I have been asked several times to explain further the materials we use in our home for language arts study, and why. I keep forgetting and/or putting it off but today I’m going to, in the words of Nike, “just do it.”
The materials we use for language are TATRAS Phonics, KISS Grammar, and Language Arts at Home.
TATRAS
TATRAS stands for Teach America to Read and Spell. What makes it stand out is that it is a vertical phonics program. That sounds complicated, but it really just means that it teaches all of the sounds a particular phonogram makes, at one time, rather than teaching each letter multiple times. Horizontal phonics, by contrast, teaches short letters first, then long letters, etc. The creator of TATRAS equates this to teaching all of the Presidents’ first names first, then all of their last names separately. (I’m not sure I agree that that’s an accurate analogy, but it does seem inefficient and confusing, to me, to teach a child only one sound of a phonogram, as though that’s all it can “say,” when it has three or four potential sounds.)
TATRAS uses the same underlying philosophy as The Writing Road to Reading, but it’s a bit more simplified (they don’t differentiate between the sounds “ah”and “aw,” for instance, figuring they’re similar enough that a child will “hear” the necessary word when sounding them out) and, in my opinion, more child-friendly. I don’t find it to be laid out well, though; the manual is confusing to use. I’ll have to write another post sometime detailing what parts we use. TATRAS also encourages teaching the letter names prior to teaching phonics, which The Writing Road to Reading discourages.
[UPDATE: Unfortunately, TATRAS is no longer readily available. The creator has passed away, so his children inherited the business, and they haven’t done anything with it. 🙁 If you can find it used, I still highly recommend it, because I haven’t found anything else that compares. The Logic of English is the closest, but it’s a lot more complex.]
KISS Grammar
Once a student can read, the next big step in his language education is English grammar. This (free!) pogram was created by a college professor who was frustrated by the lack of proficiency demonstrated by his incoming freshmen. His perspective (with which I agree!) is that most grammar programs in use today are disorderly. They do not teach concepts in a logical progression or at logical times. KISS Grammar is his attempt to correct that.
When KISS was first created, it was designed to correspond with natural language development. Children were not taught to analyze sentence constructions until the point at which they naturally begin to use them. It has been juggled a bit, though, to accommodate the needs of public school teachers who have no control over what they are required to teach, only how. Our family uses the original timeline, which begins in third grade with prepositional phrases and finishes up in eleventh with the “additional constructions.” (We teach basic recognition of nouns and verbs prior to this.) As such, we don’t use his full materials; we use only an old article found in the “Theory” section, to provide the necessary teaching information.
There are, however, now printable materials available. (Scroll down to the two columns at the bottom.) Although the background information is not necessary to teach KISS, I highly recommend reading it to understand why the material is set up the way it’s set up. (That way if you change something, you understand what you’re changing.) The Master Workbooks contain all you need to teach the material; the Grade-Level Workbooks simply divvy the sentences up by grade-level, so you aren’t trying to teach a third-grader with an eleventh-grade-appropriate text or vice versa.
Language Arts at Home
Finally, we have Language Arts at Home (or ebook here), which happens to be my own creation. The only “downside” to KISS Grammar, for language arts, is that it is just that — grammar. Nothing else. What it does — teaching grammar — it does excellently..,but our children also need reading comprehension, composition, and study skills. [UPDATE: The newer KISS workbooks do have some additional material available as optional.]
Language Arts at Home is a teacher’s guide I created to plug these other concepts in around the ideal KISS timeline. Each year’s “chapter” provides a checklist of concepts, followed by the basic information (definitions, etc.) necessary for the average parent to teach these concepts. (Exercises are not included, as we prefer to teach language skills with the materials our children are already reading for other subjects.) It’s pretty thorough until high school, where literature analysis will probably need to be supplemented. (Literature analysis is so closely tied to the content of whatever you’re analyzing that it was beyond the scope of this type of guide.)
Educational Fontware
One more, “bonus” item: Educational Fontware. We use the Italic method of handwriting instruction, and I have found the Getty-Dubay Italic fonts from Educational Fontware to be invaluable. They come in several styles (the regular font, with or without lines, dotted, outline, with or without arrows…). I can use them to create handwriting worksheets or copywork with any content I like. I also use them when making other worksheets or forms, to keep the writing style consistent for my children. Even if you’re not using Italic, take a look; they have fonts to reflect most common handwriting styles.
Thanks! This is very helpful.