English Language Arts, or ELA, encompasses seven main instructional areas—reading, and its counterpart, spelling; handwriting; vocabulary; grammar; composition (“writing”); and literature. With so many moving parts, the subject can seem overwhelming to teach. Do you really have to cover all of that, year after year?
Yes and no. Yes, you do need to cover all seven instructional areas over the course of a child’s K–12 education. No, you don’t need to cover every part of ELA at equal depth and intensity for all of those 13 years. For example, most students will master handwriting and typing in elementary school, so there’s no need to continue instruction beyond that. Likewise, by 4th grade, most students are reading well enough that your instructional focus will shift from decoding and fluency practice to the application of phonics rules to spelling. The number of areas you need to teach will change as your child progresses. You can find a chart showing when the various areas of ELA are typically taught here.
Once you know what to teach and when, the question becomes how?
Educational experts offer their best practices for teaching the various components of ELA, but their recommendations do not always translate to a homeschool context. For example, current research supports teaching vocabulary drawn from student reading, using those words to explore antonyms and synonyms, affixes, word roots, and so on. Likewise, research shows the best way to teach grammar is in the context of student writing. If you notice that your student is consistently writing sentences like “Marta played soccer with Barbra and I,” for example, experts would suggest that you offer targeted grammar instruction on the use of the objective case after prepositions, using examples that fit the model preposition + name and pronoun.
These methods can work well, but they assume that the teacher is knowledgeable and experienced enough to know when and how to add explanatory lessons. This is not the case for all homeschoolers. (Or—let’s be honest—for all classroom teachers. When I worked as the academic dean of a private school, I regularly counseled teachers who kept correcting students’ misuse of there, their, and they’re, seemingly to no avail. Answer: a targeted lesson on homophones—and a reminder that students rarely read teacher comments on their papers, let alone internalize a pattern of corrections.) In addition, homeschoolers are often pressed for time. We’re juggling students at multiple grade levels while also running a home and possibly doing paid work as well, so even if we have the expertise, whipping up a quick worksheet about how to punctuate dates in running text is not high on our priority list. It’s simply more efficient to use a straightforward curriculum to teach “git ‘er done” subjects like grammar, vocabulary, and spelling.
Writing instruction poses its own set of difficulties. Few writing programs prepare young students adequately for independent writing. Although The Writing Revolution’s explicit instructional approach has gained popularity in recent years, young students are still expected to produce paragraphs about unfamiliar subject matter while struggling with the physical act of forming letters and the cognitive demands of spelling and mechanics. The Writing Revolution has also shown the importance of writing across the curriculum, but parents and professionals alike may be hard-pressed to come up with meaningful writing assignments on their own. Even if you can find a curriculum with well-designed short answer questions or essay prompts, evaluating student writing presents another problem. How many times have you seen an answer key that informs you that Student responses will vary? It’s no wonder that writing is one of the areas many homeschoolers despair of teaching well.
Even choosing books for literature studies can be fraught. The books we loved as kids may have racist content or problematic authors. With so many new releases coming out, how do we know which titles are worthy of a slot in our curriculum? How do we respond if our student doesn’t understand the language in older books or misses the point entirely?
Here are my suggestions, with curriculum recommendations, for how to teach ELA without tears (your own or your bank account’s). Refer to this ELA Skills Sequence chart for an overview. Download the K-8 ELA curriculum recommendations as a PDF.
Reading (Phonics)
Choose a high-quality, scripted program that will take your child from short vowel sounds through 3rd or 4th grade. The Ordinary Parent’s Guide to Teaching Reading fits the bill without breaking the bank. MCP Plaid Phonics is a solid alternative.
Handwriting and Typing
My pick is Evan-Moor’s Daily Handwriting Practice, available in Traditional Manuscript (ball-and-stick), Traditional Cursive (similar to Palmer), Modern Manuscript (similar to Italic), and Contemporary Cursive (similar to New American Cursive). Pick a manuscript style, and begin teaching it in K. Add a cursive style in the middle of 2nd or the beginning of 3rd grade. Introduce typing in the middle of 4th or the beginning of 5th grade with the typing.com (free) or Touch-Type, Read & Spell (paid).
