Classical Writing

[jrichstad]

So I read all the comments about Classical Writing being nearly impossible to use and I bought it anyway, because .... I guess I just like spending money to fill up my abandoned curriculum closet 😄 

Anyway, I have Homer and the Student Workbook A for my 6th grader and I've been reading through the book but I'm still having trouble wrapping my mind around it. If you've used this, could you share what a week of working through the program looked like for you?

[8filltheheart]

LOL.....you have your poor student do exactly what the book suggests as you try to figure out why they make solid writing instruction so convoluted and then after a few weeks drop it bc you realize that strong writing skills do not require putting sentences through contortions.

[Resilient]

I could never have used Classical Writing if I didn't have the overview of what they were trying to accomplish.  That backstory came from reading Corbett's book--not noting it, memorizing it, or writing a review--just getting the gist of where this was all going.  

 

 

[PeterPan]

Well I used the Aesop levels with dd and bought Homer. I agree that jumping in a later level gets you out of the flow so that it doesn't make sense. Their texts are always so convoluted in organization, the only way I could understand them was to OUTLINE them. I suggest you do the same, just outlining the book and what is covered in each lesson till you get the big picture and progression and it makes sense to you.

[serendipitous journey]

I used Homer with elder until he asked to do WWS instead.  🙂  Those were his two options. 

I do like a lot about CW, but not how contortionist it is. 

So, trying to get my head back to what we did for the first week.  What we did NOT do: anything grammatical, no sentence diagramming.  I left all that to the grammar program. 

Do you have the Instructor's Guide?  that was my home base, iirc.  I could never have tackled it without the instructor's guide, not least because that made it easier to see which bits I was skipping on purpose so I didn't miss bits on accident.  If you have the guide, I can tell you how I used it while we were doing Homer.  If not, I am not going to be any use to you at all.  😞 

ETA: basically, I set aside 45" or so and opened my Instructor's Guide and we plowed through: I skipped the "Theory" bit altogether, hit the day's Analysis & Imitation (minus diagramming), and spent the remainder of the time on the Writing Project.   Then I tried to look ahead to what we needed for the next lesson. 

I did begin with the "Week 0" prep but in the future would use paper in a binder instead of that maddening copybook thing which I detested and we never could find anyhow, I was a total copybook failure. 

The most useful prep I did was reading stuff & adding "Day 1" "Day 2" "Day 3" and "Day 4" tabs to wherever we were in the analysis & imitation portion of the main book.

Edited August 28, 2021 by serendipitous journey

[OnceUponAFullMoon]

On 8/27/2021 at 11:54 AM, PeterPan said:

Well I used the Aesop levels with dd and bought Homer

Did Homer show how to use the sentence diagramming to write different sentence variation?

For example, did they dissect the sentence to show you that you can move the prepositional phrase from the end to the beginning of that sentence = creating new sentence structure? Did they give an example of removing a specific prepositional phrase to paraphrase by subtraction?

On 8/27/2021 at 8:42 PM, serendipitous journey said:

What we did NOT do: anything grammatical, no sentence diagramming.

From the limited samples, I cannot really tell how CW teach the imitation portion. I thought the diagramming and the 6-sentence shuffles/grammar change are their meat? 

[PeterPan]

33 minutes ago, OnceUponAFullMoon said:

Did Homer show how to use the sentence diagramming to write different sentence variation?

For example, did they dissect the sentence to show you that you can move the prepositional phrase from the end to the beginning of that sentence = creating new sentence structure? Did they give an example of removing a specific prepositional phrase to paraphrase by subtraction?

One, it has been many years since I used CW (my kids are 10 years apart), and two I plead pneumonia brain. Nevertheless, are you sure you mean prepositional phrase here? A prepositional phrase or any phrase modifies what it modifies, and the sentence diagram does *not* assign the word order of the sentence but rather shows the relationships and what is modified. So if you had an an adverbial phrase ("In the beginning" let's say), you could move it around the sentence but it would still diagram the same as it still modified the same thing no matter where you moved it. A prepositional phrase is going to close to the noun it modifies, while an adverbial phrase might move around a bit more.

Paraphrasing is both simple (if the student gets it naturally) and challenging. If your student is having difficulties with syntactical complexity or paraphrasing or other language issues, it might be better to look for materials providing the level of intervention your dc needs. 

CW is not necessarily a user friendly curriculum and I think you'll find many of the newer progym options easier to use with a wide range of students. I would assume any deficiencies you think exist in CW do. 

[OnceUponAFullMoon]

Yeah I think I meant adverbial phrase. I never did sentence diagraming. I thought the 6-sentence shuffles is good at teaching paraphrasing and sentence structure variation. 

[serendipitous journey]

27 minutes ago, OnceUponAFullMoon said:

Yeah I think I meant adverbial phrase. I never did sentence diagraming. I thought the 6-sentence shuffles is good at teaching paraphrasing and sentence structure variation. 

Quickly -- if you never did sentence diagramming, I wouldn't use CW to get it up and running.  I never use that part of it. 

Agreed, 6-sentence shuffle is good for variation. 

And agreed with all above about the difficulty of using CW.  We may be setting it aside for writing across curriculum + WWS (SWBauer's program). 

[PeterPan]

20 hours ago, OnceUponAFullMoon said:

Yeah I think I meant adverbial phrase. I never did sentence diagraming. I thought the 6-sentence shuffles is good at teaching paraphrasing and sentence structure variation. 

You might find a traditional grammar program that includes diagramming more accessible. (Abeka, R&S, whatever) Have you seen the Killgallon books on teaching sentence variety? https://www.amazon.com/s?k=killgallon+sentence+composing&sprefix=killgallon+sent%2Caps%2C95&ref=nb_sb_ss_ts-doa-p_1_15 WWS and probably most progym programs include it too. 

I suspect most students who do a lot of reading will pick up the language skills of syntactical complexity naturally on their own and not need a curriculum for it. My dd was an avid reader and didn't need those exercises. My ds, on the other hand, has ASD2 and significant language issues, and for him even the Elementary Killgallon book is rocket science hard. 

It's always about the basics--go through a basic grammar program, expose them to good language via audiobooks, read alouds, and reading. If your dc can listen to the Lang's Fairy Tales (which are recommended around 4th-5th gr in WTM, yes? some kind of fairy tales are, similar level), they probably are already nailing syntactical complexity. 

[wisdomandtreasures]

Oh, girrrl.... I don't know of it was just my pea brain or that I had just had a baby and was getting no sleep, but I got a copy and was looking through it when it arrived and it took me about 3 hours of flipping between all the different books to realize what they were even talking about! I called my husband in tears to tell him and when he got home and looked at it he said "No wonder you were in tears!" Once it clicked, it made sense, but I have a kid who loathes writing and I have 4 others to work with so it was going to be too much effort on my part, and just be a source of contention for my anti-writer, so off to eBay it went.