MCT Town level ?

[jhockley]

We used Island level this year and I supplemented quite a bit. I really liked it though and am strongly considering getting town level for next year. Can someone please tell me what the differences are (vocab component looked pretty different) so i know what I need to supplement? This year we did spelling, writing strands, reading detective, and wordly wise on the side.

[Crimson Wife]

You will still need spelling, reading comp if you are not using MCT's lit program, and probably something for mechanics practice. Wordly Wise I would drop if you are using CE. WT is dependent on whether you feel Paragraph Town is enough for writing.

[StephanieZ]

You'll keep spelling until it is mastered, as MCT never does that.

 

MCT doesn't do literature or literature analysis as part of the English sets of books, so you'll want something for literature/reading/analysis. I really like the MCT Lit sets, but they're just a few books each set, so obviously not ALL your lit for the year. You could try out the first Lit set (Mole, Peter Pan, etc set) next year. And, read lots of other great books!

 

The vocab takes it up a notch, for sure. I love the Town and Voyage vocab books. AWESOME IMHO. You can and should drop whatever other vocab you are doing (unless it something fast/easy that is linked into some reading/lit program you do).

 

Enjoy! Town is delicious. It builds on Sentence, but the vocab book is so much better, and the writing gets more involved, too. It'll be a natural progression if Sentence has gone smoothly. The only thing that will seem like a lot more work is vocab, but it's not at all overwhelming -- just plan on two or three 20-30 min sessions a week for it (for just 20 weeks, so wait until you are through the grammar text before beginning the vocab.).

 

FWIW, after doing CE & CE2 two times now with 3 kids, I finally have scheduling figured out. So here is what I do:

 

Day 1 (& Day 2): Read-aloud together (20-30 min each)

 

I do CE (and CE2) over 2 20-30 min read-aloud sessions for the weeks when you have a list of 5 WORDS and just 1 20-30 min read-aloud session when it is a STEM week. (5 each, they alternate weeks between word lists and stem lists.) You sit on couch, read and talk through the lesson. Stop half way through when it is a word week (an hour or more for the whole lesson can and will get you through it all, but I found it got tedious, so I learned to split those weeks into two shorter sessions), but the stem lessons are short enough to get through it all.

 

Day 3: Review List (20 min)

 

Then, one more 20 min "review" session practicing the comprehensive list. At the beginning of the year, this will take 5 min or less. By the end of the year (100 words/stems), it'll take a bit longer. I just sit there with the list, covering the answer part with a scrap of paper (or sitting across the couch so child can't see the answers), and drill the list both ways, repeating any a few times (mixed in) that they miss. My 10yo now does this solo because she can and is happy to, but I used to do it for them for years.

 

Day 4: Test (10 min)

 

Then test day. Based on the above, my dc have nearly always scored 100%.

 

This method works great for CE & CE2. We don't need any additional daily drill. When you get to WWW, daily drill (quizlet in our home) gets important, as the lists are huge, and so you don't learn/recall as much from the simple reading/exercises in the text, as it's more about memorization.

 

Happy MCT-ing!

[jhockley]

I think a 3 book lit unit would take about 3wks, lol. Dd devours books, so I usually just have her narrate once a week. Any reccs for mechanics?

 

Thanks so much for the schedule! That was one of my biggest challenges this year, trying to coordinate it all.

[Crimson Wife]

I use Evan-Moor Daily Paragraph Editing in conjunction with MCT for mechanics practice.

[StephanieZ]

MCT covers mechanics. No need to add more.

 

Each level builds on prior levels. The writing books cover loads of "punctuation as a function of grammar" . . . Mechanics are touched on all over the place in the grammar and writing books, woven throughout the pages.

 

IME, if you are using all the MCT English books, you've got grammar and punctuation/mechanics totally covered.

 

There might be some really basic stuff (really basic capitalization rules? etc) that, if you are not a native English speaker/writer, you might need/want some formal instruction in as it might be assumed that the teacher would cover it when it came up in MCT.

[Crimson Wife]

At least in "island" and "town", there are hardly any mechanics in MCT. My DD scored a lot lower on the mechanics portion of the ITBS compared to the other verbal sections until I started supplementing MCT with the Evan-Moor DPE. Afterwards, her test scores were much higher.

 

I disagree that these are things that native English speakers will automatically pick up because a lot of them are rather arbitrary. Why do we italicize certain titles and put others in quotation marks? Why do we capitalize the names of months but not seasons? Who knows why, but I certainly don't want my kids to lose points for something so easy to cover with a quick DPE a couple times per week.