Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Recommended Resources Love, Love, Love Michael Clay Thompson's LA

I get so much out of hearing everyone's experiences. So thought I would put this out there.

We tried EPGY's Language Arts grade 3 over the summer. It was OK. It had a lot of bugs, which did not help it. The hardest part of it for DS6 was the writing sections. They gave an assignment, which in itself was not hard, but gave a VERY restricted word list from which to write the assignment. Many times the word list had a specific theme/tone and if you wanted to write something different, it just did not work. For example, the writing assignment might be something like "Write a narrative paragraph about when you learned to ride a bike." Then the word list would include all these happy words. DS has motor planning issues and learning to ride a bike is not a fun, happy experience for him. So instead of writing to express his thoughts AND meet the requirements, he learned how to figure out what the computer wanted. This is good in a way, but the computer passed/failed the written assignment based on word types. So if you had a few key words, a noun and a verb, it pretty much passed - even if the sentence did not make sense. The end result was my aspiring author doesn't write much anymore.

In Sept, I decided to try Michael Clay Thompson's (MCT) Language Arts program based on the reviews of how much he LOVES language and it shows. WOW! Does it ever show! I picked up the 3rd grade curriculum again as this is really where MCT's program starts. Grammar Island is about as good as one can do with grammar. He breaks it down into categories which make a lot of sense. But after Grammar Island, he takes you on a journey with how to USE language in its best forms. There are 3 books after Grammar Island (which we finished in 5 weeks): Building Language, Music of the Hemispheres, and Sentence Island. Sentence Island reiterates the rules of Grammar Island. There are practice sentences you work on similar to those you did in Grammar Island. But the real beauty of the program is in Building Language and the Music of the Hemispheres.

Building Language begins with an analogy of ancient Roman arches to language. The Romans used stones to build the arch, the arches were used in repeatable patterns to create great structures, remnants of which are still found today... Language is like this too. Words are used in repeatable patters to make language which lasts. This is a wonderful bridge for my little history buff. Then it goes into the stem words from Latin and shows how that is seen not only in English, but Spanish too (he chose Spanish as his example, but it could be applied to other Romantic languages). This is really a vocabulary book, but the journey it takes you on is just... exciting and thought provoking.

The Music of the Hemispheres we just started. It talks about the sounds of letters and how choosing words with certain sounds can create an emotion or promote a thought you wish to convey without actually saying it. Instead of picking words with just meanings, you can pick words with both stated meaning and "sound" meaning. That probably doesn't make sense, but I've never seen language taught like this. It starts a little slow with a review of phonics, which is hard to get little brains through. BUT then you turn the page and see why he did the review and it makes sense. DS6 likes that he uses real poetry in his samples.

This became longer than intended, but I hope it gives a good sense of the program. Others are welcome to share their thoughts as well.

bookmarking this one for sure! thanks, Portia!

We recently started Grammar Island and we love it. I second all of Portia's recommendations!

MCT was a huge hit here as well. By "huge" I mean transformative.

I finally scored a bunch of these used and dd and I are really enjoying them, too. She wants the mud trilogy so badly ( if anyone wants to sell them to me!). We're just supplementing with them so I hope they'll stretch a year maybe.

Question:

ds11 is in 7th grade. What book should we begin with to supplement his b&m school? And do we need both the student and the parent books?

Wow! Portia if you are recommending, I am ordering. Too many things in common with our kiddos not to.

Those of you who have used this program... did you use a package? Any recommendations on what we need? The descriptions sound just phenomenal and spot on where we have been working with Language Arts.

For grammar, I'd start with either Grammar Voyage or Magic Lens 1. If he's had some grammar already, then probably go with The Magic Lens. Be sure to get the corresponding practice book as this is where much of the learning takes place. Note that the practice books contain vocabulary from the vocabulary book at the same level, so the practice book for ML1 has vocabulary from The Word Within the Word 1.

For writing, Essay Voyage is where he explains how to write an essay. Advanced Academic Writing 1 is about research papers.

I prefer Caesar's English to The Word Within the Word series. So I'd start with CE 1 rather than WWW1.

And I don't have an opinion on the poetry books as I haven't used them.

All that said, the whimsical, narrative quality of the MCT LA materials is confined to the Island and Town levels. My son was disappointed with Grammar Voyage because it is boring in comparison. In fact, he was so disenchanted with the Voyage materials that I rewrote Essay Voyage omitting all of the references to the voyage and adding different examples of good writing and essays. My son loved that, but it was a whole lot of work.

For the Voyage level you can get away with just the teacher books (for the practice book, you need both student and teacher books, as the teacher book has the answers in it), but for the Magic Lens level you need both the student and teacher books if you want to have answers.

Yes, after Town. Grammar (and Essay) Voyage have a traveling/nautical theme, but there are no characters like Mud or Queequack (was that his name?). After the amazingness of Island and Town, the voyage/nautical theme of Voyage was disappointing and annoying. The Magic Lens is a straight grammar book, which seems less annoying because it's not pretending to be something its not.

Thanks, Kai! I jumped the gun and went ahead and ordered Practice set 1 and the accompanying teacher book, but I'm going to check out the titles you suggested.