MCT Island questions

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Can you use the MCT Island alongside R&S grammar? My ds is 9yo, ending 3rd grade. We'd start with the MCT as soon as it arrives... and he's currently doing lessons with R&S 4. In looking at the online samples of MCT Island complete package, I am thinking we could go ahead and work with MCT and R&S?

 

It's hard to tell from the samples... but I am too impatient to wait the week+ for the package to arrive! :)

[Spock]

Can you use the MCT Island alongside R&S grammar? My ds is 9yo, ending 3rd grade. We'd start with the MCT as soon as it arrives... and he's currently doing lessons with R&S 4. In looking at the online samples of MCT Island complete package, I am thinking we could go ahead and work with MCT and R&S?

 

It's hard to tell from the samples... but I am too impatient to wait the week+ for the package to arrive! :)

 

You probably could, but I'm not sure it would work well, for 2 reasons. First, the people who love MCT tend to dislike the R&S teaching style, and vice versa. Second, there are some differences in terminology between the two series. For example, R&S refers to "predicate nouns" and "predicate adjectives". MCT lumps both of those together as "subject complements", and explains that a subject complement can be either a noun/pronoun or an adjective.

 

Also, R&S starts with parts of the sentence, and then slowly adds one part of speech per chapter for the rest of the year, wrapping up the year with capitalization/punctuation/dictionaries/poetry (though some of these topics are touched on earlier in some books). MCT starts with parts of speech and then moves on to how those work together to make the parts of a sentence. MCT also covers phrases and clauses fairly in depth in Island, while R&S only lightly touches on prepositional phrases in 4th grade, and doesn't introduce clauses until either 5th or 6th grade.

 

I used R&S with my older two (but not every year), and am using MCT with my younger two. I had originally planned to add in R&S lessons on topics MCT covers lightly (punctuation, capitalization, and in the Island level, writing). I still think this could work, but my children have all always disliked R&S's presentation, and after the breath of fresh air with MCT they couldn't go back to the comparatively condescending attitude of R&S. However, this is a matter of personality, and your children may react differently.

 

For my children, I have ended up covering capitalization and punctuation through dictation and writing. I also cover dictionary skills through requiring them to look up words on a semi-regular basis. This works better for them than trying to combine a program they really like with one they have always strongly disliked (but put up with). However, this may be partly because I also prefer MCT and have never quite liked R&S, even though it was the best of what I found before MCT.