BraveWriter Language Arts Program

My 2nd grader uses the Quiver, while my oldest uses the Arrow. We love the book selections. The guides help me teach spelling and grammar using the literature passages. It also includes writing and literary elements.

I really liked these programs. It was just hard to remember to use them as they are intended. It felt as though the kids weren't learning their language arts (like a workbook approach allows you to worksheet and then grade). However, they definitely get the job done, you just have to trust the approach.

My 3rd grader and I love using the Arrow language arts program. The book selections are varied and wonderful. All language arts topics are touched upon or introduced. The lesson plans are easy to implement. Don't let this deceive you, because I have ended up having the most in depth and meaningful literary discussions with my 9 year old this year! Its like having an entire language arts/writing program all wrapped up and hidden within a fun read aloud and book club discussion group. "Class work" or "lessons" are not what we feel. We feel happy and enriched!

I have enjoyed using this curriculum with my children. I love that the copywork, dictation assignments are based on great books. I like how she explains in the younger LA products why she is choosing excerpts from the book for grammar and literary elements.
You must get the "how to use Arrow, Boomerang, etc." teaching guides if you are not terribly familiar with the Charlotte Mason educational methods.
The individual products tend to be a little bit expensive, in my opinion, but I ordered back-issued products through homeschoolbuyersco-op.com because they were less expensive and I could choose the very specific books I wanted the lessons to be based off of.

Helpful for learning this subject.
Marilyn

This program saved our year for my son. He was in first grade last year, and, does NOT like writing. He pretty much hates it. However, he LOVES to read - including chapter books. We mostly used Oak Meadow last year (which we also really like), but which does have a lot of writing in it potentially. Obviously, you can always do the writing for your child, but I wanted him to really work on improving his writing and wasn't sure how to accomplish that w/o struggle. We used a Quiver of Arrows for him and it was great. He knew that each week, he had some copywork to do and that the quality of the writing was the important part. Additionally, the materials gave us some great material to discuss and think about with regard to writing style, mechanics, figures of speech, etc. Jacob learned a lot about speech within text, especially. And, because he was doing some very focused work on his writing, I felt better about doing a lot of the writing for him in other disciplines (which meant he was more willing to share all his thoughts b/c he didn't have to write them down!). We started part way through the year, so we didn't do all the books, but he enjoyed the ones we did. I also wish she had a mix-and-match set up for a package price. She does have ala carte book options, which we used for my daughter, who is older (also love the arrow program - really, really good for learning figures of speech), but it would be great if there was an option to pick the books and materials that my child will read and group that into a package instead of it being pre-done. But that is small - I think the program is wonderful.