, but I'm not under as much pressure to constantly change those out. I do them when I can. He really only liked doing them because of the Letter Box books anyways. So sometimes we just read those. The lessons are short, but fun. So we are actually progressing! He is reading slightly ahead of the book right now, simply because we learned some of the phonograms using the sound boxes. The LoE curriculum has helped him to make the step from phonograms to blending words.
He is also especially interested in the writing part because we are doing cursive. Link has a terrible time with letter reversals and I'm hoping this will help. He learned to write some letters in preschool, but they were terrible. He writes
so much better in cursive!!
The biggest negative, is that it is pretty expensive when you see that you'll have to buy four levels to get through 2nd grade. It'll end up costing almost $300.
I'll probably do the Advanced Schedule with Bumblebee next year, when he turns 4. He joins us sometimes, but isn't ready to start yet. He's doing the sound boxes and sorts right now. He probably knows his letters better than Link. Link
may get through Level C this year, it just depends on how well
I do at keeping our routine going. We do one lesson a day, 3-4 times a week. We still have 30 weeks left in the school year right now. Somehow, in 7 weeks, we have only done 13 lessons :) Not a good record, but for a while we were only doing sound boxes.
As a side note, you should check out all their
FREE paper! They have such a variety and in the past I have had such a hard time finding the different types. They also have all the
spelling rules and
phonograms in a nice list.
