Review: Language Resources

The kids love books and love reading. To study language, we do the activities in the Montessori Research and Development Language manuals, which we all enjoy. We have recently completed Elementary Language Volume III on word study and are about to start Volume IV on punctuation.

I would like to give the kids more opportunities to practice writing and to improve at it. Once a week, we have "Writers Workshop". Some weeks the kids work at a writing project: a story or a play. Some weeks they do an activity from Wordsmith Apprentice, which is a resource I like very much: the activities are fun and practical. It's good to have Wordsmith Apprentice to fall back on when the kids don't have any writing ideas. I have also been allowing the kids to use Writers Workshop time to write emails and cards and other practical life writing tasks. I have wondered about stopping that practice and having those things get done outside Writers Workshop time but I think it is good to place value on routine writing - to encourage the kids to get in the habit of writing notes to friends and relatives, and lists of things to do, etc. And those activities add variety to our Writers Workshop time. Maybe variety is the key and as long as writing emails isn't all the kids do with Writers Workshop time, it is fine to continue including practical life writing tasks in the work session.

Tessa likes to write. Josiah has done some lovely pieces of writing but he still finds the writing of a sentence a momentous undertaking. I think both would benefit from writing more. In line with Montessori's idea that a good way to develop a skill is to perform activities in which the skill is isolated, I wonder about having the kids do daily copy work or dictation - so that they don't have to think about composing at the same time as writing. We could start with just a sentence a day and build up. It needn't be boring because there are so many interesting books in the house to copy from.