Are you needing a little inspiration? Are you struggling to get your kids to write, or simply to complete their LA assignment independently?

I have been there! And with 7 kids to homeschool (and another in diapers) my children have to be able to complete work independently each day.  The past few years I have crafted LA worksheets/printables for each Sonlight core that I was teaching. This year, we are trying something a bit different…

*****INTERACTIVE NOTEBOOKING*****

I think you are going to LOVE IT! Take a look at how we approached the first week of LA H {Seventh Grade}:

Our approach to dictation hasn’t changed (we use this). But, we are working on grammar and literary analysis a whole different way.

Let’s start with Mechanics Practice (on the right I’m showing you the blurb from Sonlight’s Activity Sheet for Week 1). This week, the focus is nouns. Since it is week one, we have included a bit of a review.

And now we’ll discuss common and abstract nouns with a little cutting and pasting–just to make sure they understand the “abstract” category of nouns.

Then the difference between compound and collective. Your kids will write in the answers for this exercise (i.e. snowflake is a compound noun, a bushel (of apples) is a collective noun).

Now for the application.  They’ll identify the types of nouns in this week’s dictation passage–right in their notebook.

This week’s Creative Expression is a Character Sketch of a character in The King’s Fifth. Excerpts from Writer’s Edge along with the Character Sketch Interactive Bookmark will help your kids accomplish this task with only a little guidance from you!

The Character Sketch Interactive Bookmark will help your kids take notes as they read. They will note their character’s personality, physical characteristics and interactions with others on the front of the bookmark (tagging each reference with a page number).

Inside their Writer’s Edge your students will find a detailed description of the components of a Character Sketch and what to look for as they read this week. It also will help them decide an approach for writing about their character. They will work out their approach on the back of their Character Sketch Interactive Bookmark.

Finally, we they’ll jump into their writing notebook to organize/draft their paper. I’ll bet your kids are typing their papers at this point in their school career. But, it will help them be better writers if they organize their thoughts before they type :).

Here the assignment is laid out and they are given visual reminders of the components of the essay. No matter what approach they take to writing their sketch, they’ll want to incorporate the descriptions they noted on their Character Sketch Interactive Bookmark along with their own interpretation/explanation.

What do you think? Hopefully you LOVE it! We’ll be working in our notebooks this school year (for Cores B, E, F and H) and share the results with you this summer. Hope your year is off to a great start!