Kelly, on Harvey's and testing...

[Martha]

There are several things you could do. One is to reserve some of the exercises from each lesson and do them as a review/evaluation at the end of each section, or as often as you think necessary. I've also asked questions like the following:

List four properties of pronouns.

Give the order of parsing for adverbs, etc.

What is the difference between coordinate and subordinate conjunctions? Give some examples of each type.

What part(s) of speech do adjectives modify? Adverbs?

This sounds tedious, but you will really cement this kind of information by doing parsing and diagramming during A&I. I haven't been using CW long enough to be sure, but we get a LOT of review just by picking out a few sentences from each model to parse and diagram. My plan, in the interest of thouroughness, is to continue to do some review and evaluation during regular language arts time, but also make notes of weaknesses that show up during A&I. I'd be interested to hear what other folks are doing with this, because when we used the book for 6th grade (before CW was published), I blustered, stumbled, and backtracked a lot for the first few weeks of using Harvey's. Having CW to use in conjunction with Harvey's will help you get more out of the Harvey's texts than we did the first time out. I haven't used them much, but the exercises on pp. 110-112 can be used as well.

HTH, Martha

[Willa]

What Martha describes is similar to what I have been doing with my older kids ages 13, 14, and 16 in Harvey's Grammar. We have only used Harvey's since Feb but they have used various other grammar resources through the years.

Every day I begin with a review where I orally go over concepts from past lessons using exercises from the book or else made up. Another thing I do, just after I present a new concept or during review, is have the children do "synthesis" by thinking up and analyzing their own sentences that illustrate the concepts. This is difficult and somewhat dismaying sometimes but does give me a sense of how well they have internalized the concept.

Every two weeks (but I want to change it to weekly) I have them do a test -- I dictate some sentences from literature for them, and they parse them as far as they are able. I keep these all together and hope to see progress over time in their ability to apply concepts to real writing.

If one of the children is struggling with a concept, eg right now my non-grammatically-minded 14yo is struggling with prepositional phrases, I do extra work with him individually at another time in the homeschool day. I look for grammar worksheets on the web, or clip passages from literature,which we analyze together.

I want to adapt CW:Writing for these older kids but am still trying to figure out the logistics. They are all decent writers but haven't had much formal writing training besides a little IEW, so there will be some bumps in the road. It will be easier to start basically from the beginning with my 10yo and 7yo.

HTH, talk about copia! <g>
Willa