MCT LEVEL 2 Classical Education Homeschool Package - Package by Royal Fireworks Press

Second Edition.  Extensively Revised.

Now full-color.

Grammar Town builds on the foundation presented in Grammar Island and offers increasingly sophisticated concepts with the theme set in a townscape.

Second Edition

Extensively Revised.

The teacher manuals include tips for the student pages, pre and post tests, activities for specific topics, and wonderful original readings to keep the energy level charged with fun learning.

Teachers should note that this teacher manual is not usable by students.  The student edition is rich in activities and exercises, all of which are completely filled out in this Implementation Manual. 

This volume has too many pages for the binding to withstand normal student use. (The student book is bound in two parts to make it easier to handle and also to make it possible for the student to read the parts repeatedly without danger of the binding coming apart.)

Classical Education Edition (In Two Parts)

We are excited to announce that our new Caesar’s English I Classical Education Edition is now available. 

We are proud of this Classical Education volume.   It is the best we have ever done.  Our 25,000-image photo gallery of the ancient world—which we have built recently—has engendered in us a new level of creativity.  A principal aim of this new Edition is to give children wide-ranging insight into the ancient world and its contributions to our lives.

We were so enthusiastic about the new edition of Caesar's English that we created a book that is too large to be handled easily by children.  We ultimately decided to publish the student book in two parts of 192 pages each.  We also kept the original, one volume standard edition, to which we will soon add new photographs and change the cover.

Michael Clay Thompson has re-designed the volume to reinforce the entire language arts curriculum; every strand of the curriculum is revisited in each of the twenty lessons. 

The vocabulary component is based on the Latin stems and lists of Nonfiction Words made from the stems as well as lists of Advanced Words and Classic Words.  There are Caesar’s Analogies, Caesar’s Synonyms, and Caesar’s Antonyms.  And there is Caesar’s Word Search. Vocabulary is loaded into all the activities and there are new vocabulary terms added to the stem lessons: five new words in each lesson.

The writing component is ever present in each lesson with numerous examples of how the great writers have used the vocabulary words.  Specific writing activities include Caesar’s Paragraph where the exercises parallel Paragraph Town, the writing book at this level, as well as Caesar’s Rewrites where the students rewrite the sentences of great authors.  Also included are sections entitled Who Is That Writer? in which there is a short introduction to a major author whose work has been used in the examples.

The lessons have been divided into quarters to reflect the four levels of grammar analysis.  Through every set of five lessons a different level of grammar analysis is emphasized, so the first five are devoted to the parts of speech, the next five to the parts of the sentence, lessons xi to xv to phrases, and lesson xvi to xx to clauses. 

The poetics are enhanced by a poem written by Michael in every lesson.  Using the vocabulary words of the lesson, his poems offer the students a perspective on the Roman world through the eyes of one of its denizens.

Insight into the Roman world is provided by a more than 80 full-page photographs of Roman sites and artifacts. 

It includes:

• Many more vocabulary-loaded, reinforcement activities than in the original edition, including a Word Search in each of the twenty lessons

• An increased concentration on the links between English and Spanish.  Caesar’s Spanish highlights the Spanish cognates of the English vocabulary the students are learning.  Myriam Thompson has translated some of MCT’s poems into Spanish, and bolder type is used to emphasize the cognates.   She also wirtes about the importance of Iberia to the Roman world and provides biographies of some of the Roman emperors born there. 

• Added perspective on the feminine experience in Rome: MCT says: "We have tried to pay some attention to this dimension of the text. There are images of Roman women, there is a poem from a mother's point of view, there are images of jewelry that Roman women wore, there are poems about art and culture.  The difficult thing about looking at Roman history is that most of the famous names are men, and most of the famous events are battles or assassinations (think Caesar).  But we have tried to give a bit of a rounded perspective".

• A ten-part biography of Julius Caesar using the words from the vocabulary lessons.  

• Thomas Milton Kemnitz has provided fifteen essays on Roman buildings, the use, styles, and making of columns, the Roman use of concrete and its importance, Roman roads and streets, the Roman handling of water including aqueducts, lead pipes to houses and fountains, and the Roman baths.

You can read more about the background to these books and how they fit into classical education in two News items: The Roman links and the Ancient Greek link.

The second book of Michael Clay Thompson's stunning new Poetry series uses architecture as an extended metaphor, showing that poems are constructed like buildings and with careful attention to every detail.

Topics: alliteration, assonance, consonance, end rhyme, rhyme scheme, internal rhyme, eye-rhyme, foot, iamb, trochee, anapest, dactyl, spondee, sonnet, ballad, rime royal, limerick, simile, metaphor, personification, apostrophe, endstopped/enjambed. Can be used as a stand-alone introduction to poetry for young students, or to set the stage for a more advanced program in middle or high school.

Enables students to understand and appreciate poetry on a far higher level than usual. Stunningly presented.

Poets quoted in this volume include: Lewis Carroll, TS Eliot, Gelett Burgess, Emily Dickinson, William Blake, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robet Louis Stevenson, John Keats, Edward Lear, Walt Whitman, Lord Byron, Robert Frost, Henry Longfellow, Percy Shelley,William Shakespeare, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Samples: (pdf files) Page 5 | Page 29 | Page 39 | Page 51

Teacher manuals for the curriculum always contain the student book, plus extra pages for instruction, answers to questions where applicable and suggestions throughout the text for teachers to implement.

 Sample page (pdf file) page 28  | page 129 | page 141   

Paragraph Town is at the same level as Grammar Town, Caesar's English Iand Building Poems. With these four books, teachers are now able to implement a full language arts curriculum strongly grounded in the fundamentals.

This new book gives children an entertaining and comprehensive introduction to the paragraph. It has an extensive and structured Teacher Manual with twenty lessons, in-depth exposition and assignments.

The protagonists who teach the concepts to be learned are two engaging ducks who explore the importance of organizing sentences into orderly paragraphs; some of the different kinds of paragraphs--dialogue, description, expository, comparison; punctuation as well as grammar.

Practice Town is the second in the Practice series. This is primarily a low-cost, consumable, workbook supplement to Grammar Town and Paragraph Town and uses vocabulary from Caesar's English Iand poetics from Building Poems; students work through the sentences using a unique four-level analysis and thereby reinforce their grammar and writing skills.

Each of the hundred sentences has a separate page with four blank lines to fill in the parts of speech, the parts of the sentence, phrases and clauses. By the end of the workbook, by examining a wide and often amusing set of sentences, students experience the success and satisfaction of a clear understanding of the principles of English sentences.

The practice books have class set prices depending upon the quantity ordered; schools and school districts can combine orders of the practice books for maximum discount:

25 books: $9.00
50 books: $8.00
100 books: $7.00
250 books: $6.50
500 books: $6.00
750 books: $5.50
1,000 books: $5.00

Any mix of practice books can be ordered. Please note that in most cases, the shopping cart will not show the actual discount; this will be applied when you are billed, and no matter what the shopping cart says, you will never be billed or charged at a higher rate than that to which you are entitled.

Sample pages: Sentence 38, page 49 / Sentence 68, page 79 and comments