Spelling
If reading means learning to decode the written symbols that represent the sounds of a language, spelling is the inverse: encoding sounds with written symbols. For that reason, spelling instruction goes hand in hand with phonics. As you come to the end of your reading program, the focus shifts to applying the rules of phonics to spelling. Unless your child needs extra help with spelling, use a straightforward program like Building Spelling Skills from Evan-Moor. MCP’s Spelling Workout is another good choice. (Some students, so-called natural spellers, may not need much if any explicit spelling instruction. If your child rarely misspells words and only needs to be corrected once or twice before mastering the spelling of a word, you may have a natural speller. You can probably dispense with a formal curriculum, relying on spot corrections to get the job done.)
Vocabulary
Here you can take a two-pronged approach. Build a foundation with a formal vocabulary program like Evan-Moor’s Daily Academic Vocabulary or Sadlier’s Vocabulary Workshop, then draw additional vocabulary from the various content areas of your overall curriculum. Literature, social studies, science, and (to a lesser extent) math all provide both general and domain-specific vocabulary. Well-designed programs and textbooks will list new vocabulary or highlight key words that are defined in sidebars or a glossary.
Grammar
Again, the best approach to grammar instruction is both/and. You want to both use a straightforward grammar curriculum and provide targeted instruction in any problem areas you see in your child’s writing. Each level of Evan-Moor’s Language Fundamentals provides a year’s worth of reproducible worksheets to teach grammar and mechanics and to review spelling and vocabulary; they can also be used to address problem areas in greater depth. Each book suggests an instructional pathway through the materials. Once your student has completed Language Fundamentals, Daily Language Review and Daily Paragraph Editing will keep their skills fresh.
Composition (Writing)
As with reading instruction, writing instruction begins by building on students’ existing command of spoken language. Levels A–C of my world literature and writing program, Exploring the World through Story, use a combination of oral narration (plot summaries), copywork, and dictation to prepare students for independent writing. Writing with Ease from Well-Trained Mind Press follows the same progression and works beautifully when used in tandem with EWS. These techniques can be applied to the student’s work in social studies, science, and mathematics for reinforcement.
Once students have developed the necessary reading, spelling, and handwriting skills, they can begin to transition from oral to written expression. Short-answer questions and written narrations of two or three sentences build stamina. Sentence-variation techniques like those used in The Writing Revolution help students think critically about the content of their studies. As students progress, they move from sentences to paragraphs of increasing length and detail. Exploring the World through Story Levels D–F take students through this skill progression, and Sprouts guides parents through teaching sentence and paragraph skills across the curriculum. Writing supplements provide extra practice.
Students who have mastered paragraph structure are ready to write essays. Exploring the World through Story Levels G–I teach students to write essays of increasing length about literature. Writing with Skill provides extensive practice in different forms of academic writing. Both of these programs can be used by students through 10th grade. Writing goals for 11th and 12th grade might include longer essays, research papers, and persuasive writing.
Literature
When we talk about literature in the context of ELA instruction, we don’t mean just reading books. Obviously reading books for pleasure is a wonderful hobby and a desirable outcome of education, but recreational reading is not the same as studying literature. Neither is reading and offering one’s opinion on a book, as one might in a book club discussion. For our purposes, studying literature means reading + analysis + writing. Not everything a student reads needs to be studied in this way, and the texts they do study should be ones that help build the background knowledge that is so crucial to reading comprehension. Exploring the World through Story was written to introduce students to world literature, beginning with simple folktales and progressing to classic epics, novels, and plays from around the globe. Novel studies make a great addition to your literature program, as does the study of poetry.
In high school, consider two years of world literature (which could be EWS), one year of national literature (e.g., American literature), and finally, AP Language and Composition. This progression meshes well with the high school social studies courses suggested here.
Download the K-8 ELA curriculum recommendations as a PDF.
There are many excellent ELA programs out there; these are just the ones I’ve found (or written!) that check the boxes for quality, affordability, and ease of use. Want to discuss your favorites? Join me on the Kitchen Table Homeschool Discord server!
Copyright 2025 by Drew Campbell, Ph.D. All rights reserved.
Drew Campbell, Ph.D., has worked in education since the 1980s and holds degrees in German literature and language from Bennington College and Washington University in St. Louis. Dr. Campbell is the author of Living Memory, I Speak Latin, and Exploring the World through Story, and co-author of How to Homeschool the Kids You Have. A former homeschooling parent, classroom teacher, and school administrator, she now works as an independent curriculum developer at Stone Soup Press.