ELTL 4 and W&R Fable simultaneously??

[icngirl119]

I'm still trying to complete my plans for this Fall for my son who will be a 5th grader...

 

He will complete ELTL 3 this Spring and I've already been planning to use Fable this Fall.  I know that Fable doesn't include diagramming but I'm not sure that we should do ELTL 4 and Fable simultaneously since they might overlap too much.  

 

Can anyone help me who's familiar with these curriculums?  Or if I should use Fable with a separate book just for diagramming, what do you recommend?  Anything else I should know?  

 

Thanks so much!

Edited March 9, 2016 by icngirl119

[icngirl119]

I should also mention that we're working our way through Sentence Island and Practice Island (MCT) but I haven't seen any diagramming in the Island level yet even though we do identify parts of speech/parts of a sentence in Practice Island.  

 

If I continue into the MCT Town series, will that make up for the missing pieces in Fable?

[stutterfish]

We're using ELTL4 and w&r narrative with my 12 yr old. We enjoyed using ELTL2 last year, started ELTL3, but wanted to jump ahead. We're not particularly structured in our days or weeks, but at the moment we're doing 3 days of ELTL4 and 2 days of w&r narrative and it's working well. We don't always do all the exercises in either programme,(that would be too much for my DD, who needs to build up her writing stamina) but so far, ELTL4 and narrative seem to match quite well in content. I havent seen any diagramming yet in ELTL4 - there was A LOT of diagramming in ELTL3 (rather too much for us!) - but I'm told that ELTL4 revises everything in ELTL3.

 

We're used to tweaking: W&r narrative has rather a lot of Christian content for our taste, compared with fable, so we skim some parts. We do a lot of the narrative questions orally, so there's not too much writing. Sometimes ELTL4 explains techniques better, or at least more slowly, than W&R, so we focus on that book a little more. We use audiobooks, and choose our own poetry for ELTL.

 

I think as long as you don't mind tweaking and not insisting on doing EVERY exercise, then the two books can work. Take what you like and leave what you don't need. It's possible at some time we might switch back to only using ELTL, or will move to combine ELTL and UK English textbooks (in preparation for UK exams).

 

While it works, it's good...when it stops working, we'll reassess :)

Edited March 9, 2016 by stutterfish