How are you using Caesar's English? And other questions...

[HappyGrace]

I have CE 1, and we're on Lesson 2, basically just reading through it. It is just okay. The parts with the prefixes is pretty boring, even to me. The word discussions are a little better-we like the lit examples. I'm just not sure that it'll keep our interest if it's just reading what the words mean, etc. How much do you do per day? A lesson per day seems a bit much; maybe that's the problem. I do want to finish by the end of June though. Unless we can figure out how to make it a little more engaging I'm not sure we will stick with this portion of MCT, and it's the one I thought we'd like best!

 

We are almost halfway through Grammar Town, and that's going well-she thinks the stories are funny, is grasping the grammar, etc. I'm about to start the poems and I think that will be a hit.

 

Am I right that we don't start Paragraph Town til after you totally finish G.Town? Because it looks like you have to know how to parse the sentences on all four levels before you can do the activities in the back of P.Town, right?

[buddhabelly]

Hello,

 

You don't say how old your CE student(s) is/are. I think that makes a difference in terms of how much you do per day. I would suggest one lesson every other day, perhaps doing Grammar Town on alternate days. Is that how you are doing it now? Grammar Town goes very quickly, and then you can substitute Practice Town after that.

 

But if the student is eight years old, I would agree that a whole lesson of CE might be a lot. But for a 10 or 11-year-old, it's fine. We take turns reading it aloud, since much of CE is examples from fine literature. Don't forget to notice that there are components of CE in the Teacher Book that are not in the student book. Took us a while to discover that!

 

We didn't plan out how to do "Town," but this is how it ended up. Grammar Town for a week, then began Caesar's English (interspersed with Grammar Town sometimes), then around Lesson 14 of CE we began Paragraph Town and so we left CE for about three weeks. Now we are done with Paragraph Town (including the extra lessons at the end) and are back to CE. After one more week of CE (one lesson per day but only four days per week), we will begin Building Poems. Can't wait to get to the poetry book -- I think/hope that we're saving the best for last! Oh, wait. I forgot Practice Town. We have done some of it, but not nearly all. I guess we will get back to that after the poetry unit.

 

I had every intention of going back to Homer, but it was really excruciating.

 

Julie

[Vida Winter]

I make flash cards (online - I enter them in quizlet)and go over a portion of the lesson orally each day for reinforcement. I do about 1 lesson per week, over 4 days (last day the quiz). There is a certain amount of time that it takes to absorb the information and besides, there are opportunities for Socratic discussion that we would miss if we went faster. Although it is entirely possible I would resist the temptation to do it any faster.

[Crimson Wife]

It's funny, we're loving CE and not so much GT. I'm doing a couple lessons per week of CE and supplementing it with the Red Hot Root Words workbook from Prufrock Press. We started the year with RHRW but while the exercises are solid, the content is pretty dry. CE covers many of the same roots but in a way we both find much more engaging.

 

One suggestion from RHRW that I really like is to introduce the roots by listing a bunch of words containing them and having the child deduce the root's meaning.

[HSDCY]

We did CE1 about 2 lessons every week, that'll also get you through at the end of June.

 

I remember the first couple of lessons being easy and not as interesting. But I think it's a great time to get used to the format of CE. Every lesson after that follows the same format which makes it predictable for kids, and they know what is coming. When we first started CE, I thought it was dry and worried that it would not keep ds's interest. But I was pleasantly surprised. He has asked twice when we are going to start CE2.

 

Reading it together is fine, but I think the most important part of CE is discussion. Be sure to discuss Caesar's rewrite, it will make your child think and retain what he learns. Don't forget to encourage your child to look for CE words in his regular reading too.

 

It's true that it's best if you finish GT first before you dive into PT, but if you are running out of time, you can overlap them a little. Maybe wait until you are almost done with phrases in GT book to start PT.

 

HTH.

[HappyGrace]

This is for a 10 yr old who is pretty advanced.

 

The flash cards are a good idea for retention, thanks! I only have the teacher's book, so I hope I'm making the most out of it. The rewrite sections and analogies seem to lend themselves best to discussion; I wish there was more of this interspersed throughout!

 

I am trying to use some of the words myself outside of our lesson time. It's just the reading through the prefixes, and the synonyms, and then the length of the lessons that is making it dry, I think!

