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.

Portia-- Thanks so much for this recommendation! I am just in love with this curriculum. We got it yesterday and my son and I are eating it up!

I love words and how they sound and feel... This curriculum is how I wish I could explain the beauty and intricacies of language to my child but much more artfully developed than I could ever have done on my own.

I read the pieces of this set and see a way to inspire my child to truly enjoy and learn to create language on the level which his gifts make him capable. I wonder why our schools are stuck on inventive spelling and forced formulaic writing for children who have never been taught language... It seems such a waste and I am thrilled to have this option to give my child the tools to create instead of forcing a skill for which he is not prepared.

We also bought the Mud Trilogy with the full set. I am looking forward to going through every bit of it with him.

Yes foreign language would be great working from a "sound" foundation! If I ever see something like that I will post in a heartbeat!

I told my son the little fish he keeps noticing on the pages is named "Mud" and that we get to read about his adventures when we finish the Grammar book. It's all just so delightful!

What I wish I had is a Math curriculum that hits the same sweet spot MCT LA curriculum does. What we are doing now is BORING but he has a few gaps I am finding and filling. He needs to fill the 3rd/4th gaps before we can get into something like AOPS. He whizzed through both Dragon Box Apps (5+ and 12+) and loves balancing equations. It's hard to find that sweet spot and he nearly flips out and shuts down when he comes across something he doesn't know. I told him my one goal this year is for him to learn to find solutions rather than shut down when he doesn't know something.

I haven't found any conventions until Spring (Mar-Apr-May). I think we jumped in during the lag between the Fall and Spring ones. I do look forward to having the opportunity to browse curricula in person like that. Until then I'm skimming and learning from others.

Portia -- thanks for the write-up! Planning to order!

Happily -- have you looked at beast academy? (From AOPS) They have the 3rd grade books out and some 4th grade. DS loves the text! Not sure if it's what you'd need for homeschooling, but wanted to mention it.

I second, third, ...whatever the recommendation. We recently got MCT Island and have only been through a little bit of Grammar Island, but even at the little bit we have done, we both find it wonderful. As for Beast Academy, we just started 4A this week and DS loves it. I wish the rest of the books would come out faster. I don't know that it is quite the same flavor as MCT, but it is the closest we have ever been to finding the perfect homeschool fit with the two programs.

What has held me back from Beast Academy so far is how my son is shutting down yelling, "I can't do it, I can't do it, I can't do it!" every time he is faced with something new. I have quite a bit of negative school experiences to "untrain".

I'm walking a tight line between an occasional challenge to work through and work that is mind numbingly too easy. I looked at the pretests for level 3 and can't see him getting through it in his current mental state. We are making progress and I keep reinforcing that the one thing I want him to learn this year is how to find solutions rather than shutting down.

On the other hand, with MCT it's so seamless he doesn't feel like he's being "challenged". Tonight, he looked at me and said, "Mom, can we please do tomorrow's Grammar Island tonight? I just love it so much!".... He says math is his favorite subject and WJ puts him as >99.9 for math. I think I just feel sad that I haven't found a way to light him up about math with his innate talent just yet when I see how well MCT is doing that for LA.

Sorry I think I've ended up thread-jacking here. The MCT stuff has just set a totally new level of quality for us... and I greedily want more.

HappilyMom have you tried any of the Life of Fred books? Or Murderous Math? Read as entertainment they may be very non threatening but still feed that love of math. My DD finds Fred hilarious.

I definitely second the Murderous Maths part of this (haven't seen the Fred books, despite hearing a lot about them). They have a website - maybe you might show him and see if he likes the flavour of it? Try the Mystery Tour...

We started the Life of Fred apples when he was 4 right about the time it first came out. It doesn't really work for him. I have several of the Murderous Math books and tried introducing them over the summer. He liked the approach but did not want to read them.

I think the real problem with both of those is that his vision problems make reading arduous. Way too much text on a page.

We also tried Dream Box and too many vision problems in how they structured the questions.

This is how we ended up on IXL... only one problem per page, no distracting visuals, answers are all typed, clear connection with math standards and measurable progress and reports. But it is also perfectionism promoting, no teaching, infuriating (sometimes), and not stimulating any original thought. He gets annoyed at their slogan "practice that feels like play" because he says it is a lie.

MCT materials have nice simple pages without too many words to process at a time and the use of color to separate ideas makes it so much easier for him to follow. One reason I mentioned my math curriculum need here is because Portia's son has similar challenges to mine. I was hoping she had uncovered something good that would work for us.

