Logic of English Foundations A Review

We are wrapping up our first year of homeschooling and as we near the end I want to share some thoughts and review on the curriculum we used this year.  First up: my Logic of English Foundations A review.  Check out what we thought about our language arts curriculum!  Spoiler alert: We loved, loved, LOVED it!

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*scroll on to the bottom of this post for the video version of my review*

How I picked Logic of English

I’m a former high school math teacher – language arts is not my wheelhouse so I was a little intimidated/overwhelmed when it came time to pick a language arts curriculum.  I read/looked at/watched lots of recommendations from other homeschool moms and Logic of English was one of the curriculum options that I saw recommended over and over again.

Being that I have a math-type brain the word “logic” in the title grabbed my attention right away.  As I did some more researching I really fell in love with what I found!

Some of the things that attracted me to LOE were:

• it teaches the mechanics of how and why words are formed
• there is more of an emphasis on phonics and sounding out words rather than memorizing lots of sight words
• it’s a comprehensive curriculum that includes handwriting, phonograms, reading, reading comprehension, etc
• it’s game based and includes lots of things like scavenger hunts, hop scotch, card games, board games, etc. (perfect for an active 5 year old!); the games are what provide the repetition of the phonogram sounds so that those are learned super well

doing a phonogram scavenger hunt

What’s included?

The complete Logic of English Foundations A set comes with

• a teacher guide book
• a student workbook
• Doodling Dragons (a picture book about the phonogram sounds)
• phonogram flash cards
• tactile handwriting cards
• a lined white board
• phonogram game cards
• phonogram game tiles
• and several quick reference sheets

See all of the Foundations A set here

Here’s the unboxing video I did when I got our Foundations A set if you want to see what it all looks like

There is also an app.  It costs $2.99 and is well worth it.  You can tap on any of the phonograms to hear all of their sounds which, to be honest, I’ve needed to use quite a bit when introducing a new phonogram because I didn’t know what the sounds were either!  I likely won’t need it when I do Foundations A again with my second child but for our first time around since I was learning the phonogram sounds too it was very helpful.  There’s also a little review game on the app that your child can play but we’ve mainly just used it to hear each of the sounds.

What is taught in Foundations A?

The bulk of Foundations A consists of learning each of the phonogram sounds for all the letters of the alphabet and writing all letters in lowercase in either manuscript or cursive (you choose which one you want to do).

practicing strokes and cursive letters in salt

The beginning of Foundations A has the kids doing simple strokes and learning to segment words, by the end they are reading some simple readers and spelling out small words.  It was amazing to watch that progression!

Cursive or Manuscript?

When I first started looking at LOE I thought I’d go with the manuscript option.  I had just finished using Handwriting without Tears to teach Hudson how to print his uppercase letters and thought it made sense to stick with printing.  I didn’t learn cursive until 3rd grade and so it seemed strange to me to start a kindergartener with cursive.

However, as I was doing some reading I found two things 1) the manuscript that LOE teaches is different from the print he’d learned with Handwriting without Tears so we’d be learning something new anyway and 2) lots of people say that young kids actually do better with cursive because it flows together and they aren’t as likely to reverse letters.

I decided to go with cursive and he has done fantastic with it!  My plan was to try cursive and if he struggled we’d just skip that part of the curriculum, continue to practice printing, and come back to cursive later.  Many people do that if their child is ready to learn to read but not as ready to learn to write.  However, Hudson took to it like a duck in water and we were able to do the cursive handwriting portion right on pace with the rest of the curriculum.

And his cursive is great!  I am so very impressed with his writing!

How long did it take?

Foundations A is appropriate for kindergarten if your child is not reading yet and doesn’t know each of the phonogram sounds for every letter.  Some people skip their kids straight to Foundations B but when we began Hudson was not reading at all and only knew his letter names, not their phonogram sounds, so we started with A and I felt like it was perfect for him!

Foundations A is 40 lessons long so if you do one lesson a day it’ll take you 40 school days, if you split them up then it’ll take longer.  It took us about half of the year (we completed it right after Christmas).  We could have easily gone faster – Hudson picked up on it quickly and absolutely loved doing his LOE work but I tried to keep our lessons short each day which stretched it out some.

After Christmas we started Foundations B, which is also 40 lessons long.  This post is not a review of Foundations B since we’re not quite done yet but just in case you were wondering 1) we absolutely love it too! and 2) some of the concepts covered in B include multi-level phonograms like sh, th, igh, er, etc., teaches about silent E, has the students reading small books, works on reading comprehension, and teaches how to write all of the letters in uppercase (again, in cursive or manuscript, whichever one you picked).

So for us, Levels A and B were very doable to finish in a year of kindergarten.

My thoughts

We love love love Logic of English!  I have been SO happy with this curriculum!  I recommend it to everyone and there are no cons that I can find, only pros!

Hudson has so much fun with it.  He gets so excited about doing his lesson each day.  He enjoys playing the games (often he will ask to play them over and over again – no complaints from me!) and he has done great with learning his cursive letters.

This is an open and go curriculum, which I really like.  It requires very little prep work on my part.  The first few weeks when I was trying to get my homeschooling bearings I would sit down and read through that week’s upcoming lessons to prepare but once I got familiar with the curriculum and routine I didn’t have to do that anymore.

The curriculum is scripted out for you and is very easy to understand so you don’t have to be a language arts whiz to teach it (I certainly am not!)

Logic of English has a few parts/pieces to keep up with – more than if you just had a curriculum that only consisted of one workbook – but it’s not tons.  Here’s a video I made showing how I organize our LOE materials.

Example lesson

Here are some pictures from the book if you’d like to see an example lesson.  I also did a flip through of a lesson in the video linked below.

Video review

If you’re more a watcher/listener than a reader, here’s a video review I made on my YouTube channel

And finally, if you’d like to dive a little deeper into the Logic of English methodology before purchasing this curriculum, this video by the founder of LOE was really fascinating to me!  She’s not so much talking about the curriculum but just the actual logic behind English (which is what the curriculum is based upon).  Very interesting!

Final thoughts

I HIGHLY recommend LOE.  I have multiple homeschooling mom friends who use it and love it, and I even have some public school mom friends who use it as a supplement for their child outside of school.

Check it out here!

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Other posts you might like:

• Our full homeschool kindergarten curriculum line up
• RightStart Math Level A review
• What we used for our casual homeschool preschool
• 10 reasons why we decided to homeschool