MCT - trouble with parts of a sentence

[cmac]

Any suggestions to teach this better? He has trouble with linking verbs, direct objects and indirect objects. He says he gets it and doesn't want more explanation, but he can't get the above correct. We've reviewed the topic and done the sentences twice. We even tried to do the sentences in Practice Island but that made both of us frustrated. I didn't see any additional activities in the back that looked helpful.

 

We've only been doing Grammar Island once a week lately. It is the last subject he chooses to do now. Take a little break? Any suggestions for what to do during the break? Thanks!

[kokotg]

I'd keep going with Practice Island, talking him through it as much as necessary until he gets it. My understanding is that Practice Island was originally intended for classroom use, with the whole class going through it together, so I don't consider it a problem if my DC need help with some of the concepts, particularly when they're new. The grammar book goes through the concepts so quickly....I really think the repetition in the practice book is essential to really nail them down.

[tammyw]

This is us actually. We are reading Grammar Island, only once or twice a week, and the following week, she will have forgotten all the parts of speech :( I was thinking we either need to do it more often, or else buy some Evan-Moor workbook on grammar and do a little every day.

[FairProspects]

I have to say I am really glad we are not the only ones struggling with this! I do think it moves quickly, and we've had to slow way down and add some additional picture examples to get the point across.

[Shelsi]

Ds hated grammar island. I even started a thread or two here about it not that long ago. I decided MCT just wasn't for us, I'd have to find something else, and ds agreed. Not only did he hate it but he was totally checked out when reading it, even if he was the one reading it. Because I read several times on here that it gets so much better with Sentence Island & Practice Island I decided to just press on.

 

So we went through Grammar Island quickly - I think we did the entire thing in about 3 weeks.

 

Then we started doing 3 sentences a week from Practice Island and started reading Sentence Island.

 

I can't say it's perfect but it has gotten much better! Ds is no longer totally checked out during lessons. Initially he and I worked on the Practice Island sentences together but now I have him try to figure it out on his own and then we work together on the parts he missed or couldn't figure out.

 

Hearing about it all in Grammar Island, then again in Sentence Island, and 3 times a week in Practice Island is finally getting it all across to him. I can't say if we'll use MCT again next year or if we'll even stick with it for the rest of this year but it has seriously improved for us.

 

ETA: to me it seems that Grammar Island is more of an introduction of the concepts. I didn't expect ds to totally "get" all of it but instead to just learn that all these things exist. Then we work on mastery with Sentence Island which we do much slower. The writing assignments in Sentence Island really help it all settle into his brain as well.

Edited September 21, 2012 by Shelsi

[NittanyJen]

This was our first year using MCT, and my younger has some working memory issues. I worried about the short-term, memory dump setup.

 

We jumped in at Town level with DS 8-turned 9 during the six weeks of covering Grammar Town. We did use it 5 days per week. For him, had we just used it one day per week, it would NEVER have stuck. Not in a million years. One short lesson per day, maybe 5-12 minutes, each day. The next week was science/math week, then the following week we'd review for 1-2 minutes and be off and running again. Six language weeks, and we were ready to start Practice Town.

 

Sometimes, he doesn't get it all right. That's okay! That is what practice is for, and that is why there are 100 sentences to work with. We do 1 sentence per day, 5 days per week, every other week. He writes down his best guess at everything, then we sit down and discuss it together. Anything that he missed-- either wrong or just skipped-- I either gently correct, or ask him a probing question to get him to figure it out. "Okay, if that is an AVP, what do you need to check for? A DO or an SC? A DO, great! Do we have a DO? Yes we do, great! Do you see it? That's right! SO, if we have an AVP and a DO, sometimes there is something else found in between them, what is that? Right, an IO! We don't always find one, but let's look; do you see one? No? Okay, that's correct. So we have a Subject, and AVP, and a DO!"

 

As we have done more and more of these, he has gotten better at them and requires less prompting. The two hardest things are the AVP/LVP distinction, and spotting less common prepositions (I don't know if Island level addresses prepositions, but there are buckets of them in Town level). However, as we reinforce these concepts each day, he gets better each time and can explain it back to me more articulately now than at the beginning, so I do believe we will get there presently.

 

I see it kind of a similar way to how SWB presents the way she gives dictation to her kids; she doesn't really expect perfection right out of the cage; there is an expectation that there will be a need to guide and gently correct as she goes with them. If they could already nail it, there would not be a need for 36 weeks of practice on it!

 

Hope that provides some food for thought. That approach seems to be working here.

