Last year we found a great curriculum for Language Arts thanks to a recommendation from a co-op friend: Learning Language Arts Through Literature. This is a very comprehensive language arts program that has students reading a selection of books, doing book studies based on those, answering questions from passages in their workbook that are pulled either from those books or others that would also be appropriate for the child to read.
Another thing I really liked about this curriculum, and at least for this portion it required some parental involvement, was dictation. My oldest last year was asked to listen to me read a passage and simply write as much as he could, but to me, this touched on a critical skill that he will need for college that many homeschoolers don’t get as much practice on being that they get so much one on one time or independent study: note-taking. When he starts college, he’ll need to be able to listen to a professor speak and take quality notes, this is starting to give him practice for that which he otherwise wouldn’t be getting.
It also gave him questions that would ask him about the etymology of words, which at first he had no idea what that meant, but I find it to be helpful for them to learn the meaning of the roots of the words as it helps with later language aquisition, both English and if a child wants to learn another language, with having learned the roots of words, then they can learn those languages easier as those word roots are usually based in other languages.
Because we loved this curriculum so much last year when I did it only with my oldest child for 6th grade, this year I purchased it for all my children and we will be doing the 7th, 5th, 4th and 1st grade versions. I am sure they will all have their own unique aspects when compared to the 6th grade package we used last year (which I will reuse next year with my now-5th grader), but I am sure they are all going to be equally as wonderful and all my avid readers are looking forward to an excuse to say, “but mom, I’m reading,” to get out of chores or other homework.
Pictured below is the sixth grade selection of the teacher book, student workbook, and the accompanying books to read. Link to Rainbow Resource where complete sets can be purchased.
Babbling Brook Homeschool 