MCT and Voyages in English... redundant?

[Mother-Duck]

I am planning for grade 2 with my 7 year old. We completed FLL and WWE in Gr. 1. I recently came across the MCT curriculum and quite like it. 

 

Q1. Wondering whether to teach it this year or wait till we've covered FLL 2?

 

Q2. Does MCT cover all our grammar needs? Or should I still do Voyages in English come Gr. 3?

 

Thanks in advance for your feedback. 

 

[BatmansWife]

Hmmm...well, I'm no expert in any of these programs...but I wonder if 2nd is too soon for MCT. I'll be starting Island with my 4th grader soon. I really wouldn't think you'd need to do both MCT and VIE. I hope others can share what they think.

[Aurelia]

If you plan to go farther than just the Island level, I'd wait until 3rd grade to do MCT. The writing requirements ramp up a lot from year to year, and it is difficult for most 4th graders to write full five-paragraph essays. As an alternative, you could do the Island level in 2nd, VIE or another program in 3rd, then Town in 4th. Both MCT and VIE would be too much, IMO, particularly for a second grader.

 

MCT assumes knowledge of basic mechanics, but starts at the beginning of grammar, so it's not necessary to do another grammar program first, especially if you have an accelerated or gifted student.

[Forgiven]

I've used both Voyages in English and MCT, but not together. My DD did ViE in 3rd grade. She hated it--thought it was too boring. I loved it. I still love it. I had purchased ViE for my DD for 4th grade, but she didn't want to do it and I had to switch her vocab anyway because she had aced her vocabulary pre-test, and I was looking at Caesar's English to do instead. Looking at Caesar's English led me to look at MCT's Grammar curriculum, and I ended up buying the Island level for my DD, who was in 4th grade.

 

My DS, who was in 2nd grade was doing LLATL and liked it. He smiled every day when I would pull it out. He had so much fun with it, and I loved that part of our day because he enjoyed it too. When MCT Island arrived at our house, he was in the room as I was showing it to my DD. Well, DS liked MCT Island too. He begged to use it as well. Knowing it was written for 3rd grade, I told him that he could try it out, but if I didn't feel that he was ready for it, then we'd switch back to LLATL.

 

My DS loved MCT Island and excelled at it. In all honesty, he did better with it than my DD, who is two years older than him. He never complained about having to do it. He smiled, and enjoyed every part--especially the poetry book.

 

I planned on using Voyages in English with my DS this year (3rd grade) because I didn't want him to do the Town level too early as I've heard it's a challenge, even for 4th graders. So I planned on him doing ViE, but my DD started the Town level -- she finished Island before him -- and he saw the books and wants to do Town as well. Again, I'm going to let him, but if I find that he's struggling, I have ViE on the shelf and ready to go.

 

All that to say that I don't think 2nd grade is too young for MCT Island, but not all 2nd graders are going to be ready for it either. Also, we only did some of the writing with it, but I use another writing program, so that's not a big deal. I do like the idea of doing MCT Island in 2nd, then doing ViE for 3rd, and then switching back to MCT to do the Town level for 4th. That's what I wanted to do, and we may end up doing...we'll see.

 

As for doing them both, together, well, I wouldn't. That would be a lot of work. There is one chapter in ViE that would be useful to do with MCT. It's the diagramming chapter. You could probably find a much cheaper book to use for diagramming though (if you want your child to learn to diagram that way -- MCT teaches 4-level analysis, which I think is great too, and much clearer to my DD who learned diagramming and the 4-level analysis) than to purchase ViE just for that one component.

 

Best of luck on your decision.