Grammar, Writing, Spelling, Vocabulary

http://www.growingwithgrammar.com/

I am excited to see that the kind folks at JacKris publishing have a writing component as well as a sentence diagramming component. During years where I can't be as hands-on with some of the language arts, I find these books to be very helpful. Do I think they are as thorough as Shurley English? No, not really, but they cover much of what is needed and are user-friendly. Shurley requires a lot of Mom, and when you have more than one student, that gets tough to maintain.

I am going to consider the writing component for my rising 6th grader. My oldest is a solid writer and we used several writing approaches to teach her. Of course, we didn't realize she was a decent writer until her work was evaluated a few times by the teachers at the Potter's School (so you see, we aren't experts in where kids should be by what point in time...). We primarily used IEW to teach her how to write, but she also had a semester of writing with Katy Pistole (online, has written some sweet books on horses) which is where she learned to enjoy writing. This year she is taking English 1 with Potters School, which involves a good bit of writing. Her science class with Veritas has also included some solid writing. For this reason I am wondering about this new (to me) writing program from the Growing with Grammar publishers. I know I love the diagramming supplement and will definitely be using that!