Carson-Dellosa CD-704588 Spectrum Language Arts Gr 1, Price/EA

Excellent

Wonderful book!

Perfect for practice at home.

Great books. I use these and the Grade 3 and 4 ones as part of my homeschooling.

Spectrum has a complete series for Language Arts. This has been a great fit for our homeschooling family as a complete curriculum (more on that below). However, the series would also be immensely valuable as stand-alone books in different situations. As stand alone books they would be great for the child who is struggling with only one aspect of language arts to get some extra assistance, for summer review, or to help advance a child who is bored in school with a specific aspect of language arts. While the books together make a complete curriculum, they do not reference back-and-forth within each other, so each book can easily be used on its own. I am thoroughly impressed with this Language Arts book. It starts off right away with parts of speech (nouns, verbs, pronouns, adjectives, and prepositions). It then moves into sentences, questions, and exclamations, focusing on capitalizing the first word and putting punctuation at the end. At first this seemed very odd to me. Parts of speech seemed a lot more difficult and then we fall back to super basic things. However, why they do that soon becomes apparent as they use the parts of speech throughout the book. I also absolutely love that they use copy editing marks (i.e. the three lines under a letter to show that it needs to be capitalized). If the parts of speech words and editing marks are a part of their vocabulary and regular usage from the start, then it doesn't seem so foreign and daunting later. This book also contains sections on plurals, prefix and suffix, synonyms, antonyms, homophones, and more. RECOMMENDATION: Schoolhouse Rock is on youtube or on DVD and makes an excellent accompaniment to the parts of speech in particular! They helped reinforce the information very well! In order to make a complete curriculum you will want to have the following books: - Language Arts (instruction in parts of speech, grammar, and sentence structure) - Reading (this is not helping a child learn to read, this is reading comprehension - reading short stories or passages and then answering questions related to what the child just read) - Phonics (learning to read) - Spelling (weekly spelling lists with different modalities to learn grade appropriate spelling words) - Writing (a great progression in how to write - stories, letters, directions, informative, etc.) For homeschooling purposes this has been wonderful as a complete curriculum. Many other language arts curriculums are an all-in-one deal. 1st grade language arts means 1st grade across the board. However, if your child is a more advanced reader, that means phonics, reading, and maybe spelling will be far too easy at a 1st grade level. Having all the parts in different books allows you to move up or down in grade level(s) to tailor the language arts to fit your child best (they are not connected so that you HAVE to do all on the same level). We do 1st grade language arts and writing, 2nd grade spelling, 3rd grade reading and phonics. I could never do this with an all-in-one without spending a fortune getting all the different levels and then mixing it up. Having separate books also seems to be easier on my child because they feel like they are doing something new when we pull another book out and it gives us the flexibility to do some in the morning, some after lunch, and some on another day without feeling like there are loose ends. OVERALL, I highly recommend the entire Spectrum language arts series of books, and this Language Arts book in particular is definitely worth the money and is very comprehensive for 1st grade.

Just what I needed.