Choosing Language Arts

[4ofus]

I'm just now getting around to school planning due to a move. My sons have done WWE & WWS consistently throughout their years at home. Next year my oldest will be in 8th grade. WWS3 is the natural course, but I'm kind of on the fence about it. The thing is, WWS is a very big time commitment for him. It takes up a huge portion of his time. He has been taking AOPS Intro classes as well in middle school & those two things consume the biggest portion of his schooling. 

 

We haven't addressed grammar in a meaningful way in a couple of years, vocabulary is obtained primarily through reading, and (this is the biggest), although he reads a lot, both assigned & leisure reading, we haven't delved into the STUDY of novels much at all. I always have the best intentions & great books assigned, but we can never get past simple read & light discussion.

 

Does anyone have any thoughts? Something that maybe is more along the lines of a traditional LA course? Or do you think WWS3 (online), despite the time commitment, is enough? I really do love WWS, I just wish there was time left over for a better study of the other components of LA. WWS has helped him GREATLY to develop time management skills. At the end of every year he is light years ahead of where he was at the start as far as being able to complete the assignments thoughtfully & timely.

 

Additional information~we have done lots of MCT & enjoyed it very much. Last year I decided to shake it up & I gave the boys WWW on G3. It was a giant waste of time. An entire semester wasted. In the second semester we dropped it & did some other things, but very sporadically.

 

 

[fourisenough]

I honestly think you could do much worse than AOPS + WWS + reading lots of books! If you could add something like Vocabu-Lit to hit vocabulary, some literary analysis, and close reading you might feel better. Or what about some book club or discussion group that doesn't require much output? We're using Center for Lit's JH online class in the 'book club' style- no written output required.

[Bocky]

Agreeing with fourisenough that it sounds like you're doing well. But if you'd like to do more, maybe for literature and vocab you could look at Lightning Literature. We used LL7 in 7th for my older dd, who tended to work slowly. The books and short stories are commonly studied so it was easy for me to google literature guides like sparknotes to have an understanding of the themes for discussions. The workbook had comprehension questions and vocabulary for dd to do independently. It was very doable; a great introduction to the study of literature. I found it very open-and-go.

 

I totally get worrying that you're not doing enough. I tend to worry too. It really helped me this past year to see what my older dd did in public school for 8th grade. She's in the "good" middle school for our large metro district, as it happens. They read one book per quarter as a class, (The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian, Lord of the Flies, To Kill A Mockingbird, and The Help) for which they did comprehension questions, and then did a project: one poster, one etching, and two scrapbook pages. They also read three books of their choice per quarter from each of 12 different types (eg historical, other culture, dystopia) and did one project per quarter on one of the books. Dd wrote two poems, did one scrapbook page, and did one bigger assignment where they had to identify 10 different uses of figurative language with examples from that quarter's chosen book. That and periodic creative writing was their entire language arts - vocab was taught as part of history. I think you're already doing much more in the way of output than dd's class did through WWS.