Why Children Excel at Reading with The Good and the Beautiful Language Arts
Poetry, beautiful art, active learning—we want these things in our young children’s educations, but we also want them to learn how to read well. Can your child achieve a solid reading foundation with The Good and the Beautiful curriculum? Yes! It’s one of the things people like most about our curriculum. We love seeing the joy that children and parents experience when they see the world of reading open to their children through this curriculum. Why is our reading program so effective? Why are children excelling with this program when other reading programs have not worked for them? This post explores answers to these questions.
The Impact That Art, Nature, and High Character Have on Learning
We have carefully crafted our language arts lessons to be visually appealing and full of meaningful content and variety so that lessons are fresh and exciting. In addition, reading descriptions of nature and observing nature in beautiful paintings calms the mood and increases focus. The beauty and meaning are not just feel-good experiences; they actually improve academic learning and help children enjoy learning more.
One of the many users of our curriculum, Mary M., described this well in a recent Facebook review: “I love that my 7-year-old, who I used to have to drag to do school, now asks if she gets to do language arts yet.”
Children have an innate ability to tell when something is meaningful and worthwhile. They naturally notice what is beautiful and interesting around them in the world. They notice it in their lessons as well! Letting children dive into content that is full of meaning and beauty engages them in the learning process. It also keeps their interest and focus, allowing you to spend your time with your child teaching rather than trying to get them to focus and work.
Children are more motivated to work hard when they feel that they are working on something that is good for them. This concept was brought to our attention recently during an interview with someone for a position in our company. When asked why she was interested in working for us, she explained how the curriculum had impacted her child. She had thought he was a slow learner because he hated learning, always complained, and wasn’t progressing. When they tried The Good and the Beautiful curriculum, one of the first things they did was read a book about mothers with messages about love and respect. He turned to her when they finished the little book, smiled, and said, “This is good, Mom.” From that point forward, his learning took off because he loved the way the lessons made him feel. This mom was emotional as she explained how the beauty and meaning in our curriculum helped her child advance so rapidly in both character and academics.
Thorough Phonics Instruction
Children feel excitement while using The Good and the Beautiful reading program because they progress quickly. Our language arts curriculum, guided by the vision of Jenny Phillips, took years to create through testing, researching, piloting, and working with experts, educators, and homeschool parents.
Susan M. shared on Facebook: “My 6-year-old was struggling to learn to read and bored to tears (as was Mom!) with other books and methods. But she was determined to learn with or without me. We ordered TGTB and behold, she is READING in just a few weeks.”
Most words in the English language can be decoded, or mostly decoded, if the child has the skills to do so. In our curriculum, children memorize a short list of words that are phonics rule breakers and high-frequency words, which increases early fluency and confidence; however, the majority of our reading instruction is phonics-based.
Our unique phonics cards help children learn the sounds of phonograms quickly and confidently and then children practice those phonograms in sets of words. Our phonics-based curriculum teaches children phonemic awareness: the ability to separate sounds in a word. This allows children to decode and read new or challenging words, and it also helps them become excellent spellers.
In addition, The Good and the Beautiful curriculum teaches children to spell phonics patterns as they learn to read those same letter patterns. As children more deeply process the phonics patterns through spelling, they learn to read the patterns faster. Our curriculum also teaches children to recognize compound words, base words, prefixes, suffixes, and more.
We take reading instruction seriously at The Good and the Beautiful. However, we don’t stop at teaching children to read effectively; our curriculum also teaches children to recognize, appreciate, and seek out literature of the highest moral and literary merit—something that will bless children for their entire lives. We feel so strongly about our mission that our Language Arts Levels 1 through 5 course sets (complete with phonics cards and readers) can be downloaded completely free! Comparable program downloads sell for $100–$300. Be sure to check out our video “It’s Time to Be Brave about Books” to learn more about our mission. Please help us share our mission and resources by liking this post and leaving a comment.
