Everything taught in CC has a purpose. It is like a puzzle that gets put together Foundations teaches memorization “ The Puzzle Pieces” Essentials teaches more complex pieces about language “ Framework Pieces” Challenge A-2 Puts the pieces together Challenge 3-4 Shows the whole completed puzzle
I have a masters degree in Secondary Education, in Language Arts. My son is slated to start Essentials next year. I have sat in on essentials a couple of time, and here is my take: WHY would we teach that kind of unnecessary thing, especially in the digital world that we live in now. They love to default to: ‘some theories say’ ... Well, in Grammar, it is or it isn’t. 🤷🏼♀️ They want to push, push, push things that I have never used, not even in a post- secondary ELA world.
I actually agree with this for the most part. I do think that some grammar and spelling you just need to know, digital world or not. But I don't (for example) know how to diagram a sentence or recognize some of the "sentence patterns" in Essentials. And I don't believe in making children learn things just for the sake of it. "Some theories say" is not a good reason in my opinion. I sometimes do feel like CC kids are just rattling off facts they don't even fully understand and that seems kind of pointless.
Do you speak any foreign languages? It is my understanding, and experience after going through Essentials five times and now having two kids in Latin, that the intense grammar builds the foundation for foreign language acquisition.
@@loriamos1906 I speak THREE, two of them at a very high level. I STILL don't recognize some of the stuff in Essentials or know how to diagram a sentence. It has not hurt my foreign language acquisition skills as far as I can tell. It doesn't so much prepare them for foreign language acquisition but for LATIN specifically. Small children that haven't really been taught grammar in their native tongue yet have been taught a second language successfully and without that holding them back. There are even schools of thought that almost ignore grammar and also produce confident speakers of the language. When it comes to world languages, my experience has been that grammar alone doesn't get you very far. I knew many people who can recite and understand all of these grammar rules but can't actually SPEAK the language. Now that doesn't matter so much if it's Latin, which you are really just going to read and translate anyway. But when you are learning a world language, relying too much on grammar is a crux. You can't go through all those grammar rules in your head while speaking. I can identify all the cases in Russian on paper and recite them up and down for you, but I'm not very good at applying them when writing or speaking. That "knowledge" just flies out of my brain when it's time to speak Russian. I can barely even tell you what case a part of a German sentence is in anymore...yet I get those right almost all of the time. Honestly, the better I become at a certain grammar point, the more likely I am to forget "the rules".
Everything works together, if you had stuck with it, or if she had had the benefit of more than one year you probably could’ve seen how it all worked together. We did Three years of essentials, and we are in challenge now and seeing where it all fits together. They will have the skills to learn any language now. Other languages use declensions and conjugations. Brooke, did you not use the the essentials guide, did you read it? All the punctuation stuff is in it as well as in the IEW guide. The tutors job was to teach you how to teach the program to your student you are the teacher. The information is there in the guide
CC asks parents to read books The Core The Question And the guides. You will only get out of it what you put into it. The tutor is not the teacher, but the parent is the teacher. If the teacher does not read the materials then the teacher can not teach the materials.
There are so many ADULTS (including some that have been to college) that don't know where to put a comma in dialogue tags. Or they don't put a comma at all and use a period instead. I am kind of floored that they would teach all of this crazy, complex stuff but leave out basic punctuation. It really makes no sense to me.
They do not leave out punctuation, the guides contain all the correct information but the teacher” parent” has to read the guide. It is covered in the essentials guide and in the IEW guide. The thing is you have to read the guides. Class time is very limited and the tutor has a lot to cover. Students are not learning unnecessary information. They are getting a quality education.
We ended up doing a mix of daily grammar practice and essentials. DGP is a small workbook that's packed with tons of practice and we just used the parts of essentials that we liked. For writing we used IEW. Thank you for watching!
Goodness. I just got a notice about the above comment and saw that you commented almost a year ago. I'm so sorry. I dont know how I missed it. We did end up using parts of essentials that we liked and also used a workbook called Daily Grammar Practice. If you are still interested you can watch the 6th grade curriculum review about both of them. Thank you for watching.
