This review covers The Good and the Beautiful’s (TGTB) Language Arts Level 3 course. I review courses for younger students separately because they share similar features and focus heavily on phonics and reading. The third-grade course continues to focus on phonics and reading, but it also expands into other subjects. You might also want to read my review of Levels 4 and 5.
Level 3 teaches reading skills, spelling, writing, grammar, punctuation, usage, literature, vocabulary, geography, art skills, and art appreciation. For more effective learning, coursework in all these areas is often integrated around lesson themes. Lessons are laid out in the order in which each activity is to be completed, making it easy for parents and students to know what to do. This is especially important because of the integration of activities from so many subject areas.
Course Components
The course is available free as downloadable PDF files, but you can also purchase printed books. Sets of the printed books do not include the answer key since is available free online, but you can purchase a printed answer key separately. If you download the PDFs for the course, you need to print out only the pages on which children need to write.
For Level 3, the course set consists of the Level 3 Course Book, Level 3 Spelling Practice Book, and a set of four phonics read-together books. You also need two Good and Beautiful apps (both free)—one for letter tiles and the other to access videos and audio narrations. The videos are optional and repeat instruction already included in the lessons, but the audio narrations are essential.
The course books and readers are full color and include lovely artwork, photos, and other illustrations. Students write directly in the course books and the spelling book.
How The Course Works
The 412-page course book for Level 3 presents one lesson per day for four days each week. It is parent-directed, with instructions for the parent in a blue font and text to read to the child in a black font.
Instructional material in the course books covers grammar, usage, punctuation, vocabulary, geography, and art, and it is accompanied by exercises, sentence diagramming, map work, art images, art-activity instructions, space for writing summaries of stories from the readers, and occasional recipes. The course books also let students know when they are to complete reading assignments in the readers and lessons in their Spelling Practice Book.
Level 3 lessons might take an hour or more per day (four days per week), with parental involvement much of the time. That’s a surprisingly brief time to cover so many subject areas.
Subject Area Coverage
In many language arts programs, the instruction on grammar, usage, and punctuation has the potential to become redundant. To avoid needless grammar practice, Level 3 has section reviews covering many lessons. If students struggle with a concept while completing the review, parents can assign additional practice exercises included within the review exercises—but only if a student needs additional practice. This is a brilliant idea! Many other activities are included for teaching grammar, usage, and punctuation, including sentence diagrams.
The Spelling Practice Book is an unusual size—11” wide by 4.25" tall. It presents lessons and activities with two pages per lesson. Spelling lessons are incorporated into the lesson plans about every other day.
The spelling lessons include specific spelling words and a list of additional words near the beginning of the course books for parents to use as needed. Students work with rules, spelling patterns, base words, suffixes, prefixes, contractions, and challenging words. The lessons include a few traditional exercises, but most activities are unique and are designed to suit various learning styles. There are no traditional spelling tests. This entire approach to spelling is very innovative.
Composition instruction is well developed using many different strategies as children learn to write sentences, paragraphs, short narratives, and poetry. TGTB recommends adding both handwriting and typing courses.
The integration of subject areas around themes occurs in several ways. For instance, the lesson on pages 86 and 87 use a painting of a Native American woman and baby by the artist Grace Carpenter Hudson. The lesson teaches about concrete and abstract nouns, then has students write down those they can think of based on the painting.
In Level 3, parents and children read through the four readers together with sections clearly marked for either the parent/teacher or the student to read. The student’s part is briefer, and the lines are spaced further apart. A practice page before each chapter in the readers has phonics review, vocabulary words with definitions and sample sentences, and challenging words that cannot be sounded out phonetically. Some practice pages explain the meanings of idioms that will appear in the chapter. All readers include many stories about people of various racial and ethnic backgrounds, and many are set in different time periods or cultures. Reading comprehension and skill activities related to the readers are in the course books. Both reading and vocabulary skills are developed through many other activities in these courses.
For art, children learn about well-known artists, study artworks, and complete some art activities. The artworks included in Level 3 have online audio narrations for students to listen to.
Geography instruction teaches basic concepts such as cardinal directions, map reading, and types of maps. The courses also focus on particular countries or geographic features such as Belgium, Brazil, the Amazon River, Mt. Everest, the Bahamas, the Mediterranean, and Washington D.C.
Summary
The streamlined layout of this course makes it easy to use, and the integration of subjects and innovative approaches offer promising alternatives that should work for many types of learners.
