Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Hopefully a Language Arts Breakthrough

For weeks we haven't done much of any grammar or language arts. I just haven't felt motivated to do it and Sophie hasn't wanted to do it at all so I just put it on the back burner. This week I brought out a new program to try. We have only done the first two lessons but so far it seems to be working better than First Language Lessons had been.

Today's lesson was to do some copy work and dictation. Sophie hates doing copy work. She knows it is just busy work and throws a highly dramatic fit about how boring it is and how she doesn't want to do it. And then today I threw dictation at her where she doesn't get to see the words and has to sound them out for a change. Once I could get her to stop crying and screaming at me. I explained that I am required to teach "Reading, Writing, Math, History and Science". I told her she is very good at reading, and that she is doing very well at math. She already loves history and science so it is time we got started on writing. For some reason she suddenly calmed down, came to the table again and picked up the pencil to give it a try. She hated it at first. And got upset if the word didn't look right. But she made it through 3 complete sentences of dictation. I couldn't believe it. And she was even cooperative when I then asked her to read a lesson out of the McGuffey Reader.


I think I am going to try to make sure we do at least 3 lessons a week and see if we have less fights over time. Math has gotten better because I was persistent with it and now she loves it. It is always so hard to get Soph to do something that she isn't used to doing. But I was so happy with today's 15 min lesson I just had to share.

Let's hope it continues.

2 comments:

Andrea said...

My oldest hates writing too. It is always so nice when you can find something that leads to a breakthrough in an area they are resistant to. I hope the success continues!

Andrea said...

Maybe after she gets used to it, you won't have the drama. I'll keep my fingers crossed for you.