Our first year of homeschooling, we used grammar, phonics, and spelling workbooks for Language Arts. The kids hated it. They found the daily drills boring.
Even worse, not a day went by when I didn’t hear, “Why do we need to learn this?”
With a year of homeschooling under my belt, and a growing comfort with moving away from the way the public schools do education, I decided to find a more practical approach.
That’s when I found Learning Language Arts Through Literature (LLATL). LLATL teaches all of the language arts skills through the context of literature passages.
Each week’s lesson contains a literature passage. The work for each day focuses on a different language arts skill that refers back to that passage.
In grades 4 and higher, there are also book studies throughout the year. The lessons following the book studies focus on literature passages from that book.
Never again did I hear the words, “Why do we need to learn this?” It was obvious why they needed to know these skills because they learned them in a practical context - reading and understanding literature.
The skills covered by LLATL include grammar, reading, spelling, vocabulary, writing mechanics, creative writing, thinking skills and more. You can view the full scope and sequence here.
We plan to order LLATL again this year. I found the LLATL program to be all we needed for language arts, however, I have read that some parents felt it was weak in spelling.
We do not focus on spelling drills and quizzes because the kids read so many books. I just figure they will pick up on spelling that way.
If you are a parent who would like to use LLATL, but would like more focus on spelling, I recommend using a free online program, such as Spelling Time.
If you would like to read other reviews on LLATL, Homeschool Reviews.com has some here.
If you decide to buy LLATL, please consider checking out Christian Book Distributors. I buy almost all of my homeschool books there because they have great prices. And if you follow this link to their LLATL page, and decide to purchase, you will also be supporting our homeschool.
Updated: I added a feature in the side bar that shows current eBay auctions for LLATL.
