R&S English Independently?

[momtofive]

My oldest ds will be going into the WG guide this fall. Up to this point, we have been doing R&S English orally, with him doing 1/3 or so of the assignment written. This has worked well. We'll be beginning R&S English 7 this fall, and I'm wondering with the high school guides, what the intention is for doing R&S lessons? Do you recommend students do them independently at this stage, or should the parent still read the lesson and do most of it orally, with the student doing about 1/3 written?

In thinking about next year, I do want to be very careful of my time, though I don't want to overwhelm my new high schooler either. I'm fine still doing most of it orally, and him doing some of it written, I'd just like some clarification on what's the recommended path to take with this!

[LynnH]

I will be interested to hear the answer to this also. I plan on still doing almost all of it orally still because of my son's dysgraphia, but I always like to know how it is intended to be used. I also remember at one point someone asking about doing the class practice part of the lesson in the upper guides and I thought Julie said she often skips those since there is so much repetition between that and the written exercises. Up to this point we have done both because we were only doing 1/2 a lesson each day, but since we will do an entire lesson in the WG guide each time grammar is scheduled I was wondering if we needed to do the class practice.

[Gwenny]

I'm interested also. I've never done the class practice part. I do the oral review in the TG and then right on to the student book to read the lesson and do most orally.

[StillJulie]

My daughter reads the lesson on her own first. Then if there was anything that was confusing (she's about 1/4 of the way through book 8 now), I go over it with her before having her do a lot of the class practice and written practice orally. If I'm short on time, I'll assign more to be written. If I have the time, I often let her do it all orally. I did buy the worksheets, too, b/c sometimes it's a nice break for her to be able to mark up the problems instead of writing stuff down in a notebook. She just completed M2MM and will be starting World Geography in August.

[Carrie]

momtofive,

This is a good question. I think the answer depends on the student. At the high school level, we definitely had our kids read the text of the lesson themselves. Then, with my oldest son, we did 2/3 of the lesson exercises orally and had him pick a couple of exercises to do on paper. He enjoyed the interaction and preferred to do the lessons that way. With my second oldest son, we found that he had often worked ahead (prior to our meeting time) and written out the answers to all of the exercises, simply to be done. That was fine with us! So, we just corrected the lesson at that point.

I share this to let you know that either way is alright, as long as you make sure to keep on top of what your student is doing. We don't skip any exercises here so that would be one other recommendation I would make. When we get to doing English only twice weekly, it is necessary to do all of the exercises (in my mind).

We have seen an amazing amount of carry-over from Rod and Staff English into our boys daily written work. It is an excellent program that I continue to recommend wholeheartedly!

Blessings,
Carrie

[momtofive]

Thanks so much, ladies!

And thanks, Carrie for sharing how R&S English is being done by your older boys. It really helped me to see how we should plan for the lessons to be done with our oldest. This year, there will be four different levels of R&S English going on at our house, so keeping it all manageable is key!

Thanks, again!