MCT--How do you know what to do each day? Also, placement question.

[mo2]

Is there a schedule somewhere, or is it written in lessons where you do one lesson each day? Regarding placement, I have an 11yo who has little to no formal grammar exposure, was a late reader, and dislikes writing. Should I start with the Island or Town level?

[Hedgehogs4]

:bigear:

[BatmansWife]

Is there a schedule somewhere, or is it written in lessons where you do one lesson each day? Regarding placement, I have an 11yo who has little to no formal grammar exposure, was a late reader, and dislikes writing. Should I start with the Island or Town level?

 

I'm not an expert at all on MCT, I think I'm going to get it for next school year. I want to go with Island, and my dd will be turning 10 shortly after we would start. I would think Island would be good if your 11 year old has had little to no grammar, was a late reader, and dislikes writing. Maybe someone else can confirm if starting at the beginning is a good place to start. But, the reason I posted was that if you do decide to go with Island, the satorismiles blog has a schedule you can print. Click here to see Angela's schedule and click here to read her Island review.

 

I hope somebody will make up a similar schedule for Town by the time we would need it. Hint hint to somebody....anybody.

[Five More Minutes]

MCT is pretty fluid. You start with the Grammar book in a level (such as Grammar Island) and read through it together, discussing as you go. The pace depends on your student. Sometimes mine wanted to chew through a couple of chapters in a sitting; sometimes we'd get through a few pages before I felt we were done for the day. It took ... hmmm, maybe a few weeks to go through Grammar Island?

 

Once Grammar Island is done, you then start doing the sentences from Practice Island (one a day; 3-4 per week).

 

Once those are comfortable, you launch Sentence Island, handling it as you did Grammar Island, reading and discussing a reasonable amount daily.

 

It's a curriculum designed to be student-responsive, so a hard-and-fast schedule ends up being counter-productive, IMO. (And I am saying this as a hard-core planner!)

[Chrysalis Academy]

I would start with the Town level in your situation. As far as scheduling, just try to relax and go with it; it will become pretty obvious once you start using it how long you can go and keep your dc engaged, and where the obvious stopping points are. You can do it however works best for you. One idea would be:

 

Grammar Town - daily until completed, should take 3-4 weeks

then loop:

Day 1 - Caesar's English

Day 2 - Paragraph Town

Day 3 - Practice Town

Day 4 - practice town again, or something else like spelling

 

or, do one CE lesson each week, and the other days go through the whole Paragraph Town book, then when it's done start doing Practice Town. Really, just experiment, and see what works best for you. We like doing something different every day, for variety, but I also like doing a whole PT chapter together, so we varied it.

 

Then at the end, do a fun poetry unit using Building Poems plus some of your own favorite poetry you want to share. And you are done!

 

It's super flexible. Trust it, it's good stuff! And it takes less than a year to go through the whole thing, so you don't need to worry too much about staying "on schedule."

[km123175]

I'm in the Island level now, and I agree with the other posters. Once you've read through the grammar book (1st), you can kind of rotate through them as interest dictates. My daughter usually chooses which we do for the day. We work together on Practice island once or twice a week, and she does 1 or 2 a week on her own (as copy work, and analysis - we've got the teacher's book only for that; so, she copies it when we don't do it orally).

 

Then for Sentence Island, building language, and the poetry book, we just rotate. So, some times we'd read SI every day for the week. And in other cases, we'd go back and forth between all 3 books in one week. I try to have us read Building language at least twice per week (because we usually take 2 days to read through the material for each stem).

 

We generally do these readings/activities as bedtime read-alouds; so, enjoyable and pleasant work. I think for the Town level we'll need a bit more brain power, but I'm really looking forward to the new CE. I haven't placed my order yet - trying to figure out if they ever have sales. :)

 

Kimberly