 

Thanks for the info too on when to start P Town! (I keep thinking Provincetown when I write that, and then I want lobster with butter.....but I digress. :lol:)

[swimmermom3]

HappyGrace, we are doing CE II and I think the format is a bit different. We always make note cards (flash cards) for the word on the first day of the lesson after we have read through them together. I usually only take a page a day of new work and then we review the words. Vocabulary takes us no more than 10 minutes per day. However, I think the majority of the learning comes from incorporating the words into my ds's writing assignments and the fact that many of them show up in his literature studies. I was delighted to find that nine of my son's words showed up in a 15 page section of Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel.

[EKS]

We do one lesson per week with the cumulative quiz at the end of the week. We do about 1 page per day, sometimes more. What's fun is to keep finding the words sprinkled through the other books and we're also finding them everywhere else as well.

 

We took a month or two to do the grammar book and then switched to the writing book, practice book, and vocabulary book. We'll throw the poetry in there somewhere as well.

[HappyGrace]

It sounds like it is working best for people who are going a bit slower. I think I will try to do just two lessons per week, spread out over four days. That will still get me finished by mid-June (our end date), with even a few weeks of "padding" in case we miss some days. And we'll add in making some flash cards.

 

I've definitely decided to stick with it-she was telling dh some words from it tonight, and said she really likes it! I guess MCT does know what he's doing :)!

[StephanieZ]

Well, gosh, it's intended to last a school year, so doing it a lesson a day, that's be 4 weeks. . . seems a bit rushed!! Yoikes! I think a lesson every week is plenty fast. . . or do a lesson every 2 weeks if you have plenty of time. . .If one was in a big rush (why?!?!) with an older child, I could see feasibly doing 2 lessons a week, but that'd be pretty intense.

 

We're doing a lesson a week. We generally only do CE twice a week. One day, over about 30-45 min each time, we start a new lesson: The kids write the 5 words or roots with definitions in their vocab notebook. We start reading through the rest of the lesson. . . Stopping when we're tired or out of time. The second day, we finish reading the lesson. We also do a little drill/quiz using the Test Prep List at the end of the lesson. . . spending extra time on the words from the current list. (Basically, I just quiz them in turn, making sure we do the current words a couple/few times and all the words at least once. This take maybe 5 min.)

 

I'd estimate we're putting in about 90 minutes of "class time" on each lesson (this is with 10 & 13 yos). For me, that's plenty of dedicated vocab time per week.

 

I also have the CE lists on Quizlet (they're all there already if you want them), so when we get further along (we're on lesson 6 this week), if the kids have trouble retaining all the words, they can use Quizlet on the days we don't do CE together. So, far, the kids seem to retain the new words perfectly so I don't know that we'll need extra drill.

 

Anyhow, on the theoretical "3rd day" of the week, the kids take the weekly quiz. It so happens that we generally do the "1st day" of the new lesson following the quiz, so that's why I say I only do CE about twice a week. . . since Day 3 for lesson 5 would be on the same day as Day 1 for lesson 6.

 

HTH

[branycbur]

Just a quick question, do any or all of you recommend using the teacher's manual with this program?

[radiobrain]

Just a quick question, do any or all of you recommend using the teacher's manual with this program?

 

 

I will be speaking for 98% of all MCT users when I say....

 

TM only!

 

It has the whole student book, then teacher section in the back.

[Friederike in Persia]

 

We're doing a lesson a week. We generally only do CE twice a week. One day, over about 30-45 min each time, we start a new lesson: The kids write the 5 words or roots with definitions in their vocab notebook. We start reading through the rest of the lesson. . . Stopping when we're tired or out of time. The second day, we finish reading the lesson. We also do a little drill/quiz using the Test Prep List at the end of the lesson. . . spending extra time on the words from the current list. (Basically, I just quiz them in turn, making sure we do the current words a couple/few times and all the words at least once. This take maybe 5 min.)

 

I'd estimate we're putting in about 90 minutes of "class time" on each lesson (this is with 10 & 13 yos). For me, that's plenty of dedicated vocab time per week.

 

 

 

:iagree: My dd10 is doing 2 lessons a week, until she's in CE 2, cause she does Voyage othersise. She's a willing student, but I wouldn't want to go much faster, I don't think she'd retain it all.

Dd9 does Town and we do one lesson a week, which goes nicely with going through Grammar Town.

[branycbur]

I will be speaking for 98% of all MCT users when I say....

 

TM only!

 

It has the whole student book, then teacher section in the back.

