Hey everyone, it's Jenny Phillips. I just wanted to give you a really raw, close-up look at the
new Level 3 Language Arts course set for The Good and the Beautiful which releases on Monday. I am
so excited about this course. The new version has three components. It has the coursebook,
it has the "I Sat by the Sea" poetry compilation, which is integrated heavily with the course,
and the Level 3 Personal Reader, which is illustrated and it is part of the level 3
course. It is integrated with the course. So, I kind of want to walk you through what some of the
major changes are in this new version. So, all of the lessons, all of the items, are the checklist
items that used to be in the old editions are just integrated now right into every lesson and
the lessons are divided into daily lessons that are supposed to take about the same length of
time. So, if you finish one lesson a day and the lessons are shorter than in the previous edition,
then you will finish the course (one lesson a day, four days a week) you'll finish in one school year
with a few weeks at least to spare. So, I want to show you how the lessons work. So, at the
beginning, it's gonna tell you--it's gonna prompt you for everything. Have the child read aloud the
poems on these pages in "I Sat by the Sea". Now they're gonna read the poems twice, and you're
going to be talking with them about the, about the poems and the vocabulary. And this is an amazing
way for them to practice their reading fluency to improve in their reading and their vocabulary.
Their poetry is so packed with literary devices of similes and metaphors and imagery and descriptive
language and sensory language and alliteration and personification and all these kind of things,
that it's also going to greatly improve their writing. The very best thing you can do to
increase children's writing is to have them read and read and read really good literature. And so
our pilot families, some of them were a little bit nervous about this because they didn't think that
their kids or their boys would really love reading poetry um throughout this course,
and it ended up being so loved by our families. Their kids just grew to really, really love poetry
and the parents can see that their reading fluency and skills just increased so much as
they read these books. These are a compilation of poems, of classic poems, and they are Illustrated.
These are all original illustrations from The Good and the Beautiful. And this whole course,
including this "I Sat by the Sea" poetry compilation is a completely free download
on our website. All of the components that you need for this. So it will tell you when to read
these and it will guide you through pointing out to your child where you're using personification,
where personification is being used, and to go over vocabulary words that are in there, etc.
And then it says in this lesson to practice the challenging word climbs. Now in previous editions,
there were black and white flashcards for these challenging words, which is going to help children
with more challenging phonetic principles such as CH usually says "ch" but it can also say the hard
"c" sound like an orchid, in orchestra, and why in the middle of a word it makes different sounds and
things like that. So in the appendix then, we have changed the flashcards into the spelling word, um,
the challenging word climb. So there's 15 mountains, and on each mountain are words
that were on the challenging words flashcards. They're almost exactly the same but we did make
some changes to them. And so when it tells you to read, it says practice the challenging word
climbs in the appendix. Practice the words on one to four mountains for three to five minutes
total. So you'll just practice the words for three to four minutes, however far they get. And
when a child can. as the instructions say on this page, when a child can read all the words on the
mountain (basically, they can climb the mountain then without getting any of the words wrong)
then they get to draw a flag at the top of the mountain. Our pilot how many children loved doing
the mountains. That's so different than just doing the flashcards for these words with all these fun
mountains for the child to do. So you do that with the child, and then you just go ahead and read the
instructions. You don't have to prepare anything beforehand. You don't have to know what nouns and
adjectives are. You just read and explore along with your child. And so, what you do is,
you're gonna incorporate, the lesson incorporates into here geography and art right integrated with
the lesson. And so you're gonna explore this beautiful painting with your child, talking
about nouns and adjectives in this lesson and then they're gonna go ahead and do an independent work
section which is gonna allow you to have some time to work with other children while they do some
of their independent work. So I wanted to go to another lesson here that shows a little bit about
how we have changed our writing. Children in Level 3 get very overwhelmed with writing projects. We
don't want children to hate reading, writing. We don't want them to have to do projects that are
really beyond their level. They are still learning grammar and all of those skills that they need and
punctuation. But they do need to start learning the concepts of writing. So our writing in Level
3 is really strong and we are really excited about the way that we have approached it. We learned so
much by working with our pilot families. This project was such a huge amount of work because
we would put lessons through our pilot families and if any of the children, well if the children
had meltdowns or felt overwhelmed, then we redid it and said "How can we teach these principles
