Chrysalis Academy Posted March 7, 2012 Share Posted March 7, 2012 (edited) Just got my box yesterday - I am *blissed out*:001_wub: I know there are as many ways to implement this as there are teachers/learners, but how are *you* using the program? Specific questions: I know you are supposed to work through Grammar Town first, and then do Practice Town to reinforce the concepts for the rest of the year. How do you use Prac Town? Once a week, several sentences at a time? A sentence a day? Other? Then you add in . . . do you add in the other pieces one at a time, and do blocks? Or all at once? I can see going to a 4-day a week sequence where you do 1 day of Prac Town exercises, one of Para Town, one of CE, and one of BP. I can also see doing it in blocks - how do you do this? Are you finding that it takes a whole "school year" to finish a level? I'm thinking this is only about 32 weeks of material, using it 3 or 4 days a week. What is your experience? Any other hints or tips for using Towns? We are so excited to begin! Edited March 7, 2012 by rroberts707 add a question Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sandragood1 Posted March 7, 2012 Share Posted March 7, 2012 :bigear: Sandra Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shawna in Texas Posted March 7, 2012 Share Posted March 7, 2012 (edited) With Town it took us no time to get through GT (a month, month and a half). With PrT and CE, I can't remember how I actually scheduled it, but I do know that we'd go a few weeks without doing PrT because we were working so hard on PT, which was pretty heavy on the analysis. With CE, we'd do one ch. a week, so we must have finished a early. I do remember at the last of that school year taking a few tests to check retention. With PT (my favorite), after we finished the book, we went back and redid (some we did 3 times) some assignments because we enjoyed them so much. We were able to stretch that out for the whole year. I turned the poetry into a unit with other books that we did for 6 weeks or so. ETA: With PrT we'd try to do a sentence a day, when we remembered. ETA again (so I can actually answer your question :tongue_smilie: ): GT was a block at the beginning. After that was completed, CE, PrT, and PT were done together. I added poetry for the summer. For CE and PT, we'd start the chapter on Mon., then do a little in vocab and a little more in writing each day until Fri. which was vocab test day, and turn in your paper day. If it was a hard paper, sometimes I'd give her an extra week to write and if we were working that hard on writing, vocab might have gotten neglected, so it would wait until the next Friday, too. It sort of all just falls into place once you get going on it. Edited March 7, 2012 by Shawna in Texas Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
.... Posted March 7, 2012 Share Posted March 7, 2012 Just got my box yesterday - I am *blissed out*:001_wub: I know there are as many ways to implement this as there are teachers/learners, but how are *you* using the program? Specific questions: I know you are supposed to work through Grammar Town first, and then do Practice Town to reinforce the concepts for the rest of the year. How do you use Prac Town? Once a week, several sentences at a time? A sentence a day? Other? Then you add in . . . do you add in the other pieces one at a time, and do blocks? Or all at once? I can see going to a 4-day a week sequence where you do 1 day of Prac Town exercises, one of Para Town, one of CE, and one of BP. I can also see doing it in blocks - how do you do this? Are you finding that it takes a whole "school year" to finish a level? I'm thinking this is only about 32 weeks of material, using it 3 or 4 days a week. What is your experience? Any other hints or tips for using Towns? We are so excited to begin! It's 5:30 am here, so bear with me and my writing. :001_smile: This is the only time I can get on the computer without sippy cups flying through the air. We actually started with Paragraph Town first. This is probably controversial :tongue_smilie:, but we're skipping the grammar book this time around. We'll pick up the grammar book again for Voyage next year. So, after PT, we'll start the practice workbook (maybe a sentence a day) and start the poetry book. We work through one book at a time. We're reading them in this order: Paragraph Town Building Poems Caesar's English simultaneously working thru the workbook Does it take a school year to complete? Not really. Any other hints or tips? The way he describes paragraphs, topic sentences, etc in PT is just awesome. My husband (who never witnesses our homeschooling) watched my daughter and I reading through PT together and he was in awe. :thumbup1: He said that our daughter knows more grammar than he does. I told him that I've been learning right alongside her. ;) MCT has some short essays in PT and I've been using those for alot of discussion with my daughter. OK, point to the topic sentence of this paragraph...now what do you think this paragraph is about...etc. Also, there is a short intro to parts of 5 paragraph essay in there: introduction, body, conclusion, etc. I'm not a 5 paragraph essay fan, but at least she would know what someone was talking about if they mentioned it in an outside class. I know it's not for everyone, but I am just a huge fan of MCT LA. We do supplement with a writing program, tho. My daughter is using The Creative Writer right now (another really great book). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TKDmom Posted March 7, 2012 Share Posted March 7, 2012 (edited) My schedule for working through all the books was to do Grammar 3x/week, Building Poems 1x/week, and Caesar's English 1x/week. Once we finished Grammar Town, we worked on Paragraph Town 2-3x/week and we did a page of Practice Town 4x/week. It was nice to start BP and CE at the beginning because you will see allusions to them in Paragraph Town and Practice Town. CE alternates short and long chapters. We took 1 week to do the shorter chapters and 2 weeks for the longer ones. I would usually spend a day reading Paragraph Town, and then the other day(s) for working on writing assignments. I didn't actually finish Town level (the writing ramped up too much for my dd), but when I scheduled it out this way, it was somewhere between 32 and 34 weeks of material. It was nice to know I had a little bit of wiggle room with our school year. The books will all end at different times, but then you can start adding in other resources that look fun. ;) Edited March 7, 2012 by bonniebeth4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chrysalis Academy Posted March 7, 2012 Author Share Posted March 7, 2012 Thanks, everyone, for responding - this is exactly what I was hoping for, different examples of how y'all have used the different pieces. I'm still grappling with how & when to start - even though we are technically still in 4th grade, and will school till the end of June and then take ~7 weeks off (for theater camp and family vacation), we're starting other 5th grade work now (i.e. WWS). So I'm trying to figure out whether to jump in to Town stuff now, or whether to wait till August when we are back. If we start now, we'll end halfway through "5th grade" and then have to decide whether to move on to Voyage, or do something else. I'm trying to just let go of the grade level/beginning of year thing that is a holdover from ps, but for some reason that is hard . . . but I"m sure it will be liberating if I manage to do it!;) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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