Lost Tools Of Writing Level 1 Student Workbook

Using the Lost Tools of Writing Level 1 Student Workbook Without Losing Your Mind

The workbook is a collection of exercises designed to walk a student through the first stage of the classical Trivium: Grammar. It covers parts of speech, sentence diagramming, and basic punctuation. The exercises are presented as copying work and fill-in-the-blank drills. That's it. There's no elaborate explanation of why something works the way it does, and that's by design. I had a student who got stuck on the interjection section for three days straight. He kept insisting that every word ending in "-ly" was an adverb. The workbook doesn't really address this head-on because it assumes the parent will catch these patterns when reviewing the error analysis sections at the end of each lesson. My workaround was simple: I pulled out a dictionary and we looked up "quickly" together, traced it back to its root adjective, and I told him to trust the dictionary over his pattern-matching instinct. It worked.

Lost Tools Of Writing Level 1 Student Workbook

The workbook itself is free and available from the author's website. You can download the PDF directly. There are three sections: vocabulary building, sentence diagrams, and a writing section that asks the student to produce original sentences using the structures they've just practiced. The vocabulary section is where most students either breeze through or hit a wall, depending on their reading level. My advice is to not rush it. If a student can't spell "conjunction" correctly, they're going to struggle with the diagramming exercises later. The first three lessons alone can take a week for a student who isn't comfortable with the terminology. Here's something the curriculum doesn't make clear: the diagramming exercises are not meant to be done in order without skipping around. Lesson 4 builds on a concept from Lesson 2 that the student may have already forgotten. I keep a sticky note on the page I'm currently on and flag any lesson where the student seems unsure of an earlier concept. That way I'm not restarting from scratch, I'm just doing a five-minute review of the specific topic. This cuts the total time spent on the workbook from about six weeks down to closer to four, depending on the student's pace. The sentence diagramming section is the part most people complain about. It's dry. It's repetitive. It works. I had one student who initially couldn't see the point of diagramming a simple subject-verb sentence. She kept asking why she needed to draw a line for every prepositional phrase. I let her skip ahead to a longer sentence from the writing section and showed her how diagramming it helped her identify which words were actually modifiers versus structural elements. After that, she understood it was a parsing tool, not just a pattern to memorize.

There are known issues with the PDF formatting on certain printers. Some users report that the diagram lines shift or overlap when printed from a Mac. If you run into this, use the browser print function rather than opening the PDF in Preview or Adobe. It usually comes out clean. The author is aware of the issue but hasn't updated the file in a while. The writing portion of each lesson asks students to produce sentences using specific grammatical structures. This is where the workbook can feel too open-ended for some students and too restrictive for others. A student with a strong vocabulary might finish a page in ten minutes and then sit there waiting for something else to do. A student who struggles with sentence construction might spend forty minutes on one exercise and still produce something awkward. I recommend having a short list of backup prompts ready: ask them to diagram a sentence from a book they're reading, or convert a paragraph into individual sentence diagrams. It keeps the pace moving without adding new material from outside the curriculum. One counter-intuitive thing I've noticed: students who diagram perfectly on the worksheets often write worse sentences. The workbook teaches identification before production, and that's correct in theory, but the gap between knowing what a predicate nominative is and using one naturally in writing is wider than the exercises account for. I pair the workbook with a separate composition notebook where the student writes freely every other day. The workbook gives them the tools; the composition notebook is where they actually build something with them. Without that second practice, the diagrams stay abstract and don't transfer to actual writing.

The workbook also doesn't cover apostrophe usage in depth. There's a brief section on possessive nouns, but contractions get almost no attention. If your student confuses "its" and "it's" regularly, you'll need supplemental material. I use a simple cheat sheet I made that shows common contraction pairs alongside their possessive forms. It takes about five minutes to explain and addresses the most common mistake I see at this level. If you're using this with multiple students at different levels, the workbook is structured so that each lesson is self-contained. You can run two students through the same lesson at different paces without confusion. The answer key is included in the back of the PDF. It's accurate, though I did catch one typo where the answer for a diagramming exercise in Lesson 8 lists "the quick brown fox" as the subject when the actual subject in that sentence is just "fox." It's a minor error but it confused a student who was double-checking her work against the key. The workbook works best when paired with the parent guide, which provides brief explanations for each concept. Without the parent guide, you're essentially teaching grammar by osmosis, which is fine if you already understand the material yourself. If you're learning it alongside your student, the guide is necessary. It's also available as a free PDF download from the same source.

The biggest limitation of this curriculum is that it moves very slowly on the early lessons and then speeds up without much transition. Lessons 1 through 5 can take two weeks. Lessons 10 through 15 can be done in a week if the student has a solid foundation. There's no pacing guide built into the workbook, so you have to gauge your student's readiness yourself. I recommend setting a hard limit of one lesson per day, no exceptions. Even if the student finishes in fifteen minutes, make them do the next one the following day. The repetition is the point. If the workbook isn't working for your student, the most common alternative I see people use is the Sentence Diagramming course by the same author, which goes deeper into syntax. It's a paid course, but it covers the same ground with more explanation. Another option is to skip the workbook entirely and use a traditional grammar textbook like Warriner's English Grammar and Composition. That has more comprehensive coverage of punctuation and parts of speech, though it lacks the diagramming focus that makes the Lost Tools workbook distinctive.