OK I was coming to post MCT's sentence but nothing beats "Mom, dad and I are having a baby." Well I might as well put it. I'm sure MCt wouldn't mind. Robert Frost wrote that the woods were "lovely, dark and deep." The editors inserted the comma before and. Later, they took it back out in a new edition. Reason: Frost did not mean that the woods were three things. He meant that dark depth was lovely. If you do not use the comma when it really is a list, you lose the chance to make that distinction. http://rfwpsupport.com/showthread.php?177-Oxford-drops-the-serial-comma.....-what-say-you-MCT

I don't think they cover the same material although I must admit to having never seen R&S. MCT doesn't cover writing letters, I also don't think it covers word choice (there vs their, affect vs effect, bring vs take). He might cover those in the higher levels but I don't recall any of that in Island, Town, Voyage. I try to keep in mind MCT's purpose. From what I gather, he has very limited time to teach kids the fundamentals of grammar since PS are moving to eliminating formal grammar instruction. He is teaching core grammar topics needed to be successful in college. hence, he's not covering letter writing, creative writing. His focus is grammar instruction and expository writing.

Does any outbreak, whether bacterial or viral, kill or sicken all that come in contact? No. There are prostitutes who are seemingly immune to HIV. Why? There is something about their immune response which clears the virus. Given those undisputed facts, it's understandable that no vaccine is 100% effective. Having a vaccine be even only 80% effective is great. For those who do not make a proper response to the vaccine, herd immunity takes care of them assuming enough people are vaccinated. Then there are those who can't be vaccinated....some elderly, those w/ compromised immune systems, etc. Those people depend on herd immunity for protection. It's pretty easy to determine who the affected individuals are...and it's not to place blame but it's part of the epidemiology. There was an outbreak of something in San Diego. It was determined that an un-vax child went abroad, contracted the disease, spread it to others on the airplane, then infected those at his pre-school who were mostly non-vax, and then they spread it to grocery store personnel and on it goes. IF the outbreaks are in previously vaccinated individuals, an entirely different response would need to occur ie testing for differences in sero-types, bad batch of vaccine, etc. Similarly, some medications work in some people and not others. Many medications are tested only on men and have been found to not work as well in women or in African-Americans. Often those populations are a very small percentage of the test group or none at all. When I was in graduate school, I along w/ 3 others received the HepB vax. We were tested a few months later for a response. I was the only one that sero-converted w/ 1 series of shots. The other 3 people had not and were therefore not protected. They had to go through another series of shots and then luckily, had a positive immune response. It's just differences in immune systems.

Bells went off in my head when I read the bold above......

OH my word! I LOVE LOVE LOVE IT!!!!!!!!!!!!! DH has been leaving a fake, but very realistic snake about the house. NO matter how many times I jump, I still do it. Even if I saw that darn snake just 15min before, I still jump!

Halcyon - I'm trying to send you a PM but your mailbox is full. :001_smile:

Yes, it's clearer, thanks! Just wanted to make sure I wasn't mis-reading you. I think the first K12 Human Odyssey book is 7th grade. Looks like there are two courses. Intermediate WOrld History A which covers Prehistory through MIddle AGes vol1 and Intermediate World History B which covers 1400-1917. They are listed as 7th and 8th grades. I don't see where the K12 HUman Odyssey Vol3 is used but presumably it would be after 8th grade.

I'm unclear what you mean by the above statement. There are three K12 Human Odyssey books. I don't even think the K12 course covers all of the first book the first year. There are teacher/student guides for the first 2 books but not for the third.

I say, if what you have planned has worked well, your kids are learning and retaining and are happy, then don't break it. If you can go to a friend's house who has several levels of MCT and you just fall in love and your kids think it's the next best thing to sliced bread.....only then would I switch. Capt Uhura

Mom4Peace - Thank you for your very informative blog!!! I love your high school biology and will be using it with my son at some point. We will be doing ACS Middle School chemistry this year and I'm looking forward to it! Capt Uhura

:iagree::iagree: As I read through WWS sample, I was thinking the same thing. It would definitely be easy to use WWS methodology across the curriculum. IN fact, I had already done something similar and it worked very well. I took notes in outline form when we watched a documentary and then had DS choose a portion of it to write his narration. SWB filled in all the details for me on how to do that effectively. :001_smile: She rocks!

