My Dream Middle-School Language-Arts Program

We're doing it right now: Latina Christiana II (or some comparable Latin grammar course -- I'm not necessarily that in love with LC, though it's pretty good), plus sentence diagramming via Ye Hedge School's First Whole Book of Diagrams and Elementary Diagramming Worktext. I didn't plan things out this way, but the two courses dovetail beautifully, if serendipitously: this past week Amicus was simultaneously working on the accusative case in Latin and diagramming sentences with direct objects in the diagramming worktext, for reinforcement in both directions.

I've said it before, but I love diagramming. It's one of those things I didn't expect ever to do with my children, because I hadn't liked it or seen the point in it as a middle-school student myself, but we have found it both useful and fun. Just goes to show you that "I found/didn't find it interesting" is never a sound basis for a pedagogy. Even if a given child isn't wired analytically, as Amicus is, it's worth doing structural-language work at least as an exercise, because at some point one does have to admit that writing isn't merely an overflow of self-expression, but -- as William Carlos Williams says, of the poem -- "a large or small machine made of words." Latin helps to make this clear -- it's the Lego set of languages, with endings you pop on and off to connect ideas with each other in some kind of coherent fashion. English isn't so obviously that way, since we dropped the inflection business, but that's where diagramming is useful, so that you see how a given thought fits together and is coherent or not.

Add to that a lot of reading and, above and beyond the sentences you're asked to compose and diagram in FDWT, writing a lot of Redwall fan fiction, and there you have it, a program which encompasses all areas of English study and balances required seatwork (ie Latin and diagramming) with child-directed learning. Of course, if we hadn't stumbled into fan fiction, I'd be imposing some kind of composition program this year, but so far that's something I've never had to do. I thought I'd have to light a fire under Amicus to get him to write, but he apparently had his finger on that switch all the time, which is a great relief and will make formal writing instruction in high school that much easier.