Our LLATL Tweaks

I think during our homeschool journey we have tried LLATL about three previous times...which shot a hole in the theory of  "third times a charm". lol I think the first time we tried it many moons ago I didn't have my kids placed in the right book. (Let me just tell you that correct placement solves A LOT of issues with just about any curriculum you're using.) One time I tried the older, spiral-bound versions which I personally liked because they didn't have any "fluff" in them. I was trying to cut corners on a super-tight budget, so I was trying to force them to work. Needless to say, it didn't. Between all the times we've come back to LLATL, I've used the Red through the Gold American Literature books. Three years ago, while I was still homeschooling my daughter in her senior year, we decided to give it another chance, and I'm SO glad we did.

For these last three years, I found a "tweak" that has worked really well in helping R retain a lot of the grammar and other "annoyances" of English. R is a VERY reluctant writer and really dislikes any English/language arts pretty strongly. With other programs (and even previous uses of LLATL), he only remembered things long enough to pass some test or assessment. He is a hands-on, visual learner. When I took that into account, it made a HUGE difference. It's still not his favorite subject by any stretch of the imagination, but he's remembering things. Woo hoo!!!

What did I tweak it to make such a difference? Very rarely does he do any type of underlining, circling, etc. which is what the instructions usually say. Instead, I bought a package of ten different colored highlighters from our local office supply store, and we assigned each part of speech its own color of highlighter. When the instructions say to underline the nouns/subjects once and the verbs/predicates twice, he highlights them in different colors. They are MUCH easier to differentiate then...especially if you need to go back and do something else with them later in the week. He still might not remember the names of them, but he can tell you which color they should be. I'm just a happy camper that he knows they're supposed to be different colors...if ya know what I mean. I will have him use the highlighters to go back over his own writing to make sure there's a wide variety of details and correct parts of speech used.

Over the years, I have supplemented LLATL with other things depending on what the needs have been for a particular child in a specific year. At some point, I have supplemented with Winston Grammar...which I'm not sure would've been necessary if I had used the highlighter method then. I've also added in the Wordsmith series over the years...from the same publisher as LLATL. R is using the Wordsmith level now. I basically decide kind of on-the-fly if we'll use the writing assignment in LLATL or substitute with one in Wordsmith.

I hope these tweaks of mine can help you, too. (I will post pictures later. We lost our internet last night...and just got it back before I left to homeschool. Stay tuned for the pics.)