We have used Amblesideonline for the last couple of years. It is such a relief not to have to hunt down great books! I wanted to raise Readers and this curriculum fits the bill. My youngest, The Wart, is finally reading in his spare time and I credit Ambleside and Charlotte Mason’s methods with the success.
My highschooler, Merlyn, is using 2 books for his writing this year:
- The Elements of Style by Strunk and White.
This is a wonderful resource! We’ve broken it down, per Amblesideonline’s lesson plan, so that he only reads a snippet every week. He’s getting a lot of ‘so that’s why you do that…’ out of it.
- Points of View by James Moffett
This is one that I personally like. I read about it from one of John Holt’s books and later found it at a thrift store. The Voracious Reader reads a short story from it and then tries his hand at recreating the particular point of view that the author used.
He is also writing narrations on a couple of his school books:
- The Brendan Voyage by Tim Severin
He is mostly working on the typical event-driven narration with this book. We will work on refining his ability to skim over some topics while zooming in and giving a lot of detail on others.
- Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott
This is one that I’m reading along with and giving weekly assignments as they occur to me. We’re both really enjoying this book. Scott’s heavy use of descriptive writing in the first few chapters gave my son the opportunity to work on character sketches. This wasn’t his favorite way to write, but he did really well.
The Wart is at the stage of Studied Dictation. I usually have him study a passage, trying to memorize the spelling and mechanics, then in a couple of days he writes as much as he can from memory. This is a big step from the dictations that I had him do previously. Last year, I had him copy a sentence on the board, study it for 2 days, and write it with out looking while I read it from the board. He has come a long way and his spelling has improved 80%!
He’s in about the 7th grade and hates to write. I’m planning to see how I can remedy that. He’s really into computers so we will try a blog for him. His editing skills are lacking so we are doing Labs on Mechanics every week.
So, this is where we are at. Come join us and learn to love writing too!
Abigael Raun