Teaching ELA using Evan-Moor Grade 8 Daily Workbooks

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Last school year, I tried to implement more full curriculum into our homeschool. I figured since my daughters are getting older than maybe my approach to teaching them should change. I’ve heard many times in the homeschool community that as the kids get older parent-teachers start to feel pressure to change up their homeschooling approach. I didn’t think I would be that parent, but I was. After struggling with the unnecessary changes in our language arts for most of last school year and part of this school year, I decided to go back to what works for our homeschool which is working through resources that focus on specific grammar skills versus combining all the areas of English in one text.

This year my eighth grade daughter is using Daily Reading Comprehension and Daily 6-Trait Writing along with one other grammar resource and participating in a book club with other girls who homeschool for her English course.

Daily 6-Trait Writing is a twenty-five week five day writing program that covers ideas, organization, word choice, sentence fluency, and voice. The units include five weeks of lessons that cover different aspects of the main topic. For example, the unit “sentence fluency” covers rhythm, structure and length, poetry, quotations, and writing a smooth paragraph. The weekly lessons are consist of a daily activity in the form of a worksheet for days one to four with a writing assignment on day five.

As a parent-teacher, I appreciate the rubric that is included in the writing program for evaluating the week five writing assignment. Since week five is the last week of lessons for each specific topic, there is a expectation of progress from week one to week five. The rubric allows be to grade without bias based on what my daughter has done, and what Evan-Moor’s curriculum expects to accomplish.

Daily Reading Comprehension is a thirty week reading program that covers a variety of comprehension strategies including monitoring comprehension, making connections, visualizing, organizing, determining important information, and asking questions. The program also covers comprehension skills such as making inferences, cause and effect, compare and contrast, predicting, and author’s purpose. The first six weeks of lessons focus on strategies, and the last 24 weeks focus on both strategies and skills. Each weekly lesson consists of five passages and questions related to the passage.

Using the “Daily” programs from Evan-Moor helps us stay on track with continually building English Language Arts skills. My daughter is a great English student and does really well when it comes to most assignments English related, but with all things there’s always room to learn more even in areas that are going well. I like that the “Daily” books highlight areas that I have not taught her explicitly. For us, these English grammar products aren’t teacher heavy which allows her to work independently. We do discuss the objective for the lessons, but she truly has freedom in doing the work without being held up by me unlike some of the other curricula we’ve tried to use. I’ve also found throughout our homeschool journey that short, straight forward lessons have a lasting impact versus heavy lessons.

If you’re looking for a way to include more ELA in your homeschool without the use of a cumbersome curriculum, consider including some of the Evan-Moor resources in your homeschool arsenal. It can make a world of difference especially if you are often feeling behind or if your child isn’t a fan of writing tons to prove he or she understands the concept.

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