[cmac]

Thank you all so much for all the great advice. I really thought we had to get everything right before moving on. It never occurred to me that there would be a chance to reinforce it/relearn it later.

 

We worked on it a little more that night. We did Practice Island, but this time we started at the beginning. That was much better. We did the middle ones before since they were the ones that had to do with direct objects, etc. and that was really hard.

 

I will try working on it a little every day and see if that works for him. And I will try and do this:

 

Anything that he missed-- either wrong or just skipped-- I either gently correct, or ask him a probing question to get him to figure it out. "Okay, if that is an AVP, what do you need to check for? A DO or an SC? A DO, great! Do we have a DO? Yes we do, great! Do you see it? That's right! SO, if we have an AVP and a DO, sometimes there is something else found in between them, what is that? Right, an IO! We don't always find one, but let's look; do you see one? No? Okay, that's correct. So we have a Subject, and AVP, and a DO!"

 

And I will remember this:

I see it kind of a similar way to how SWB presents the way she gives dictation to her kids; she doesn't really expect perfection right out of the cage; there is an expectation that there will be a need to guide and gently correct as she goes with them. If they could already nail it, there would not be a need for 36 weeks of practice on it!

[Forgiven]

We do Grammar Island every day, but we don't do a lot of pages each day. Sometimes it's just a few pages. We don't go to the next page until my DS has a good grasp on what the current page is teaching.

 

My DD also does Grammar Island, but she goes at her own pace. She seems to be getting it without any problems and is almost done with Grammar Island all together.

 

My DS and I were going too slow for DD, but she goes too fast for DS, so we go at different speeds. I have found that my DS has a bit of trouble at times, but it's usually if we haven't opened the book in a couple of days due to whatever interrupted school the day before. When we do it every day, he doesn't have many problems at all.

 

We also do Mad Libs a lot and I get books out of the Library that discuss the different parts of speech in fun ways. Oh, and I let them watch School House Rock videos while I'm making lunch.

 

I would just keep going over what your child doesn't get and not progress until he/she does. Take a break from this book and check out books in the Library. I actually got a book the other day from Amazon that looks good too. I forget the name, but it's colorful and fun, and is about the different parts of speech.

 

I was scared to use MCT after reading horror stories, but I find that if we take it page-by-page and discuss everything until my son knows what he's just learned, then we're good. We haven't had any problems with it so far. We do go slowly though, so maybe that's the drawback...

[StephanieZ]

IMHO, if it doesn't come easily, you'd be well served to shelve it for a year.

[cmac]

Thanks for more great advice. We did Practice Island yesterday and today, just doing the parts of a sentence. Yesterday was fine, we did up to 12. Today we were up to 50 (he wanted to keep going) and he probably got 1/4 of them wrong.

 

I have thought about coming back to it in 3 months, since it seems he would get more out of it if it wasn't such a challenge. But he now says he likes the challenge. I do plan on adding fun math books from the library.

 

So I guess we are not doing it as intended, but I still feel we are getting a lot from it.

[Aloha2U]

We dabbled with Shurley English in between levels of FLL, and before supplementing FLL with MCT. We've found the "question & answer flows" from Shurley to be most helpful alongside MCT's four level analysis.

 

ETA: Also, have you attempted to diagram any of the practice sentences? The First Whole Book of Diagrams by Mary Daly is a good resource.

Edited September 26, 2012 by CMama

[Miss Marple]

Can anyone remember the lady who made the great chart that showed the parts of the sentence - she did it to go along with MCT LA? I printed it off and kept it in a page protector and put a copy in each of the boys' notebooks. It was awesome - unfortunately I cleaned all that out a while back and don't have a copy.

 

ETA: I found a copy! It shows

Step 1: Parts of Speech

Step 2: Parts of a Sentence

Step 3: Phrases

Step 4: Clauses

 

Unfortunately there is no name or web addy on it. If I remember correctly, it was posted on the MCT LA forum. Surely someone else out there remembers :D

Edited September 26, 2012 by CynthiaOK

[EKS]

I would do Grammar Island every day for 5-10 minutes. After that, I'd also read through Sentence Island (also every day) because there is quite a bit of grammar instruction in it. Then I would do the practice book every day. By the end of the year, your son will understand it.

[Aloha2U]

Can anyone remember the lady who made the great chart that showed the parts of the sentence - she did it to go along with MCT LA? I printed it off and kept it in a page protector and put a copy in each of the boys' notebooks. It was awesome - unfortunately I cleaned all that out a while back and don't have a copy.

