Love or Hate Shurley English?

[IceFairy]

It keeps grabbing my attention for DS for next year. I had been set on WWW/GWG or Abeka Language 2 but I cannot seem to be able to cluck the purchase button on either of those. He will be a 1st grader doing mostly 2nd grade work.

[Katie Jean]

It keeps grabbing my attention for DS for next year. I had been set on WWW/GWG or Abeka Language 2 but I cannot seem to be able to cluck the purchase button on either of those. He will be a 1st grader doing mostly 2nd grade work.

 

I don't know what WWW/GWG are, but I can say I did not like SE at all. Of course it totally depends on the learning style and intensity you prefer. I personally prefer a more gentle approach and I felt SE was very heavy in early grades. (And on)

 

I would prefer Abeka or FLL over it any day. To me, SE doesn't even seem written towards children, it seems so wordy. We got the jingles cd too and my kids refused to listen to them more than once as they were so dorky.

 

JMHO lol I'm sure there are plenty of people who love it. :)

 

HTH good luck ;)

[Um_2_4]

I got Shurley 1 and then adapted it to our use when my oldest was 5. My oldest is solid on grammar. Yes the jingles are dorky. To be honest I threaten to sing them to him if he gets off task, but they stuck in his head. We did not do all the writing, journals and we skipped the 1st 4 chapters about organizing.

Did we continue in Shurley, NO. Too heavy is a good word.

Some of the stories are funny.

[IceFairy]

Thanks ladies!

[Peplophoros]

I dropped it mid-year because it is SOOO bloated! I taught the "meat" of the lesson and had to wade through pages and pages of extra "stuff." Blech. I love the rigor, but it could have been condensed to one page per lesson. The student workbook is also practically worthless. I'm considering doing an Evan Moor workbook for grammar instead.

[Um_2_4]

I am using www1 for dd now and it does cover grammar some with the writing, but it is very workbook-y (new word lol). So it depends if your dc likes that. I am thinking to add in grammar land with it's worksheets. I was using an evan-moor 1st grade grammar book with her, but it is too simplified ("Action words" versus "verbs, I'm not a fan of made up names for things).

[oneddmanybooks]

If you like flipping pages (a lot!) during a lengthy lesson, you'll like Shurley English. I don't like it. I'm using Language Smarts, which we like, but I think we are going to switch to Rod & Staff. I don't feel like Lang. Smarts is covering everything, but that might just be me.

[Bree]

I love Shurley. My kids like it for the most part. I am a lot stronger in math than LA and I think Shurley plays on this strength because the jingles are kinda like math formulas to help figure out what part of speech everything is and I get it, I think that is why I love it so much. Level 2 you start looking up definitions for vocab words and ds doesn't like that so much, but he tends to not like writing. One thing that I have heard is their composition isn't as strong as their grammar. If your dc isn't ready to start looking up definitions I would start at Level 1 if you do go with Shurley.

[Lugrita]

I have unresolved feelings about Shurley. On one hand, it's effective. The question and answer flow for sentence classification is useful, and my older kids have retained more from our tiny bit of time with Shurley than they have with three years each of FLL. But I tend to dread doing it so much - and I'm a former English major who loves this stuff - that we have never yet made it beyond chapter 9 of the same book (level 4). I'm trying to finish it this year merely for the sake of principle, and not because I see great benefits to any of us in continuing.

 

It's cumbersome to use it - as a pp said, if you use it you will continually flip pages, and you will be waiting for your children to flip pages, during every lesson. The workbook just isn't organized well. The lessons are often needlessly long. The jingles are scorned by most kids that I know. We don't play the cd...we just chant the rules and get it over with quickly. The writing component is pretty blah, so while I did force my children to do the three-point expository paragraphs, I have skipped the rest of the writing and journaling assignments in Shurley.

 

But it has been an effective tool in our home, so I've decided that a tiny bit of Shurley is a useful thing, and we will keep it around but I will never feel the necessity to use it on a daily basis. I find that I do actually like Shurley when it's a nice extra that we do, and when it isn't something that I have to do every day (or even every week).

[mrsrevmeg]

I have somewhat of a love/hate relationship with Shurley. I love the results. My oldest only did Shurley for two years and now we still use the question and answer flow if he ever gets stuck on something in grammar. We don't do the writing or vocabulary sections. After several years of jingling two to three times a day, the jignles can get very annoying. We do them a few times a month, rather than daily. My youngest in fourth grade. I have the Shurley books up through sixth. So we are going to keep on using it.

[mumto2]

Shurley has worked well for us. I didn't want to like it because the book was huge with all those scripted lessons but it works well. We certainly skipped parts. We did every other year-- 2,4,6, as recommended by some. Another big advantage was with two dc's the different levels are reasonably easy to teach together.