Brave Writer and Michael Clay Thompson

Let's start with this: I did not intend to use two English programs. I definitely did not intend to use two English programs plus several supplemental pieces. But that's what I've ended up doing. I notice others doing similarly on various forums, but given that both of these programs are hard to wrap your mind around until you start using them, I thought I'd have a bit of a comparison post.

Brave Writer's strengths include its focus on creativity and language as a natural part of our world. It encourages Big Juicy Conversations, not just about books but also about movies and art and life. It encourages us to simply enjoy what we read without feeling the need to analyze it all. Brave Writer emphasizes how much our writing can be about the things that we naturally enjoy and are inspired by, and not necessarily related to traditional academics at all.

Michael Clay Thompson's program's strengths lie in the absolute joy it takes in academics. The love of academic writing and language comes through very clearly. He emphasizes that the most enjoyable reading starts with writing that is extremely well done.  Because of this, he focuses on technical grammar, classic vocabulary, and academic writing.

So, can you see what the likely weaknesses of each program are? Brave Writer can come across as almost anti-academic at times, and MCT's program feels as though it is almost discouraging creativity. They both start with a love of language, and they both eschew teaching/following formulaic writing methods, but they approach it from very different sides.

We don't try to use these at the same time. It would be far too much. We started with Jot it Down, and it was a light, fun introduction. The Kid wasn't ready to move on to Partnership Writing yet, but did want to know parts of speech, so I crossed my fingers (there are nearly no sample pages!) and bought MCT's Grammar Island. She loved that, and learned easily and quickly from it, so I picked up the rest of the Island level as well.

We continued on like this. When we would hit a point where we were getting restless with one approach, or finished one level but she wasn't ready for the leap to the next level, we would switch to the other one. They have balanced each other perfectly for The Kid, giving us a solid set of academic books, and a good number of creative projects.

Suppose the Wolf Were an Octopus

We piece together most of our curriculum here. It is the easiest way to meet The Kid's needs. One of the pieces I have loved for Language Arts and keep coming back to is this wonderful little series from Royal Fireworks Press.

The books are split by grade level (K-2, 3-4, 5-6, and 7-8), but they all follow the same format, simply using books more likely to appeal to each of those grade ranges. For example, the K-2 level focuses on picture books and early chapter books. The 7-8 version features books like Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry and The Hobbit.

For each book, there is a total of 18 questions, 3 questions in each of six "levels". The levels correspond to Bloom's Taxonomy and the basic idea is that when you begin to work on comprehension, you would start with level 1 questions. As children become more adept at understanding and discussing literature, you would work your way up through the levels to more complex discussions. However, they include all the levels of questions for each and every book, so you would start with the book level that matches your child's interest level and/or reading level, then use the questions to adjust for comprehension ability.

The levels used in the books are:

1. Remembering: Basic facts about peoples, places, or things
2. Understanding: Often about why a character did something, using situations where the "why" was often explicitly stated in the text or is easy to discern
3. Applying: Questions that have the student apply situations in the book to their own lives - what would they have done if...? If you could interfere at any point in this story, when would it be?
4. Analyzing: examines information and situations in the book. There are a lot of "how", "why", and "what do you think caused _____" types of questions in here. 
5. Evaluating: Asks the students to make judgments about the books - was an action an example of courage or cowardice? How did a character apply their own sense of judgment and was it consistent with what they said about their morals? What was a character's biggest strength and biggest weakness?
6. Creating: These are invitations to rewrite the story, or part of the story. The series title comes from a question in the K-2 book, relating to Red Riding Hood: "Suppose the wolf were an octopus. How would the story change?"

We've used these books in a few ways, all of which boil down to helping me come up with more creative questions than I manage on my own. When The Kid wanted to learn how to write paragraphs, we used questions from these books to come up with good topics. She recently is tackling essay writing. We're using MCT's Essay Voyage as the main text for this, but find their assignments uninspiring, and she was thrilled to see me pull these off the shelf to replace the assignments. They cover enough variety of books that we've ever actually read just to match up with the series, we just find something in the list that she has read and enjoyed and wants to write about!