 

ETA: I found a copy! It shows

Step 1: Parts of Speech

Step 2: Parts of a Sentence

Step 3: Phrases

Step 4: Clauses

 

Unfortunately there is no name or web addy on it. If I remember correctly, it was posted on the MCT LA forum. Surely someone else out there remembers :D

 

There's this Grammar Chart in the MCTLA Yahoo! group files. Is that what you have?

[KAM]

I would just continue with it and not worry too much about whether or not he gets everything. Parts of speech are extensively reviewed in Grammar Town, which I am going through with mine now. Even I get a bit confused sometimes, but the importance for me is not that they can identify every part of speech every time, but that we are going through the process of analyzing the language and learning to think in new ways.

[Chrysalis Academy]

Yes, what they said: Everything gets repeated, and then more complicated structures get added, every year in the Island-Town-Voyage sequence. The grammar is repeated in the first chapter of each writing book, too. That together with 100 sentences each year? Figure by the end of 3 years they will know this stuff cold! ;)

 

I've been pleasantly surprised at the level of retention now that we've done it all 3 times (Sentence Island-Grammar Town-Paragraph Town). At this point, I expect that all the "basic" structures should be mastered, but we both still have to look up some of the verbal phrases at times!

[Miss Marple]

No - the one I have is much easier to read and is divided into sections that match the 4 levels of "diagramming". But I think it was in the yahoo group originally. I am no longer a member of that group, though, so I can't search for it.

 

It was so helpful for the boys when they were doing the 4 level diagramming. I'll keep looking....maybe I can upload it somewhere...

[EKS]

Parts of speech are extensively reviewed in Grammar Town, which I am going through with mine now.

 

The thing about MCT is that everything is reviewed in each book (or at least in the one's I've used: Island, Town, Voyage, and ML1). It gets a bit repetitive actually.

 

But to the OP: The point is, don't worry! Help him out when he needs it and he'll get it eventually.

[Violet Crown]

Well, we chucked MCT and are using a cobbled-together structural grammar curriculum (don't ask). So for us direct and indirect objects are extremely easy: (1) if a verb has two objects (ditransitive verb, though for now I just call them "two-object verbs"), the first is the indirect object, the second is the direct object; (2) you can stick "to" or "for" in front of an indirect object, and you will then feel a need to move it behind the direct object.

 

Linking verbs are verbs like be, seem, appear, etc. that have complements giving more information about the subject. (We leave linking verbs alone for quite a while as they can be hard to intuit, and there's no pressing need to identify them at an early age; I just point out where they occur, we think about how the verb itself doesn't give much information [e.g. "get" in "He got sick" versus "He got the prize"], and we move on.)

 

Which is, I suppose, another way of repeating the previous advice to wait until older if it isn't clicking now.

[Shelsi]

Can anyone remember the lady who made the great chart that showed the parts of the sentence - she did it to go along with MCT LA? I printed it off and kept it in a page protector and put a copy in each of the boys' notebooks. It was awesome - unfortunately I cleaned all that out a while back and don't have a copy.

 

ETA: I found a copy! It shows

Step 1: Parts of Speech

Step 2: Parts of a Sentence

Step 3: Phrases

Step 4: Clauses

 

Unfortunately there is no name or web addy on it. If I remember correctly, it was posted on the MCT LA forum. Surely someone else out there remembers :D

 

There's a Grammar Chart in Grammar Island. My ds uses it all the time, I made a copy of it and have it in his folder with the sentences he's supposed to do for the week.

 

It's just like you said, it lists the 4 steps and under each one it lists the parts.

 

So for example it says something like

Step 1: Parts of Speech

Noun: a person, place, or thing...then it lists examples

Adjective: modifies a noun....then lists a few examples

 

and so forth.

 

ETA: It's towards the end of the book...I can look up the page number if you need it.

[cmac]

Thanks again for all the very helpful replies. We finally finished Grammar Island successfully, though we still have more work to do in Practice Island. I don't see us having any problem finishing Practice Island. After continuing on and accepting mistakes without too much worry, I think it just clicked with him. Yeah! And I am finally seeing the beauty of MCT that people write about, though I can't explain it. I can see how it's not for everyone though.

 

Thanks for reminding me of the summary in the back of the book, but that didn't seem to help him. I just noticed there are extra practice sentences in the back that would have helped. Somehow I missed those. We did do some KISS(modified), for extra practice.

 

Hope everyone is doing well with MCT. For us, sticking with Grammar Island had a happy ending.

Edited October 19, 2012 by cmac