Mt. Pleasant Classical Academy

I presently have books everywhere, all over the floor and my school table, trying to figure out grammar & lit & writing for next year for MilitaryKid. This year he worked through R&S grammar 6th grade and has done rather well but he hasn’t done their writing assignments. MK has made it half-way through Editor-in-Chief A1, and has made great strides at catching errors as he proofreads their writing. He hasn’t transferred this new skill to his own writing yet. For writing he’s written too few topic reports in history or science, but has made it through Classical Composition’s Fable and half of the Narration book. His writing is choppy, filled with run-on sentences, punctuation errors, and it is not even close to being 6th grade level writing. Maybe 3rd grade level. He’s a reluctant student too, and would rather be playing with the dogs then doing school of any kind. I’m reluctant to say he’s going into 7th grade too; educational maturity is lacking.

For Language Arts for MK I plan to drop R&S grammar since their 7th grade textbook gets too abstract for even me; and will drop Classical Composition for writing.

This is what I have for next year, for Language Arts, just grabbing books off my shelves:

GRAMMAR

Editor-in-Chief — it’s working and we’ll stick with it. LOL, I have books A2 - C2

Rules of the Game — Books 1 & 2

Jensen’s Grammar — iffff Rules of the Game goes quickly we’ll add this in. It might take us 20 weeks to get through Rules of the Game or 40 weeks, hard for me to say right now. If it takes just 20 weeks we’ll move on to Jensen’s Grammar.

Literature:

In the past I’ve ignored doing a formal program here and instead have relied upon WTM and Sonlight book lists and asked MK questions about his reading or had him narrate the story back to me. This approach worked great with ScienceKid but MK dawdles so much that his ‘read book list’ is quite short this year. I want something that guides me a bit more too, something a bit more directed learning. Frankie at Kitchen Table Learners suggested Lightning Literature and a local HS friend happened to have it for me to borrow. After close examination I do not care for their writing assignments but their literary analysis lessons are something I have not touched on at all. We’ll try this for the coming year.

The big switch will be in writing. I’ve looked through my Writing Strands books, and the Writing Power book sitting on my shelf, and just couldn’t see what I wanted or thought MK needed. I have Put That in Writing — and I think that will work for us. “trains students in techniques for developing paragraphs with strong topic sentences and supporting points that are both logical and topical.” He’ll also write reports in History and Science related to what he is studying, and really the quantity needs to be increased ten-fold.

This past year MK took a break from spelling and vocabulary work. This coming year he’ll have vocabulary study back on his plate with the emphasis on learning Latin and Greek roots. SK used Vocabulary from Classical Roots and while I really like this program MK is just not ready for something this rigourous yet. It will probable be way, way too high for MK but I’ll give it a try. If we have to bag VFCR for a year, I’ll have him work through Words on the Vine first, to get him into the groove of doing root-work and a bit of time to mature as a learner too.