Language Arts Block

Grade 1

This is one of the two places I deviate from most waldorfinspired homeschooling and it's works for us. I am using The Reading Lesson with a waldorf twist. I chose TRL because it made sense to me. Instead of teaching the letters in alphabetical order, this programs teaches by the most common letters in the English language and sigh words along with each lesson. I also read the Write Road to Reading right before the holidays, which has some more methodology that would help with learning how to read through writing. I first mixed up the TRL with a waldorf twist. Looking back now, I should of went a little heavier on the Waldorf. We went through 12 out of the 20 lessons when I decided to back down from the old method of learning and started from the beginning of our new way. I also wished I did more block lessons and laid heavy into the form drawing. Having sensory integration disorder, my ds really needed the more holistic way of learning. My biggest issue was that I didn't feel comfortable with the waldorf curriculum that I initially purchased. Then when we hit the brick wall after the holidays I looked into the christopherus website and curriculum. Which lead me to look at other waldorf homeschool blogs and realized that what was given was more of a frame. With a little work, elbow and brain grease, we could have fun learning at home that really tends to ds's need.

So we started from square one using a mixture of all three methods:

This week we reviewed the following letters: c o s a t with trees being our center theme. H

ere are a few photos of our week:

So I started the week with the above chalk drawing with a story about an apple tree, a cat, a snake and an octopus. Not only did we cover each sound, I manage to squeeze a little morality into the story. After the story, we drew step by step the chalkboard picture into our MLB on Monday.

After morning prayer and movement, we have our playdough time. I only covered forming the letters one day this week. After that, he was very creative in forming words without being prompted.

Here is a sample of how we worked through the letters. Our drawing have the lower case letters in it. Ds picked out four words for each letter and we practiced writing them on the chalkboard before writing them in the MLB.

On our last day, we only had to cover one letter and then we went into dictation which was writing bits of the story from our main story of the week. Of course using a little humor made the writing exercise a much happier experience. Look at that smile!

One more thing to mention on a sensory note: for our writing we use broken pieces of chalk and crayons to do our writing. This is a Writing Without Tears inspiration. ds usually holds writing utensils with a death grip. The broken pieces forces him to hold them with a tripod grip.