Language arts is simply the art of using language well.
Anything you do to help your child grow in understanding and using language can be considered
a component of language arts.
When you think about language, you can divide it into four areas: hearing, speaking, reading,
and writing.
The main thing to remember about language arts is that learning to use language well
is a process—a process that, in most cases, occurs quite naturally.
Charlotte Mason followed the natural progression of hearing, speaking, reading, and writing
when she designed how she would approach language arts.
Let's take a look at each of those four areas and see the natural progression that is inherent
with children and built into Charlotte's methods.
Here are the approximate grade levels that Charlotte used as benchmarks to guide this
progression.
But remember that different children progress at different rates, especially in dealing
with language.
In language arts it is crucial that you teach the child, not just the curriculum.
First, a child hears language.
You start with conversations—talking with a child.
Most parents do this quite readily.
You do not talk baby talk; you use regular sentence structure and regular vocabulary.
As the child progresses, he absorbs all of that and continually fine tunes his ability
to understand what he is hearing.
You also read good books to him.
As he listens to those good books, he picks up more vocabulary in the context of the story
line.
And you continue good conversations and reading good books aloud through all of his schooling
years.
You simply increase the complexity of those conversations and books as he is ready, allowing
him to hear a variety of styles of writing from a variety of authors and always being
careful to choose books that will feed his mind and heart with living ideas.
Second, a child speaks language.
As the child hears you talking, he eventually tries it for himself.
You continue the conversations, and the child gains valuable practice in using words well
as he talks.
Charlotte introduced two other methods to help a child learn to use words well in speaking.
She gave the child poetry or Scripture to memorize and gently coached him in conveying
his interpretation of the meaning of the words as he recited them.
She also gave him practice in putting together his own spoken words with oral narrations.
Narration in its simplest form asks the child to retell in his own words what he just heard.
It's a much higher thinking level than true/false, multiple choice, or fill in the blank.
And it naturally cultivates a higher level of language mastery.
Those three speaking components can also increase in complexity as your child progresses throughout
his school years.
Once you have them in place, you just keep going.
Third, a child learns to read the language.
He starts the process when he is young by playing with letters and getting to know the
sounds they make.
This is done through informal activities with letters that the child can manipulate: foam
letters, magnetic letters, wooden blocks with letters on them.
Once he knows the sounds, the natural next step is to put sounds together to build words.
And once the child is comfortable building words and reading them, he is ready for actual
reading lessons.
In Charlotte's mind, reading lessons meant taking the process one step further and learning
to read sentences and passages, not just isolated words.
As the child gains fluency in reading sentences and passages, he naturally progresses to being
able to read his school books for himself.
And when he can read for instruction for himself, he is set for life.
All you do is increase the difficulty level of the books as he is ready.
Fourth, a child learns to write the language.
That process starts with drawing and using the large muscles: drawing in the air, drawing
on the whiteboard on the wall, drawing in the sand.
You can teach a young child how to form letters, even if he is not ready for paper and pencil
writing, by teaching him the strokes using his large muscles.
Then when he is ready to move to paper and pencil, he'll already know the correct strokes.
Once he has learned to write his letters, you progress naturally to what Charlotte called
copywork.
Copywork is giving a child words and sentences to copy—passages from beautiful poetry,
Scripture, quotations, or good literature—being careful to keep the lessons short and to feed
his mind with living ideas.
Copywork naturally progresses to transcription.
Copywork is usually accomplished by copying the model letter by letter.
Eventually the child progresses to copying word by word—he looks at a word, gets a
mental snapshot of that word, then looks down and writes it.
After that he progresses to copying phrase by phrase.
When he gets to that stage, he's doing transcription.
And transcription naturally leads to the next step: dictation.
Charlotte used all three of those methods— copywork, transcription, and dictation—to
teach spelling in context with great literature, rather than using spelling lists.
With dictation the child looks carefully at the entire passage.
But you don't require him to write the whole thing from memory: when he is sure he can
write it all correctly, you dictate it to him phrase by phrase as he writes.
Along with this transition into being comfortable reproducing longer passages, you also ask
him to write longer passages in his own words: written narrations.
The child has had years of practice with the mental process of narrating because of his
oral narrations; now he simply starts to write some of them.
So the next natural step is to move into helping the child fine tune his writing.
Now there is a reason to study the parts of speech and how they can affect sentence structure
and meaning.
As he continues to progress in his writing skills, he has a reason to want composition
guidance—to desire help communicating his thoughts more clearly and effectively.
But notice how those composition lessons are a culmination of the natural progression in
all of language arts.
This fine tuning is done after the child has spent years taking in good examples by listening
to great books, memorizing and reciting rich literary passages, practicing the mental process
of expressing his own thoughts through oral narration, seeing great writing for himself
and noticing the mechanics as he reads for instruction, copying and studying those passages
for transcription and dictation, becoming comfortable with handwriting so the physical
action is not a deterrent or an obstacle to expression, and developing his own voice from
the vast array of excellent authors he has spent time reading and pondering.
It is a natural progression toward a multi-faceted goal.
This is a process that cannot be and should not be rushed.
And keep in mind that it cannot necessarily be measured at every step of the way; much
of it is assimilated deep below the surface and is not seen until the plant bears its
fruit—sometimes years later.
But you can be sure that if you keep your eyes on the big picture, keep the natural
progression in mind and just give the child the next step as he is ready for it, you will
see the result.
You will see a child with a firm grasp on the art of using language well.