From what I know right now (still hoping something better is out there)I think I need to keep taming the shut down beast working together through IXL and when he has improved there, hop over to Beast Academy...

Well. I underestimated my son...certainly not the first time. I showed him the Beast Pre-test one question at a time and he did very well and thought it was fun! So we are ordering Beast and shelving IXL. We'll see how it goes. Thanks so much for the recommendations! I always learn so much here.

Portia that helps tremendously! We are still going to try Beast but there is *something* different about formats for my son and he does prefer the computer generally.

The *book* effect that sometimes pops up isn't an issue with MCT so far and I am only guessing that it is the open spaces and use of color in the text.

I had him take the EPGY entrance test some time back. I have had it in my list as a good option to try.


I really appreciate hearing what works for your son who is just ahead of mine and shares so many of the unusual characteristics mine has.

This Michael Clay stuff looks wonderful! Do you think I could order it just as a supplement, after-schooling thing? If so, what do you recommend I order to start on that?

ETA: My Ds is in 2nd grade and loves language, vocabularly, etc.

Oh yes! It would be fabulous for after-schooling. Mine is first grade (according to birthdate) and also loves words. He has been delighted by it. There is lots of rich depth within the clear and simple explanations of all the types of words.

We only do about 15 min or so each day and just read together and talk about it. We have started with the Grammar book as they recommend. According to Publisher recommendations: After section one of Grammar Island is done then you begin to add the Vocabulary book (Building Language), Practice Island starts at the end of Grammar Island. You start Sentence Island once four-level analysis is strong as seen in the practice sentences. (Chart is a little unclear here but shows begin Mud Trilogy (literature component) after you get going in Sentence Island.) Poetry (Music of the Hemispheres) begins after you complete Practice Island.

They break it down into 4 parts like this:
1. Grammar Island
2. Building Language
3. Practice Island and Sentence Island
4. Mud Trilogy and Music of the Hemispheres

The characters in the books are introduced in the preceding curriculum pieces. We first see Mud (the fish) in little glimpses in the Grammar book's first few pages. When my son first noticed him and pointed him out, I was able to say "That's Mud, you will get to read his adventures later in our studies."

In Sentence Island we get formally introduced to Mud and friends as he tries to figure out about sentences.

The Grammar is not dry. It's very imaginative so it's fun to start with it and begin pondering language. It artfully gets in to all the pieces of language and explores what those pieces tell us and how they work together. My son was familiar with Noun/Verb/Adverb/Adjective and he has not been bored. It has deepened his understanding and feels like a story. He laughs at the humor and enjoys the visuals.

Nice! Thank you that was exactly the advice I was looking for! And what I was gleaning I should do from the website. Awesome! Thanks again... ordering now

Can't wait to hear how it goes! LA time has quickly become a cherished time for my son and I to share.

Questions:
How suitable is this for very mathy, very non-humanities type parents?
How suitable is this for very mathy, very non-humanities type DS8?
How do you choose a starting level?
What about for a very verbal-strength DD5 (not sure where she got that from) whose had no schooling yet, but is a self taught reader (since 3)? Does the program start too high? What would you start such DD5 on instead?
How much parental involvement is needed?
How much parental skill is needed?
How much parental enthusiasm is needed?
Could DS8 work through this fairly independently, given that he's shown various degrees of independent school work at home in the past?

Thanks, Portia. That time commitment seems low, though maybe you're going through it slowly.

For comparison, k12.com ELA expects 2 hours per day, 5 days per week, 36 weeks per year. A smart, focused kid can get through it quicker, and a parent is only needed part of the time, but it's a huge time drain even then.

So how much time would the child need to spend, and how much time would the parent need to spend, per week, to cover the entire course in a typical 9 month school year? Does the parent need to spend any time on "advance preparation" for using the materials, or can you pretty much just crack open the books and get started?

Given that DS8 just did a non-gifted 3rd grade ELA course (as a 2nd grader), would it make sense for him to start MCT at Level 1 which is 3rd grade gifted?

What about reusing the materials for younger siblings in a later year?

Thankyou very much. This is great information.

We got the Island set and DS8 just started reading it. Any suggestions what our DD5 should do before starting this? She's a fluent reader, but has had essentially no schooling yet. We're homeschooling and have just started DD5. She's been doing EPGY math and has done K and 1, but has rejected EPGY ELA. Actually she doesn't really want to do anything that looks like schoolwork.

Any ideas for ELA activity for DD5 while we are waiting for DD5 to be more ready for the MCT materials? "Ready for the MCT materials" means 2 things here: (1) Having learnt any prerequisite knowlege/skills one is supposed to have before starting MCT Island and (2) being more willing to participate in the learning process.

