Language Arts 3 Instructor's Guide

by MERRY M on 2008-04-03
I think that Sonlight did a good job of addressing the concerns brought out in the previous review. Sonlight was responsive to customer needs shortly after the issues were brought to their attention (around the time the review was written), and posted revised assignments for the few weeks in question online and have updated their product. LA 3 has many good points. One of my favorites was that I could do it with both of my kids together (3rd & 5th grades this year). What a time saver! The writing assignments had good variety and were interesting. Buyers should realize the dictation/copywork for this year do not come from the readers as in other years. The selections are mainly scripture, sometimes poetry or quotes. My kids enjoyed the selections, so this wasn't a negative for us but might be for some. The reason I don't give this product 5 stars: 1, We found the pacing to be a bit fast. Writing and revising on the same day would be overwhelming for my kids, so I never required that. Which meant we either didn't revise assignments, or we had to skip some to do that. Sometimes there were "mini reports" to look up information and write a short report all in one day. I think assignments like this need a bit more time. 2, I really want to do more with dictation. With only a few exceptions, the dictation in LA 3 has nothing to do with what you learn the rest of the week. It doesn't show examples of concepts (or if it does, they are not pointed out)--there's really no teaching included on what to point out to your kids from the passage or why it was chosen. It's just something to do on Mondays without tying into the rest of the week. Overall, a good, strong product that your kids can learn a lot from. The biggest thing my kids took away this year was the value of a good hook. They recognize it in their reading, and try to apply it in their writing even when I don't prompt them to. And their writing ability improved a ton this year between doing dictation (we actually did it as copywork on Mondays & dictation on Fridays to get a bit more mileage out of it), and the writing assignments. In general, the pre-writing assignments helped them (a few in 2007 were a bit rocky, don't know if those got changed for 2008, but overall great), and they enjoyed the few picture "story-starters" included in this core.