Ruth Heller World of Language Series

Quite by accident, I recently came across a lovely series of language arts books. I wasn't even looking for a language arts curriculum, but saw these books mentioned on an Oak Meadow forum that I frequent and knew I had to check them out.

The Ruth Heller World of Language Series is a beautiful collection of picture books with each book highlighting a particular part of speech. There are eight books in the series:

• Merry-Go-Round, A Book About Nouns
• Mine, All Mine, A Book About Pronouns
• Kites Sail High, A Book About Verbs
• Many Luscious Lollipops, A Book About Adjectives
• Up, Up, and Away, A Book About Adverbs
• Behind the Mask, A Book About Prepositions
• Fantastic! Wow! And Unreal!, A Book About Interjections and Conjunctions

This afternoon I received the first four that I ordered.

I loved them so much that I ordered the other four tonight. (It helps that Amazon has a "buy three, get the fourth free" promotion going on right now.)

These living books, have beautiful, lively illustrations and are written in engaging rhyme.

Thing 4, who is a highly visual child, will love this series.

Who knew that grammar lessons could be so much fun?

Hobby Lobby Homeschool

When I'm out and about with the munchkins, I often try to sneak in a lesson or two. For example, if I buy something that costs $6.84 and give the clerk a $10 (on the rare occasion that I actually have cash in my purse), I'll ask one of the kiddos to tell me how much change I'm getting back. If I'm really quick (and have a calculator handy), I can get the answer before Thing 3 does. He is a math whiz!

Sometimes, a lesson just jumps off a shelf and slaps me in the face. Today was one of those times. We were strolling around Hobby Lobby when I glanced over at a shelf filled with frames and saw this spelling/grammar lesson staring me in the face.

In case you have old eyes like I do, that picture frame says "Grandma's are Great!"

When I saw the frame, I literally gasped and said, "Oh. My. Goodness." My children looked around, expecting to see someone impaled by a knitting needle.

I admit that I am a grammar and spelling snob. It's rare that I read an article on the website of our local paper with stopping 10 times and exclaiming, "For crying out loud! Don't these people proofread?" Even so, I was pretty sure that my 8 and 10 year olds could spot the problem with this frame.

First of all, to be completely nit picky, given that "Great" is capitalized, "are" should have been capitalized, as well. I could let that go, however, if not for the other glaring mistake on this commercially made frame that some sweet child is going to give Grandma for Mother's Day. Let me show you again.

After regaining my composure, I turned to my darling children and said, "Do you see anything wrong with this frame?" Without hesitating, they both said, "It's the apostrophe." Thing 3 then added, "You don't use an apostrophe to make a word plural."

Ahhhhhh. Exactly. You don't use an apostrophe to make a word plural. Ever. You don't do it when addressing Christmas cards. (It's "The Smiths", please, not "The Smith's".) You don't do it on a picture frame.

My children are paying attention.

I did consider the possibility that some sweet child is going to put a photo of Grandma's cookies in this frame, making the caption, "Grandma's Are Great!", entirely grammatically correct. In that case, just ignore this post.

Mad Libs

Around here, we use Mad Libs quite a bit. It's a fun way to work on simple parts of speech. The kids love them because they're so silly, and it's something we can take with us on road trips, etc.

Today I came across It's A Mad Libs World!...Online Mad Libs. Cool! The kids fill out a form that asks for parts of speech, click "submit" and the story appears. If they forget the definition for one of the parts of speech, they just mouse over the term and a definition pops up along with a few examples. There are 13 Mad Libs categories to choose from. Our favorite is Pirate Mad Libs!

Mad Libs not only reinforce simple grammar, but they're great for reading practice, too.

Check it out. It's a fun site!

Conjunction, Junction, What's Your Function?

Since I am a child of the 70s and early 80s, when Shurley said it was time to learn about conjunctions and interjections, you just know I had to pull out my Schoolhouse Rock! DVD.

"Hurray! I'm for the other team!"

I can hardly wait until we do our government unit!