If you are looking for a quick way to reinforce grammar skills each day, and like the idea of mixing in character development in the process, then you have come to the right place. Daily Oral Language with Character is an elementary language arts curriculum for 1st – 5th grade that includes sentence editing and thoughtful character activities that can be completed in about 15 minutes a day. The student books are spiral bound, so they fold back to make writing easier.

Each grade has one workbook and one teacher’s guide with 180 lessons, one for every day of the school year. The books are divided into 9 chapters, each focusing on one of the following character traits: honesty, honor, respect, accountability, excellence, self-control, fairness, caring, and civility. Each lesson has a sentence with grammatical and punctuation errors in it, and space for the student to write it correctly underneath it. After the student corrects this, there are questions or writing prompts that relate to the character quality they are studying. These are age appropriate questions or activities that the children can complete on their own. The teacher’s guide gives suggested responses on these, but there are generally no right or wrong answer.

Each day, the students are to do one page of the book. This is not a stand-alone Grammar program, but a good supplement to your existing program. There are no lessons with teaching instruction in them, but the teacher’s guide does give correct answers and quick explanations if needed. This curriculum is not specifically written for homeschoolers, but it definitely can work for them too. Most of the questions ask for your own opinion, but I found a few that asked you to ask your classmates questions, or the questions related specifically to school. I had my children think of their co-op time, or even Sunday School time for those questions, or even ask a sibling. Overall, it doesn’t have an anti-homeschool feel about it, but you can tell it was not written specifically for homeschool families. It is also not a Christian publication, but the character traits are excellent for everyone to learn and practice.

My kids liked that they could do this book on their own, and I liked that too. Since they could do it independently, it was great for times when I was helping another sibling. They rarely did just one page at a time, often doing several lessons in one sitting.  The teacher’s guide lists the rules at the bottom of the page, as well as the correct sentences at the top, and suggested answers for the other questions. Honestly, I rarely used the teacher’s guide, but my children are in 2nd and 4th grade. I’m sure in the upper grades, they would come in very handy! One of the things we used a lot from the teacher’s guide however, is the page of “proofreader’s marks.” It would be great if they added this into the student books also. I made a copy of it for the kids to use each day. They would use these on their sentences they were correcting, bring it to me to check, and then write it the correct way. This kept them from writing it the wrong way and having to rewrite it later.

Daily Oral Language with Character is a nice addition to your Language Arts studies. The student books are very reasonable, at just under $10. If you chose to forgo the teacher’s guide, this would be a very inexpensive way to add in some Language review and character training also.

We classically educate our children at home, so this isn’t a book I would have sought out to purchase, but my kids have enjoyed it. They like that it doesn’t take much time to complete, and only the sentence correction question is “graded” on each page. I like that they are reviewing proper Grammar and sentence structure, and basic character traits for a few minutes each day.

Product Review by Leslie Everett, The Old Schoolhouse® Magazine, LLC, January, 2013