What is Well Ordered Language?
Well-Ordered Language (WOL) is our grammar curriculum, designed to help students understand not only what the parts of language are, but also how words work together to communicate ideas clearly and beautifully. Rather than studying grammar as a list of isolated rules, students learn to examine the relationships among words, phrases, clauses, and sentences.
Lessons combine reading, speaking, listening, writing, discussion, songs and chants, sentence analysis, and diagramming. Students regularly practice identifying grammatical elements in a specific order, helping them develop a consistent process for analyzing increasingly complex sentences. Literature and poetry are also woven throughout the program so students can see grammar at work in well-written language.
During fifth grade, students work through Well-Ordered Language Levels 3A and 3B, building upon their previous understanding of the parts of speech and sentence structure.
In Level 3A, students study and practice:
The four kinds of sentences
Subjects, predicates, adjectives, and adverbs
Predicate verbs, predicate nominatives, and predicate adjectives
Prepositional phrases
Personal and interrogative pronouns
Sensory linking verbs
Direct and indirect objects
Relative (adjectival) clauses
Sentence diagramming
In Level 3B, students expand their understanding to include:
Adverbs and other adverbial elements
Adverbial prepositional and noun phrases
Adverbial clauses
Reflexive pronouns
Verbals: participles, gerunds, and infinitives
Simple, compound, complex, and compound-complex sentences
More advanced sentence analysis and diagramming
Throughout the year, our goal is larger than simply identifying grammatical terms. Students are learning to think carefully about how language is constructed and to use that knowledge to become clearer, more precise, and more thoughtful writers and speakers.