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Climbing to Good English?


~happy2Bamommy~
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Some past threads. There are some of us who not only love CGE, but love to talk about it too. :lol:

 

I very recently bought CGE 1. I've been using the rest of the series for awhile.

 

CGE is a very affordable and practical Amish Workbook series. The scope is narrow. You will soon get sick of hearing me extoll the virtues of narrow curricula. The composition topics of this curriculum can be mastered and the generic lessons can be repeated, unlike many wider curricula.

 

CGE teaches HANDWRITTEN composition. More and more curricula are assuming a student is composing on a word processor, and do not teach the necessary steps for handwritten composition. Since many important tests require handwritten composition, I think this is a mistake. Never mind that we often need to compose handwritten letters and memos and other forms of writing, in daily life.

 

The series is written to be used by untrained teenaged teachers. The series is written to be completed by the teacher, before teaching it, but many well educated adults will do fine skipping that step.

 

If you are OCD about grammar, you might not like that the grammar lessons are integrated into the daily lessons. If you like open and go without planning, then you will probably like the sequence and organization of the grammar lessons. The series is carefully planned, but at first glance can look a bit haphazard.

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Has anyone here used this with their children?

 

I stumbled across it on Rainbow Resource and I am now curious :)

 

http://www.rainbowresource.com/prodlist.php?subject=7&category=6771

 

We use it and love it. We are on our second year with it. One page a day is very doable and a lot is packed into the lesson. It is definitely "no frills" and gets the job done well, efficiently and effectively.

 

I think it is a very well thought out scope and sequence and I'm glad we started from the very beginning, although I did go ahead and get all the teacher's manuals used so I could see where the program was headed to make sure this was a trip I wanted to take with them.

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Thank you ladies!

 

I was searching through threads here last night. One thing I read was that it is very much like Rod and Staff. I do like R&S material but I have been trying to find something with an actual text the student writes in. We need something that is more open, write, and go for the stage we are in right now :)

 

We are already using Easy Grammar.

I am hoping that a combination of the two will be a sound system.

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Thank you ladies!

 

I was searching through threads here last night. One thing I read was that it is very much like Rod and Staff. I do like R&S material but I have been trying to find something with an actual text the student writes in. We need something that is more open, write, and go for the stage we are in right now :)

 

We are already using Easy Grammar.

I am hoping that a combination of the two will be a sound system.

 

I hope it works well for you. What levels are you looking at for CGE?

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My 4th and 5th graders are using CTGE this year. I like that it is open-and-go, and mostly independent for them. I also like how they schedule compositions; one day dd will have to write notes and a rough draft, and then a few lessons later it will tell her to get it back out and proofread and write the final draft. So, all the scheduling is already built in. The grammar is solid, like R&S. My main motivation for buying CTGE was to not have to do any planning. With R&S I was looking over the lessons and deciding how much of the written work to assign. I also felt guilty for not going over the oral drills with my dc that often.

 

That being said, now that I've used CTGE for several weeks, I realize that although it's a workbook, they are still requiring a lot more writing than I expected. (For example, ds had sentences with unnecessary words, like "that there dog is running", and he had to cross off the unnecessary words. He also had to write the entire sentence correctly on the lines below. So, it's not just a fill-in-the-blank kind of workbook. They allow plenty of room to do lots of writing in the lessons. Longer compositions are written on separate paper.) I realize that I likely was not assigning enough writing in R&S. I could probably go back to R&S next year and have a better idea of how much work they should actually be doing. I do like that R&S is a nonconsumable text.

 

Anyway, CTGE was a great decision for us this year, since I was wanting a break from R&S.

Edited by lotsofpumpkins
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CTGE is one of my top two or three choices for continuing on with my 4th grader (who can read The Boxcar Children with minimal help, but is still at 2nd grade level in phonics, spelling, and writing skills due to a speech disorder). Everything that Hunter mentioned are the reasons why I'm attracted to CTGE. Dd has just completed the 1st grade CTGE book and it's a great fit for her. I'm not worried about the amount of writing in CTGE because I believe it's actually helped my dd to improve in that area, as it challenges her, and she's one who wants to prove that she can do something. ;)

 

Anyway, if I don't go with CTGE, the only reason will be because of the font style and typewritten, photocopied look of the pages. Probably a dumb reason, and it definitely bothers me more than dd... she hasn't complained about it at all. :tongue_smilie: At any rate, I'm still trying to make up my mind about how important that issue is, but I need to decide soon because she's ready to move on. Lotsofpumpkins' post is encouraging. :001_smile:

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