Writing and Rhetoric series (CAP), grammar question

[KeriJ]

I'm about to order the W&R books for my 5th grader. (I had ordered before but canceled...long story) We use R&S for grammar, and I'm trying to think through how I'll schedule them both.  I would skip the writing exercise in R&S I assume.  I seem to remember someone in the other thread mentioning that CAP gave a recommendation for scheduling both grammar and writing. 

 

Can anyone chime in?

[Chelli]

They recommend one week using W&R completing one lesson in that time, then the next week doing grammar.

 

I've not really followed this recommendation since I'm using MCT for grammar and it's kind of an every day type program. I do take a week off from W&R though and spend the off week focusing on sentence and paragraph construction and mechanics like direct quotations, punctuation, etc.

[Aloha2U]

We just started both R&S and W&R this past week.  I'm replacing the writing exercises in R&S - which seem as though they're every fourth lesson or so - with a lesson from Poetry Primer by Logos, but we're still doing both grammar and writing every week - four days per week each.  I plan on having us finish both book 1 and 2 of W&R in the first semester, so that we can complete the second half of WWE 4 in the second semester.

[Chrysalis Academy]

Well, Fable has 14 lessons, and Narrative 1 has 10, so that's 24 weeks of writing lessons, so you'll definitely have some no-CAP weeks.  And - just guessing here - I bet you will not take a full week to get through a lesson with a 5th grader.  They have it laid out so that a typical teaching week has 3 or 4 days of work, depending on how you stretch it out.  I bet an older kid will get through it in 2-3 days, consistently.  So you could easily fit it in with other LA stuff, both within the week and within the year.

[Soror]

We are using MCT as well and we do it daily. We are not quite completing a lesson of WR1 per week as we are doing WWE3 as well.

[Chrysalis Academy]

Soror, do you mean you are doing both W&R and WWE each day?

 

 

[Soror]

I'm still working out everything tbh. I've sometimes done both on the same day but I think my current plan is to do 2 days of WWE and 4 days of WR1, switching back and forth. I believe that will give us enough time to finish both programs this year. I am also watching the clock as well, my goal is about 30 minutes of writing a day, so if we have a short day I'm doing more. We are just half-way through Lesson 3 in WR though. I think our time is better spent focusing on WR and then WWE instead of doing a bit of one and then of the other.

[Chrysalis Academy]

Thanks.  I'm still waiting for my copy of the student workbooks to arrive, but I'm thinking of alternating weeks - a W&P week, then a WWE week.  This is with my 2nd grader, so I'm only looking to get through the Fable book this year alongside WWE2.  She does copywork and dictation effortlessly, and is coming along well with narrations, but she is easily bored and I can already see the eyerolls starting when I pull out WWE, and we've only done 4 weeks so far!  So I need to add something with more interest and challenge.  She is a tough one to keep engaged, and I'm starting to realize that most of what I've got her doing is too easy for her at this point - I was trying to start off gently, but I may have undershot. (Is that even a word?)

[boscopup]

I use W&R Fable and R&S English 5. It has not been a problem at all to do both. W&R lessons are typically done in about 3 days by my son (4th grade and writing phobic). I use WWE3 narration days on the other 2 days of the week (I skip the WWE dictation, since W&R has dictation). I don't plan to use every R&S English writing lesson, but the lesson we did recently was writing about a personal experience, with the example being a barn fire. It just so happens that we had a garage fire last year, so I went ahead and had my son write about that, and we came up with various questions to ask and put them on the board. He wrote from that list of questions, picking and choosing. We did not do W&R that day, nor did we do any writing in WWE that day (only one of the two narration days in WWE involves writing).

 

As far as the grammar lessons go, he still does those each day, including the written exercises. The more my son writes, the easier and more automatic it gets. I assign about half the exercises.