The Language Arts

Since our Geography/History classes are more spread out these days, I've decided to introduce a new segment into our home school to go with our regular math, reading, and science classes. This will be a language arts segment. It will consist mostly of reading different types of literature together. We will also do quite a bit of talking about the genre, as well as about the authors, and about basic story elements like: Setting, Characters, Plot, etc. The following types of literature will be included in this class:

Fairy tales
Tall tales
Legends and Myths (We have already done some work with Legends in our Native American Units, but we'll touch on it again.)
Fables
Allegories
And at Maddi's suggestion: Parables. (Perfect while we study the New Testament this year!)

During the month of January, we started with Fairy Tales. We talked about key features of fairy tales, and we read every fairy tale we could get our hands on. We also studied a few of the famous fairy tale writers like the brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson. I can't say enough how much the kids loved this unit. During the course of the unit we bought over 12 fairy tale books to keep at our home and the kids still beg to have a daily fairy tale reading. One of the best parts of this unit was letting the kids write their very own fairy tale. We talked about characters, setting, and plot. Then I helped the kids actually write down their fairy tale story. I broke their story into pages for them, and each day for a week they typed up their fairy tales. Then we re-covered some of our old board books and pasted in their words. The kids then spent a full week illustrating their books. They were so proud of their work, and their fairy tales turned out really great. When Nick gets a chance I will have him scan in their books.

I think we'll do Tall Tales next, and I think we will do it much the same. Even though it is very time consuming letting them do their own books, I don't think the kids will have it any other way. We'll probably curb the writing of our own texts after tall tales though, just for the sake of time.

When we get through all of these types of literature, I want to turn our language arts into a poetry class. And believe me, when we get to poetry, we'll for sure go back to letting the kids try out writing poems of their very own.