 

 

I had no idea! I was going to go with the student edition only...thank you so much!

[Matryoshka]

Well, gosh, it's intended to last a school year, so doing it a lesson a day, that's be 4 weeks. . . seems a bit rushed!! Yoikes! I think a lesson every week is plenty fast. . . or do a lesson every 2 weeks if you have plenty of time. . .If one was in a big rush (why?!?!) with an older child, I could see feasibly doing 2 lessons a week, but that'd be pretty intense.

 

:iagree: With 20 lessons in the book, and it being intended to be done over a whole school year, the pace is obviously intended to be 1 lesson a week. We did do two lessons a week, with the inbetween days the quizzes, but I'm doing Town with 6th graders, so I was doubling the time to get to Voyage a bit sooner. But one lesson a day is definitely overkill! :)

[buddhabelly]

Wow, y'all must be using a different curriculum if a chapter of CE takes you a whole week? We do one hour of Language Arts a day, and if we are doing Caesar's English, we do one chapter. This is for an 11-year-old that just turned 11. They only introduce about four new words in each chapter; the rest is just review.

 

We usually end up doing it four times a week, which works out to 4 chapters/lessons per week.

 

Julie

[HappyGrace]

Update: dd is LOVING CE!!! She is so excited to see a word pop up in GT. She said she was so happy to have a program that is finally enough challenge for her to be fun (!!)

 

I do have her making the flash cards now. That helps especially with the prefixes. We're doing about a half a lesson a day and that seems to be about right. I see why people say to just trust the program. The first couple days I wasn't sure-thought it would be too dry, just sitting there discussing words. But she adores it!

 

I hope the poetry (will start this next wk) and PTown are as big a hit!

 

I do wish we were even a little further in CE somehow because I think some of the words that we haven't gotten to yet are showing up in GTown and I wish we already knew them so GTown would be reinforcing them!

[StephanieZ]

Wow, y'all must be using a different curriculum if a chapter of CE takes you a whole week? We do one hour of Language Arts a day, and if we are doing Caesar's English, we do one chapter. This is for an 11-year-old that just turned 11. They only introduce about four new words in each chapter; the rest is just review.

 

We usually end up doing it four times a week, which works out to 4 chapters/lessons per week.

 

Julie

 

LOL, we might just talk a lot more than you do. I am doing it with 2 dc, and we three tend to chat a lot. I like to explore the quotations, the analogies, all the related words. . . We do a lot of chatting.

 

We analyze each analogy and talk through it. . .

 

We actually look words up in the dictonary most days (You know, those sections where they list a whole bunch of synonymns and tell you to look up all those you don't know. . . and to compare the meanings of the various ones. . . Gosh, we could spend an hour on one word!!!!!!!!!!!!! Just comparing the nuances of countenance vs visage vs . . . )

 

I guess we are taking the chapter of CE as a starting off point and then exploring the language using the CE text as guide/inspiration.

 

I *could* cover a chapter in an hour, sure -- if we zipped right through and didn't look down any side trails . . .

 

In any event, I just wouldn't bother doing that more than once a week or so (say 60-90 min/wk max). Frankly, I think there are much more valuable ways to spend a lot of school time on than a formal vocab program. I'd rather spend 1 hr/wk on "vocab" and any extra hours available on more reading or writing.

 

I mean, surely, if one wanted to, you could do a lesson a day, in an hour or so. Zip right through. Test next day, and then teach next lesson. Sure, fine, whatever.

 

But. . . FOR GOD'S SAKE, WHY!?!?!?!

 

(Unless you have a child driven to be a linguist. . . and mesmerized by formal vocab study. . . in which case, more power to you and the child!)

 

For us, I just don't see the point. My kids already have vocabularies substantially larger than the vast majority of adults, and will surely test in the top percentiles of SAT/ACT vocab testing when the time comes. . . I just can't see why anyone would spend so much time on it.

 

EDITED to add:

 

FWIW, we are doing CE, GT, PT and BP all at the same time, pretty much (we are in the Practice phase of GT) and do IEW writing as well. . . oh, and a spelling program (SWO). . . so since we are doing it all each week, there is less time in a given week for each book. In rereading your earlier post, I see that sometimes you are doing pretty much just ONE of the MCT books in a given week. . . obviously, that would change the time equation a great deal!! LOL. Whatever works. . . WORKS!!

Edited March 13, 2010 by StephanieZ