In the Fall Peace Hill Press catalogue which we got at the Valley Forge RFWP conference, it is stated that a level would be out each year. So I'm assuming the WWS grade 6 would be out Fall of 2012. It says WWS grade 7 2013 and WWS grade 8 2014.

Faith ..... it's a sad day for me reading that you feel this way. :sad:

OH MY GOODNESS YES! That's it!!! Thank you!

Do you have a link to that curriculum? I used to have a link to one. I think there were three of them. One was running a book store. The other a toy store. And I can't recall the third. Darn I can't remember.

:iagree::iagree::iagree:

Yes, I will definitely bug Dr. K. to do this again. I also envision something a little different. Perhaps more workshops? Something along the lines of what I think SWB is thinking. More give and take. Most of us will have heard her lectures at conferences or on MP3s. What about putting up text on the screen for all of us to outline and then rewrite from the outline and then have a discussion of what we came up with? THen we can ask those questions we've been asking here, "What do you do when DC simply puts the outline into paragraph form?" "Should we or how to get DC to expand their text from the outline?"

More impressive than his actually being brave enough to raise his hand - what a great comment! Her kids were truly delightful!!!! I wish my boys could have seen MCT in action. They would have loved, loved, loved his Poetry seminar.

I did Island level w/ my 1st grader DS who was reading about 4th grade level at the time. He was fine with it. His strength is LA and grammar is candy to him. :D He then did Town level as a 2nd grader BUT he did not do the writing in Town level. He did PWME instead along with some Pattern Based Writing. Next year he'll do WWE4 and writing in history and science and literature. THen for his 4th grade year, he'll down Paragraph Town. For grammar during this "MCT gap" year, he'll do either FLL4 or Advanced Language Lessons.....not sure which. I think after two years of grammar w/ MCT, he's ready for ALL.

Enviromommy - OH MY!!!! I'm so glad you and your kids are ok!

On the way to the conference, Dr. K and his wife were side-swiped by an 18-wheeler. It totaled the rental vehicle. The truck didn't stop so they had to chase him down. He finally stopped. Then they had to wait for the cops, and then it took 2hrs for the rental company to come w/ another vehicle. There was glass everywhere, in their hair, stuck on their skin. They had to leave HALF of what they had for the conference (schedules, credit card machine, books) in the van since the rental company only had an SUV. So instead of registration at 4-5pm, it was from 9-10pm. But everyone was very understanding and very relaxed about it all and were mostly worried about Dr. K. and his wife. Yes "bomb diggity!"

Luckymama, Thank you so much for arranging the dinner for everyone at the RFWP Valley Forge convention. It definitely helped to take the stress off the evening after we learned of Dr. K.'s auto accident. ALso, thank you for picking folks up and bringing them to the airport. It was so wonderful to meet you and I wish I lived closer to my WTM peeps! I feel like we were instant friends! Again, thank you for helping make the conference a success! Capt Uhura

Laurel will be ecstatic! I love mosquito larvae. They are very interesting to watch. Also compare them to butterflies, ladybugs, and praying mantis.

:iagree: with Crimsonwife. I found that my son wasn't ready to go fully into Town level writing (he had no issues w/ grammar, poetry, vocabulary) so we worked on paragraphs with other programs. He has also done WWE1-4 (well, he's finishing up WWE4 now) and the WWS beta test. I definitely see these as complimentary. HOwever, I will add, it definitely depends on your ability as a teacher to teach/facilitate writing. I found I need more incremental/detailed instruction that what MCT provided in Town level. Also, there is a big gap in maturity/writing expectations from Town level to Voyage level. I know several here needed a gap year between the two. In addition to MCT, we do outlining, rewriting from outlines, and written narrations in history and science.

You certainly won the distance award and I'm so happy you came!!! It was fun shopping with you! Who would have thought we'd be shopping together? :lol: