Disclosure: I received this complimentary product through the Homeschool Review Crew.
We love to learn grammar by taking apart excellent sentences from the books that we read and by examining each other’s writing to fix mistakes and make it better. My kids have at times asked for harder, more direct grammar instruction, though, and that’s why we are excited for the opportunity to review English 1 Language Skills (9th grade) from Paradigm Accelerated Curriculum.
PAC offers different types of curriculum, but the English 1 Language Skills piece that we’ve been using is a complete language arts curriculum. It’s available in both digital and physical formats, and we received both. My Little Man chose to use the physical version.
When I first opened the box, it felt overwhelming – but just for a few moments. This kit has several pieces: the ‘textbook,’ the activity book where the student actually writes answers and completes work, and answer keys for the teacher. These ‘books’ are all softcover, and to things simple, the books are printed in smaller, softcover pieces instead of massive workbooks or textbooks. What looks like many pieces at first is merely a series of small workbooks the student moves through. These smaller books are easier to use and easy to carry around, which we both enjoyed.
The answer keys were actually shrink-wrapped, hole-punched pages, so I pulled out an empty binder and had them ready to go in a matter of minutes. I like how easy that process was!
The student books are clearly labeled on the front as being ‘text’ or ‘activity’ and with the number of each. The curriculum is also clearly structured: Book One of each type contains Chapter One, and that is broken down into 15 lessons with a quiz after every five lessons. After the end of all fifteen lessons, the student takes a test and then moves into Chapter Two.
Each lesson begins with a short story about a historical figure. The lesson includes a character lesson, something short and quotable that is to be memorized, vocabulary words, and then moves into the grammar instruction. After reading all of this from the textbook, the student switches to the activity book to complete the exercises for that lesson.
My Little Man loves the finite piece of this. He loves knowing exactly what he’s expected to do each day and exactly when he’ll be finished. He likes the similar structure of the lessons and that familiarity this breeds of how it all works. He also enjoyed reading the stories and worked well with the clear directions.
On the other hand, the grammar was tricky at times. Perhaps there are components for middle school, and so by jumping into the middle we missed things. A few times we felt as if more instruction was needed. While I love the simplicity of merely comparing the answers to those in the answer key, if My Little Man needed help, I sometimes needed it, too. I’m pretty good with grammar, and I was always able to figure it out, but simpler, clearer explanations would have been great.
PAC’s website claims that one of their goals is to prepare students for a post-secondary work with strong communication skills, and I can see that one would clearly excel with grammar after using this curriculum. The lessons are extremely detailed, and the scope and sequence moves through a variety of grammar types and structures, moving beyond simple word choice to sentence and paragraph construction. Completion of this class is worth one credit, and you’ll certainly get your money’s worth of grammar instruction by the end.
I would personally hesitate to call this a complete English language arts curriculum, though, simply because the reading components all appear to be the short selections that are part of the lessons. While they do take a variety of formats and I appreciate the way that they’ve been chosen to highlight positive character traits, I want my students to do much more reading for me than what is included here. We’ll continue to use this alongside of our other reading and analytical work, and I think it’s perfect for that.
Don’t take my word for it, though. See what the other members of the Homeschool Review Crew have to say!