with the children really enjoying what they're doing and really learning?" And we just finally,
totally figured it out. Our pilot families, our children loved the way that we approached writing
in here. So this lesson is on Switzerland, but they're gonna learn about writing,
they're gonna learn about geography. So they're learning about rural and urban and suburban
through studying this painting, as well as the art principles and the painting. And in addition,
they're reading a book about Switzerland in their Level Three Personal Reader. so it's just
all coordinated and meaningful. And so you kind of talk about this painting and the geography
principles behind it and the art principles, and then they're going to go ahead and create a little
essay. But it talks about, you know, we begin with an attention-grabbing opening. You can start with
a question, a statement, or description, and then you want to make it clear what you're going to be
writing about. So they copy this sentence which is a model opening paragraph onto a separate paper
and then it talks about how each paragraph in an essay should be about one main idea. Your essay
has three main ideas which are right here. And so then they will cut these out and read
them and decide the order that they go in, and realize these are your main body texts. Each one
of them has one supporting point and then it talks about what a closing paragraph is. They copy this
closing paragraph, so they end up with this whole essay where they have written the opening and the
ending and have all their body paragraphs pasted in there. But then they do this over and over
and they really start to understand what makes the parts of an essay. One of the reasons that
we discovered that writing essays is so difficult for younger children is they've never read them.
And children learn, they model what they read. And that's how children really naturally learn
how to write is by reading. And they read a ton of fiction, and maybe even some nonfiction, but not a
lot of essays, maybe none. And so they really have to model first before they feel comfortable. And
so when they go through this process over and over and over again they're like "oh yeah, an essay,
I get it!" You start with your opening and we show all the different ways through all the different
times they do this that they can open and I've just got my main body paragraphs and this is how
you close an essay. But they're loving it too as they're writing about this beautiful scene that
they're doing. And then they're gonna go ahead and go to their, the independent practice after
that. So I wanted to go to one more lesson here to show you and so this is the lesson on independent
clauses. And again, you're gonna be using this beautiful painting to be talking about geography
again and art and other principles. There's so much packed in this one lesson. This is the whole
lesson, the parent part and the independent lesson in here. This lesson probably took three to four
hours for us to initially create and then it was piloted and we'll go through different things,
and that is because it is so compact in making sure that the learning is all so compact so that
you don't have to spend so much time with your children, and yet they are learning
so much. So one of the ways that we were able to reduce lesson lengths in these lessons is
by doing this exact thing. We didn't lose the amount of information that's being taught, and
the effectiveness of the information is actually improved, but they're gonna be talking about this
and talking about independent dependent clauses. But they also learn the difference between woman
and women spelled with an or en, commonly confused words as they talk about this picture. And then,
when you do this dictation and they're dictating these clauses and they have to decide if it's
a dependent clause or an independent clause, they're also using woman and women. And also
we have in here possessive nouns, which they have learned. And so it's reviewing a lot of
the things that they've learned in and really um packing it in. And so we have also not lost our
lessons that were the favorite lessons of so many families that we got feedback on. It's so great
to teach our children how to write well and how to write with correct grammar and punctuation,
but it's even more important that they learn how to write Christ-like communications
that the letters, the texts, the emails, the papers, and essays, everything that they write,
that they write in a Christ-like way. And we still have our lessons about the old literature
and the changes that literature has gone through. Teaching children what really makes books worthy
and talking about the McGuffey readers. And one of the other things that we're excited about is
the way that we have increased our spelling rules, or the effectiveness of our spelling
rules that we have taught. It used to just be a page of like all of this dictation that you would
go back and forth, but now we have varied ways that they practice and we're bringing in more
kinesthetic and auditory and visual learning in learning the spelling rules. We're really
excited about that. In addition, we're bringing in more activities to learn things. In this example,
they're learning compound sentences and as they do they're cutting these out and rearranging
the sentences into different compound sentences, seeing how they're connected with the comma and a
coordinating conjunction, talking about matching them up with these different pictures. And kids
love it so much that they don't even totally realize how much they're learning and that
they're actually doing grammar and all of this. So we really hope that you love these lessons
and we are so excited to offer this course to everybody completely free starting on Monday.