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Multiple levels of MCT- what does it look like in your house?


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Well, I used Town with my 5th grader this year and started Island with my 2nd graders a few weeks ago.  I did the Grammar Town book with my 5th grader first, and then got her going on Paragraph Town and Caesar's English.  There's a lot of discussion in the first part of Paragraph Town, but the second half of the book is more review and writing exercises.  Caesar's English has the same sorts of exercises every week, so it's easy to get into a pattern.  My dd does a lot of it independently, and then I check over her work and we discuss it.  I started my twins on Grammar Island once my oldest had gotten through all of Grammar Town and the first half of Paragraph Town.  

 

At this point, the twins are finishing up Grammar Island, and I'll have them work through Practice Island sentences over the summer.  We'll save the other Island books for next year. Oldest has finished Grammar Town and Paragraph Town; she has one more week of Caesar's English; we're reading Building Poems together; and she'll work through Practice Town over the summer.  We're also doing spelling and cursive, and the 5yo is learning to read.  LA takes a lot of time, but it's the most important area of school, so that's to be expected. I think next year my oldest will be doing more writing as part of her history and literature work, so she might not have a formal writing program.

 

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Well, I used Town with my 5th grader this year and started Island with my 2nd graders a few weeks ago.  I did the Grammar Town book with my 5th grader first, and then got her going on Paragraph Town and Caesar's English.  There's a lot of discussion in the first part of Paragraph Town, but the second half of the book is more review and writing exercises.  Caesar's English has the same sorts of exercises every week, so it's easy to get into a pattern.  My dd does a lot of it independently, and then I check over her work and we discuss it.  I started my twins on Grammar Island once my oldest had gotten through all of Grammar Town and the first half of Paragraph Town.  

 

At this point, the twins are finishing up Grammar Island, and I'll have them work through Practice Island sentences over the summer.  We'll save the other Island books for next year. Oldest has finished Grammar Town and Paragraph Town; she has one more week of Caesar's English; we're reading Building Poems together; and she'll work through Practice Town over the summer.  We're also doing spelling and cursive, and the 5yo is learning to read.  LA takes a lot of time, but it's the most important area of school, so that's to be expected. I think next year my oldest will be doing more writing as part of her history and literature work, so she might not have a formal writing program.

 

 

Thanks!

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Mine are 3 years apart, and the age difference was too much - they younger one couldn't go fast enough. This year I'll have one in Voyage and one in Island. For my older child, the introductory book (the grammar one) and the poetry book have been the most parent-intensive. In the grammar book there is something to do on almost every page, so we go through it together, and in poetry we take turns reading out loud. For the other books I've let the student read sections on their own and then talked about it or gone over the exercises together afterwards. This kid loved the Caesar's English book and wanted to read it for fun, so I'd stop and periodically discuss sections - quizzing on vocab or roots, making sure that he could pronounce the words correctly - but we didn't go through it together the whole time. With paragraph town, we did the discussion/lessons, but didn't read together every day. It may be different with my younger child, but knowing that we can do parts independently makes doing 2 levels sound less daunting. And, I've staggered the days, so that we don't do all of the parts every day - poetry on T/F,vocab on M/W, for instance.

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  • 2 years later...

My kids are significantly younger but I've decided to keep them in the same level for now. My now 7yo went through Island at 4/5, but never finished up the Practice book since we ended up mostly analyzing sentences from his writing. So now that I'm starting grammar with my now 4yo (Sentence Family before MCT) I will be expecting my 7yo to do more with the writing portions particularly from the poetry book and the practice book while the 4yo just enjoys and learns the basics.

In a couple years when my third son is ready to start I anticipate I'll want to put the oldest in the next level and the middle either with the younger or older depending on where he seems to fit best. I've found MCT easy to scale up or down. 

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My 7yo and 11yo are working in the Town and Voyage levels, respectively. They will both finish everything but the writing book for their levels in the next few months, but both need a little more time before tackling the writing books for their respective levels.

Running two levels at once hasn't been a problem at all. I spend about 15 minutes per kid per day reading and discussing whatever book they're in and then another 1-3 minutes per kid on some days going over the sentence analyses they did independently. We work through the books, excluding the practice books, one at a time, and do anywhere from 1 to 4 sentence analyses per week (after finishing the grammar books). Once every week or two we spend the entire 15 minute time slot on a cumulative review of vocab. 

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It's our summer break, but last school year I had one in Town and the other in Literature.  I didn't usually spend more than 30 minutes/day with each kid, and often less - it depended on what we were doing.  One of my kids chooses to do a little extra in the beginning so that we have a break later in the year, and the other procrastinates and does the minimum and then has to work hard to finish, so I feel like I spent more time in the fall with one kid and more in the spring with the other.  Although it's made to be done together, my kids often do the reading and then we stop and talk every time there's a question - in other words, they might read 2 pages of Caesar's English on their own, then we discuss the questions, then they read another page, then we talk, etc.  So, I'm involved and available, but I can answer a question for the other kiddo if I need to.  It was less time when I had one in Island and one in Voyage, but the complexity kicked up for us when younger had to start writing paragraphs and older was reading some of the complicated writing in the Voyage and Literature levels.  But, I will say that my education was sorely lacking in reading literature, poetry, and classic essays, so this has been fantastic for us.  Older got through with the literature level early and we started level 5.  We just did the first part of the grammar book, and the complexity of the grammar definitely kicks up a notch at this level.  

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3 hours ago, ClemsonDana said:

We just did the first part of the grammar book, and the complexity of the grammar definitely kicks up a notch at this level.  

yes!  I've been pre-reading Magic Lens, and whew! I think it's going to double as a "learn-how-to-learn" course.  Thankfully the jump for the other kiddo from Island to Town won't be much.

It's good to hear that running 2 levels of MCT is doable.  I was wondering, originally, if anyone combined the different kids and let the lowest level kid drop off before you dig deep (sort of how it's like to do Moorning Time with a large age spread).  But it seems like no one is doing it this way.  I think this combination-method might lose the simplicity and clarity of MCT's presentation.

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