heartofdakota.com

Does anyone have any good ideas for what I could use for Language Arts for my going to be first grader. He reads at a 2nd-3rd grade level, but I don't really know where to place him for LA.

Which HOD guide will he be doing for 1st grade?

I just took my 1st grader through LHFHG this past year. He was also an advanced reader, so I took him through all the emerging readers and finished those about mid-year. When he finished those he read some of the level 2/3 books recommended with DITHOR. I used the Beyond Guide for all of the LA this year. We did the Beyond spelling lists and light grammar in the LA box.

This coming year we will be doing Beyond as written, except that I will be taking him through Rod and Staff English 2 and spelling list 2 from Beyond.

I'll be using LHFHG with my 1st grader but will be adding spelling list 1 from Beyond. We're still finishing up phonics so I'm trying not to add too much. I will re-evaluate once we're about 6 weeks in.

This year, my DS did the poetry copywork, Beyond's weekly grammar lessons, and the Emergent Readers. We started with spelling list 1, but I decided to leave it out since our phonics program has a bit of spelling in it.

We did a combo of things from the guides LHFHG and Beyond, as well.
We started out the year in LHFHG and were using A Reason for Handwriting A and Thinking Skills for fine motor skills work. As the year moved on we moved into the Beyond guide as a whole and picked up the poetry copywork as fine motor skill practice.
We also used spelling list 1 in the appendix of Beyond for spelling.
We started the grammar lessons in the Beyond guide mid-year. Those are on day 5 of each unit in the place of spelling.
We used the Emerging Readers in the appendix of Beyond for reading practice. These readers begin at a 2.0 (2nd grade, 0 months) or 2.4 (2nd grade, 4 months) reading level depending on which Bible you choose. The Early Readers Bible is the easier of the 2. They progress to a 3.4 reading level. These include comprehension questions to follow-up each reading that follow Bloom's taxonomy (much better questions than I'd come up with on the fly ). So, these will not only give your child practice reading aloud with an increasing level of difficulty, but will also build the skill of comprehending what they're reading. Your child may fall at the beginning of this set or mid-way through. You can start anywhere in the set and just move forward from there. If it were me, I'd start just a smidge under where they can easily read.
Once your child is through with the Emerging Readers, you can begin level 2/3 of Drawn Into The Heart of Reading (DITHOR). Now, with a 1st grader, you may want to do all the follow up orally rather than writing in the student workbook. You could write the answers and your child could dictate.

Kathleen