We’re a pretty typical homeschooling family, doing our best to work through our chosen curriculum.  But I’ve discovered one thing it’s missing, and that’s handwriting.  It seems to be something  a lot of homeschoolers overlook.   The kids do plenty of writing as part of their Language Arts program, or History or whatever else, but not [...]

We are still working on it, of course. What, you ask? Spelling and vocabulary! My daughter has an incredible spoken vocabulary. She reads above grade level and for that I am very grateful. I don’t worry too much about whether or not she has mastered grade level vocabulary or even whether she might be above [...]

Argh! Learning languages is so difficult sometimes. English is hard enough if it is your first language. It is much harder if English is going to be a second language. Add on top of that the fact that English has a different set of grammar rules and spelling rules than most other languages. That means [...]

This week we had some fun by combining a bit of language study with art.  It’s called “language arts“, right?  So that’s what we did!  Together, we made a list of all the compound words we could think of.  Of course, this required me to explain what a compound word is, and we talked about [...]

The fifth grade school year is a very important year where language arts and vocabulary are concerned. Standards based bench marks indicate that students should be able to use grade appropriate vocabulary. From a parental and teacher point of view that statement doesn’t really help us decided what is the appropriate vocabulary. Aside from giving [...]