Just a little "caveat emptor" here. I leafed through Magic Lens 1 (the level 4 grammar book), and found it full of misunderstandings about grammar. The kind of stuff that makes linguists tear their hair and scream.

I'm not just talking about simplifying a complex academic subject, similar to a physics curriculum for fourth graders. I'm talking about outright failure to understand the topic he is supposed to be teaching.

(This is sadly typical of grammar instruction in the U.S. and other anglophone countries, so this isn't really to single out these books for criticism. There's probably very little out there that's any better.)

(For a refreshing, if far too brief, counter-example, check out the new standards for grammar instruction in the U.K., which were written by an actual academic linguist.)

Could you please give some examples, MegMeg?

Okay, I only had five minutes to look at someone else's copy, so now I'm going through the sample you can get on-line to see what I can pull out and explain easily. Also, I'm a little afraid of this turning into a quibble-fest. Any one point can be argued as being not that great a transgression, but it's the cummulative effect that's problematic. With that in mind, here goes:

- Let's start with the introduction:
This is not so much incorrect as it is incoherent. In the memorable words of Wolfgang Pauli, it is "not even wrong."

- He goes on: Minor logic and support words could finish the job. This is a stunningly ignorant statement about the structure of language. It is wrong both because grammar is not determined by logic (and the belief that is should be has led to many of the pernicious "zombie rules" that plague the popular imagination, like the idea that you can't say "Me and Tom went to the store" because you wouldn't say "Me went to the store"); and because it implies that explaining everything beyond subject-predicate is a matter of a few minor details, rather than a challenge of staggering complexity that still keeps brilliant minds occupied for their entire careers. I'm not saying that little kids should be slapped upside the head with that complexity, but the fact that this author would make such a statement strongly suggests that he has never had any real exposure to his subject matter.

- He talks about "four levels" of grammar in a way that is entirely at odds with how linguists talk about the levels of grammar. (Properly speaking, the three levels of grammar are phonology, morphology, and syntax. Thompson is restricting his remarks to syntax.) The four "things" he is talking about are not exactly wrong. There are such things as parts of speech, subjects and predicates, phrases, and clauses.

- "There are only eight kinds of words." False false false. This would be like saying "There are only three states of matter. Learn these and you know all there is to know about states of matter." It is also very likely that if he is trying to shoe-horn everything into eight parts of speech, he miscategorizes some types of words.

- "parts of sentence: the subject, simple predicate, direct object, and other parts." He just got done saying there are only two "parts of the sentence." Even if we accept that he's using his own way of describing things, this is just plain bad pedagogy.

- When he introduces nouns, he uses the canard that a noun is a person, place or thing, which is just not true (unless you stretch the definition of "thing" to the breaking point). Nouns can be action-like ("His humming is driving me crazy"). What really distinguishes nouns and verbs is the syntactic role they play in the sentence, as subject, head of a verb-phrase, and so on. If he's already introducing the distinction between subject and predicate, why not use this to drive the distinction between nouns and verbs?

He also, incidentally, feels the need to mention "collective nouns" (e.g. "flock") but neglects the more interesting and discussion-worth distinction between mass nouns and count nouns (e.g. "lumber," which has no plural, vs. "log," which does).

- He praises The Elements of Style. If you want to see a linguist go apoplectic over Strunk & White's Horrid Little Book, go here.

Well, that's all I have time for right now. That was harvested from just a few pages of the preview, so I don't have high hopes for the rest of it.

MegMeg - could you recommend any good alternatives to MCT (in any format)?

Let him fly through EPGY. You could also skip him .5 grade ahead once in awhile (per EPGY recommendation, if he is getting > 80% correct consistently). DS slowed down in EPGY Algebra (8), at which point (without finishing EPGY Algebra) he switched to AOPS Prealgebra (textbook+solution manual only, self-paced), and AOPS Algebra 1 class after that.

Alas, no, other than the rather minimal framework from the U.K. that I posted. A highly intelligent middle- or high-schooler might be able to handle an introductory college linguistics text.

The good news is, there is very little evidence that a technical knowledge of grammar helps one become a better writer. (Again, contra the claims of MCT.)

And of course, all this is separate from the issue of teaching literature, where it is much easier to find good resources.

I knew MegMeg's link was going to be something written by Geoff Pullam before I so much as hovered over it, but I guessed wrongly that it would be at Language Log. I'm now fantasising about a home educating language arts programme based around reading and discussing every article at LL as it comes out...

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/

Could be an afterschooling activity.

That would be awesome!