Teaching English Doesn't Have to Take All Day

Are your students more like the tortoise or the hare when it comes to learning English? Some homeschoolers find that grammar, writing, spelling, vocabulary, and literature take so long that it feels like they just can’t win. Others find that their kids breeze through English lessons so quickly that they may not be accomplishing the goal of being competent readers and writers.

Fortunately, learning English doesn’t have to take all day. In fact, there’s a way to teach it that’s so enjoyable that you and your kids will want to do it. As a former homeschool mom of six who also taught English to her friends’ kids, I’m going to get you on the fast track to English teaching success. Ready? Let’s go!

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#1 Use Stories

The first step to teaching English quickly and effectively is to use stories. In fact, if all you do is read your kids a story every day, you’re making progress in all the language arts. Stories are one of the best ways to teach vocabulary—which also happens to be the best predictor of academic achievement and life success. Using stories that include advanced vocabulary words like those in Grammar Galaxy will give your kids exposure to the words. Exposure to the words is more effective for building vocabulary than having kids write out definitions—something most students don’t like doing.

In addition to vocabulary, stories teach grammar through exposure. Although some grammar has to be explicitly taught, other grammar is mastered through listening to it used correctly in conversation and story.

Stories can be used to teach literary concepts of course, but they also help students become better writers. Most writers were voracious readers in childhood. They learned how to use the English language to express themselves by reading their favorite authors.

The added benefit of using stories to teach is that they are memorable. A lecture or nonfiction paragraph is forgettable. But stories stick with us and beg to be shared. That’s why I wrote Grammar Galaxy—to use story to teach language arts concepts.

Ask many adults what a prefix is and they won’t know. But in Grammar Galaxy, Prefix is an evil programmer who introduces the re- virus into the galaxy’s computer system. As a result, movies keep rewinding and people keep repeating themselves. Students are guardians of the galaxy who correct the chaos Prefix and his Gremlin accomplice caused. If you’d like to try a free sample of Grammar Galaxy, click here.

#2 Skip spelling and vocabulary busywork

If you’re using story to teach English, you’ve already come a long way. But now let’s take a shortcut. When I first started homeschooling, I thought I needed a separate spelling curriculum—one that presents new lists of words to be memorized. As I tried one curriculum after another like this, I noticed something. My kids already seemed to know most of the words in each list. And those they didn’t either weren’t that difficult to spell, or they weren’t words they used often.

While dyslexic students’ spelling can benefit from focused work on phonics, most students can focus on learning only the words they are misspelling in their own writing. Then they can choose a mnemonic or memory tool that makes remembering easiest. For example, students may find it helpful to remember that piece meaning part is spelled p-i-e-c-e by noting the word pie at the beginning. They can embellish this further with a saying like: “The waitress put a piece of pie in front of Ce.” In Grammar Galaxy, students focus on learning to spell the most commonly misspelled words. They also choose and create a mnemonic that helps them remember them.

I found the same shortcut worked with vocabulary. I didn’t need a separate vocabulary curriculum, but it did make sense to review Greek and Latin word roots that form the basis of so many English words. I added many of these to the vocabulary unit of Grammar Galaxy. As homeschoolers, we save teaching time by not doing spelling or vocabulary busywork.

#3 Encourage kids to write faster with milestones, friends, and encouragement

Writing is like the last leg of the race. It feels like the hardest part, but that’s mostly psychological.

Florence Chadwick attempted to swim 21 miles from Catalina Island to the California coast in thick fog. She stopped after almost 16 hours of swimming only to discover she was less than a mile away from shore. If she had known, she would have dug deep and finished. How can we use her experience to help our reluctant or slow writers?

The most important thing we can do is break up the long writing process into smaller milestones. Swimming 21 miles must have felt impossibly hard. “Write an essay” can feel like a slog for our students too. So instead of, “Write an essay,” we can say, “write your three main points.” Instead of write a paragraph, we can say, “write the topic sentence.” Shorter sprints completed regularly help students build skills more effectively than a writing marathon.

The next thing we can do to make our writing lessons take less time is have students write with others. If Florence had been trying to beat another swimmer who was still swimming, I think she would have gone the distance. Giving a student an independent writing assignment that doesn’t have to be shared is not as motivating as participating in a class. Having my kids share their writing in our home-based co-op with friends helped them write better and faster. But writing and sharing with family members also helped—especially when we had a funniest writing competition that I participated in and Dad judged.

Finally, we can speed our young writers along by cheering them through to the finish line. If we are alongside them, focusing on when they should have started, and what they could have done better, they will be tempted to quit. Applaud the effort and content first to help them finish writing faster. Only then can we choose one or two things that we’d like them to improve in the next writing assignment.

Students don’t have to be either the tortoise or the hare when it comes to learning English. They can be guardians of Grammar Galaxy who quickly defeat the Gremlin and master language arts. Download a sample from the link here.

Have other ideas for quickly and effectively teaching English? Comment to share them.