MCT Voyage Questions

[SunnyDays]

I'm working on orders for next year, and MCT is next on the list. Have a couple questions for those of you who've used it.

 

First, for which books do you truly need both teacher and student? I see it's recommended to get both for Grammar Voyage, have you found this to be true? What about CE II??

 

Also, I'm not really sure DS will be ready to do the exercises in Essay Voyage. Would it be worth getting it just to read through and discuss, or not really?

 

Finally... The poetry book. Is there enough new material in here beyond Town level? They look pretty similar. And although DS finds it okay, he's not the world's biggest poetry fan. :)

 

Thanks for your thoughts...

[Chrysalis Academy]

I haven't used the student books for anything (except Practice), and I don't think they are necessary.

 

I think that Essay Voyage is useful for reading about and discussing essays. It is very focused on how an essay works together, structurally - intro, body, conclusion, topic sentences, clarity, unwordiness (is that a word?) etc. We do read and discuss and pick apart the essays included - there are at least 3 in each chapter, two by MCT and one "classic" essay by a writer like Poe, Montaigne, Emerson, etc. Some of these are a little dense, but they are actually my favorite part of the chapters. We don't do the assignments - they are kind of arbitrary, and we get enough of that (writing about assigned topics you might not actually be interested in) with WWS - I'm trying to get our writing pulled back in, to writing across the curriculum and writing to learn about topics of interest. So I will assign an essay on a different topic, but try and focus on the principle of the chapter, rather than using one of MCT's assignments.

 

We haven't done the poetry book yet, so I can't comment. I know this is heresy, but I'm not actually so enamored of MCT's style of teaching about poetry . . . so if you aren't excited about it you have my permission to skip it! ;) :D

[shukriyya]

 

We haven't done the poetry book yet, so I can't comment. I know this is heresy, but I'm not actually so enamored of MCT's style of teaching about poetry . . . so if you aren't excited about it you have my permission to skip it! ;) :D

 

 

Curious as to what you're not keen on. I haven't used them either but have perused them online.

[8filltheheart]

I'm working on orders for next year, and MCT is next on the list. Have a couple questions for those of you who've used it.

 

First, for which books do you truly need both teacher and student? I see it's recommended to get both for Grammar Voyage, have you found this to be true? What about CE II??

 

Also, I'm not really sure DS will be ready to do the exercises in Essay Voyage. Would it be worth getting it just to read through and discuss, or not really?

 

Finally... The poetry book. Is there enough new material in here beyond Town level? They look pretty similar. And although DS finds it okay, he's not the world's biggest poetry fan. :)

 

Thanks for your thoughts...

 

 

My view is contrary to most posters on the forum, so take it fwiw.

 

My dd LOVES poetry, and I mean loves with a passion. She reads things like Marmion with pure enthusiasm. Both she and I strongly dislike MCT's approach to poetry. In our opinion, it focuses so much on terminology and dissecting the poems that the "poetry" is subverted. For a good introduction to poetry, we both preferred Classical Academic Press's Art of Poetry.

 

We both really liked CE2.

 

For dd, the grammar was all review. He teaches grammar similar to the way I have always taught it, so I appreciated that part of it, but I did find some of it bizarre. He had more pages devoted to articles than verbals (or something like that....it has been a few yrs.) Just seemed odd.

 

Essay....that is a can of worms with me. Dd and I really enjoyed it at the beginning. His "voyagers" essays do a good job of demonstrating interesting stylistic techniques. His inclusion of classic essays were enjoyed at first, but after a while we were wishing for a wider variety of genre.

 

Where I really disagree with Essay is in the 2nd half of the book in his MLA instruction. IMHO his essays lack proper paragraph construction/development, teach students to incorporate too many long quotes (MLA explicitly teaches that long quotes should be used sparingly), and use quotes to prove the argument vs. support the argument. (many disagree with me, so like I said, take it fwiw.)

 

HTH

[Chrysalis Academy]

Curious as to what you're not keen on. I haven't used them either but have perused them online.

 

 

 

Pretty much what 8FilltheHeart said above - I really love reading poetry, but the focus in MCT is very much on deconstructing, defining terms, etc. I like to read poetry for the beauty of the language, for a message that resonates, and I like to try and understand it in its historical and literary context - what was going on in the world at the time that made *this* what the poet had to say? and why did he/she choose this form to say it? I'm not so interested in the exact details of the structure. So we read through the poetry book, but it is a tiny part of poetry studies for us, and if I hadn't gotten the books as part of the package, I'd probably save my pennies and skip them.

 

It's not that there is anything wrong with them - but for us, they aren't as good at hooking us in, engaging us in the language, the way the rest of MCT's materials do.

 

As far as Essay Voyage, I don't disagree with what 8 said, and we will skip the instructional part of how to do quotes - I think WWS teaches this much better. I don't use MCT's writing books to teach writing, I use them to spark interesting discussions about writing, to help my dd see the goal of writing well - it kind of provides the "whole" that we find missing (so far) in WWS's parts-to-whole approach.

[dbmamaz]

iir, each of the sections of assignments in essay voyage included at least one assignment which wasnt a written assignment - such as, find these places on a map. we used it in 9th grade, so i made him do what seemed to me the most rigorous essay, because that was appropriate for him

 

we also enjoyed the first half of the book a lot more than the second. it got boring . .how many essays about ship voyages do you really want to read? and the thing about the squirrel? we might have quit after that one, i dont recall

 

we used the series before the upgrades. we only bought the practice book and the teachers books. i dont know how much its changed since then.

 

oh, and the poetry was ok for us - we hadnt done much poetry and my son likes rules - when we got to the chapter about poetry breaking grammar rules, he almost had a nervous breakdown . . . sigh.

[SunnyDays]

I appreciate all the thoughts. Sounds like I wouldn't miss much if we skip poetry, which is what I suspected. We just started Building Poems in Town though, so I'll wait until we are done with it... I'm thinking we'll both decide it's enough. :)

 

As for Essay Voyage, I looked at the samples again. I like the idea of using it to discuss writing. I don't think we would do the assignments either. Again, I may need to wait on a decision until we've finished Paragraph Town. This is for a rising 5th grade boy who avoids as much writing as possible, LOL, so I just don't know that he's even ready for the concepts yet.

 

Thanks again. I'll ponder the options with all your responses in mind!

[8filltheheart]

. This is for a rising 5th grade boy who avoids as much writing as possible, LOL, so I just don't know that he's even ready for the concepts yet.

 

 

I would not use Voyages with a 5th grade boy unless he was advanced in LA. I used it with a very strong 6th grader and like I said, it didn't really hold her attention that well mid-yr. (and she was already writing strong multi-page papers by that pt and was reading advanced lit.)

[SunnyDays]

 

 

I would not use Voyages with a 5th grade boy unless he was advanced in LA. I used it with a very strong 6th grader and like I said, it didn't really hold her attention that well mid-yr. (and she was already writing strong multi-page papers by that pt and was reading advanced lit.)

 

Well, he is advanced... In everything but writing. :) He's excellent with grammar, loves vocabulary, etc. Just doesn't enjoy writing. So if I so get it, I'll either set it aside for a year, or just read through sections of it for the exposure to good writing.