I get so much out of hearing everyone's experiences. So thought I would put this out there.

We tried EPGY's Language Arts grade 3 over the summer. It was OK. It had a lot of bugs, which did not help it. The hardest part of it for DS6 was the writing sections. They gave an assignment, which in itself was not hard, but gave a VERY restricted word list from which to write the assignment. Many times the word list had a specific theme/tone and if you wanted to write something different, it just did not work. For example, the writing assignment might be something like "Write a narrative paragraph about when you learned to ride a bike." Then the word list would include all these happy words. DS has motor planning issues and learning to ride a bike is not a fun, happy experience for him. So instead of writing to express his thoughts AND meet the requirements, he learned how to figure out what the computer wanted. This is good in a way, but the computer passed/failed the written assignment based on word types. So if you had a few key words, a noun and a verb, it pretty much passed - even if the sentence did not make sense. The end result was my aspiring author doesn't write much anymore.

In Sept, I decided to try Michael Clay Thompson's (MCT) Language Arts program based on the reviews of how much he LOVES language and it shows. WOW! Does it ever show! I picked up the 3rd grade curriculum again as this is really where MCT's program starts. Grammar Island is about as good as one can do with grammar. He breaks it down into categories which make a lot of sense. But after Grammar Island, he takes you on a journey with how to USE language in its best forms. There are 3 books after Grammar Island (which we finished in 5 weeks): Building Language, Music of the Hemispheres, and Sentence Island. Sentence Island reiterates the rules of Grammar Island. There are practice sentences you work on similar to those you did in Grammar Island. But the real beauty of the program is in Building Language and the Music of the Hemispheres.

Building Language begins with an analogy of ancient Roman arches to language. The Romans used stones to build the arch, the arches were used in repeatable patterns to create great structures, remnants of which are still found today... Language is like this too. Words are used in repeatable patters to make language which lasts. This is a wonderful bridge for my little history buff. Then it goes into the stem words from Latin and shows how that is seen not only in English, but Spanish too (he chose Spanish as his example, but it could be applied to other Romantic languages). This is really a vocabulary book, but the journey it takes you on is just... exciting and thought provoking.

The Music of the Hemispheres we just started. It talks about the sounds of letters and how choosing words with certain sounds can create an emotion or promote a thought you wish to convey without actually saying it. Instead of picking words with just meanings, you can pick words with both stated meaning and "sound" meaning. That probably doesn't make sense, but I've never seen language taught like this. It starts a little slow with a review of phonics, which is hard to get little brains through. BUT then you turn the page and see why he did the review and it makes sense. DS6 likes that he uses real poetry in his samples.

This became longer than intended, but I hope it gives a good sense of the program. Others are welcome to share their thoughts as well.