If you're looking for an all-in-one approach, I've heard really good things about
Michael Clay Thompson, unfortunately it is also fairly pricey and it didn't have a literary analysis element, which I really want for my DS7.
We're using a 3 pronged approach to L.A. this year for DS7. We're doing
KISS Grammar, which is free. Even though it looks very basic and it says it starts with 2nd grade, the exercises are deceptively simple. There are no "See spot run" types, they're real sentences taken from classic children's literature and can be fairly tricky. It does include quite a few practice pages for each concept, but we do 3 pages a week and it takes him 5 minutes. The website is a bear to navigate, I've linked directly to the printable workbooks, but the site really is a mess!
For writing practice we had been using
Igniting Your Writing, we just finished it up on Thursday, actually. It was great for my DS, who has been reluctant to write. The prompts are fun and engaging, each lesson focuses on a different part of the writing process and it includes 3 levels of exercises so one book can accommodate multiple writing abilities.
Finally for literary analysis, the only program I could find was through the College of William and Mary. It's written for gifted kids and amazingly it does a very good job of estimating appropriate grade levels. We're using
Journies and Destinations, which is the 2nd-3rd grade curriculum. Though DS7 reads at a much higher level than 3rd grade, they pick literature that is challenging to analyze, even if it isn't necessarily challenging to read. There is also an integrated writing component, though it doesn't have any grammar. It also is only a semester course, but I just haven't found anything else like it.
When we're done with the Journies and Destinations, we're going to move on to Igniting Your Writing II and
Suppose the Wolf Were an Octopus, which is grade leveled and has a range of different books for each level, with discussion questions that are based on Bloom's Taxonomy.
I hope that something in there is helpful! It's taken me a year and a half of homeschooling to put together a L.A. curriculum that I'm happy with!
Kimberly
