Writing is a difficult process for students who have learning disabilities that are similar to dyslexia. We recently had the opportunity to review Simply Classical Writing Book One: Step-by-Step Sentences (Bible Story Edition) and Simply Classical Writing Book Two: Step-by-Step Sentences Student Guide (Bible Story Edition) from Memoria Press. This has been an interesting combination of grammar and writing with a Biblical theme.
Simply Classical Writing Book One: Step-by-Step Sentences (Bible Story Edition) and Simply Classical Writing Book Two: Step-by-Step Sentences Student Guide (Bible Story Edition) was written for beginning grammar and sentence writing. Written for roughly Grades 1/2 up to Grade 3/4, this grammar series provides lessons of copywork that combines grammar rules and composition and provides students with a carefully-sequenced series of instruction the teaches and allows students to practice skills in capitalizing, punctuation, and editing. We also received the Simply Classical Writing Book Two: Step-by-Step Sentences Teacher Key (Bible Story Edition).
Simply Classical Writing Book One: Step-by-Step Sentences (Bible Story Edition) is part of the Memoria Press Special-Needs curriculum choices. It is specifically written to allow more practice and time to master various subjects. Book One contains 34 weeks worth of material. So depending on your school schedule, this is material for a full school year. In this book students will be covering topics on following directions, using capital letters, decoding sentences, and creating sentences.
Each weekly lesson is based on a biblical topic that is read from A Child's Garden of Bible Stories. You start out by reading the story, and then in their workbook there are short sentence writing opportunities to work on daily. I would estimate roughly 10-15 minutes depending on the student. Decoding sentences daily by color coding the sentences as they are written. The story is encouraged to be read daily along with the work.
The beginning pages have suggestions for parents if their child is still struggling. These modifications can easily be made depending on their child's abilities. But if you find that this program is too easy for your student, they also have modification suggestions to provide more of a challenge.
Caty actually was a bit ahead of Simply Classical Writing Book One: Step-by-Step Sentences (Bible Story Edition) and she actually began in Simply Classical Writing Book Two: Step-by-Step Sentences Student Guide (Bible Story Edition). Book Two has a very similar format as Book One. One difference though is instead of reading from A Child's Garden of Bible Stories, scriptural passages are given each week to explore. The passages included range from Genesis in the Old Testament into the New Testament.
Each week student's explore topics on Main Idea/Detail sentences, types of sentences, correct punctuation, antonyms/synonyms, sentence fragments and full sentences, nouns, pronouns, verbs (and their tenses), adjectives, adverbs, articles, and creating detail sentences. All materials are written for roughly a 2nd - 4th grade with each lessons being built off of the previous week. This series was created for the student's continual progress at mastering skills by building on each week's lessons.
How did this work for Caty? She has learning disabilities that mimic dyslexia. One of the areas that she struggles with is grammar and writing. We have been hitting creating sentences hard the last couple months, because she really has an interest in writing. She wants to create stories. She gets very frustrated when her "sentences" are not in the right format. I was interested in seeing how she would do with this program.
She really liked the length of the lessons. She also liked that she was able to verbally give some answers when she was struggling with holding her pencil. When filling in descriptive words, and then recopying the entire sentence, it seemed to help her some. It's an ongoing work in progress. We have only been working for a few weeks now. But she has started spacing her words just a bit better and even remembering to capitalize the starting letter of her sentences. Adding punctuation though is something she'll continue to work with.
She liked the Bible stories. Hearing the scriptures read daily helped her remember many passages so far. Using the people we were reading about in her actual writing definitely made these historical figures even more alive to her.
I really liked that there was very little planning needed to use either Simply Classical Writing Book One: Step-by-Step Sentences (Bible Story Edition) or Simply Classical Writing Book Two: Step-by-Step Sentences Student Guide (Bible Story Edition) from Memoria Press. With three learning at three different levels and all of them with various learning disabilities, I need all the help I can get. Using this Simply Classical Curriculum really helped me show Caty how she can more effectively build confidence in her writing skills and that she can write full and complete sentences following all the rules.
The Simply Classical Writing Book Two: Step-by-Step Sentences Teachers Guide (Bible Story Edition) could be a very handy addition to your workload. This book went along with Book Two, there is not a separate guide for Book One. This book was helpful on days when Caty wanted to work independently. I could easily check her work without re-reading her entire lesson.
Several members of the Homeschool Review Crew were given the opportunity to review Simply Classical Writing Book One: Step-by-Step Sentences (Bible Story Edition), Simply Classical Writing Book Two: Step-by-Step Sentences Student Guide (Bible Story Edition) and Simply Classical Writing Book Two: Step-by-Step Sentences Teachers Guide (Bible Story Edition). Click on the picture below to see the materials that we explored from the Simply Classical Curriculum series and other history titles from Memoria Press.
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