Michael Clay Thompson: Writing Program - Series by Royal Fireworks Press

In response to requests from English teachers who have discovered the results that can be achieved from using his grammar and vocabulary programs, we are pleased to present Michael Clay Thompson’s series about writing.

It begins with Sentence Island, a lavishly illustrated book for third grade, gifted or fourth grade regular students. Ideally, Michael would like kids to use Grammar Island first, and then proceed on to Sentence Island, all the while working with Building Language and Music of the Hemispheres. For information on these books and the complete series, go to Michael Clay Thompson's Language Arts Curriculum.

This volume features an array of quirky animals, birds, insects, a talking tree and an amazing fish—whose name is Mud. From each character, Mud learns a different aspect of sentence structure. These rules and concepts are the essential foundation students need for formal writing assignments.

This eagerly anticipated book teaches in a lively way some advanced concepts. Understanding these concepts enables students to write sentences that make sense, communicate ideas and impart information. Its approach and the wonderful illustrations, demonstrate too that it can be fun to write well.

The next book in the writing series is Paragraph Town.

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.

In what will be an indispensable book for English teachers and all teachers of gifted children, Essay Voyage explicates the elements of the correct, formal essay—the essay expected for essay exams, research papers, critical responses, and other formal analyses of academic subjects. With the use of extensive examples and thorough explanation, we see that formal writing involves the correct use of words, sentences, paragraphs, punctuation and other elements such as organized structure and unity.

The book has a journeying theme that takes us around the world. Each chapter is followed by exercises, challenging questions, examples of good essays and a discussion of the correct use of words taken from Caesar’s English Volume 2.

Ideally it should be used in conjunction with Grammar Voyage, Caesar’s English Volume 2 and A World of Poetry.

This is the first volume at  the secondary level in Michael Clay Thompson's Writing Program. It is an important addition to his curriculum for formal language study and extends the writing series from Sentence Island, Paragraph Town and Essay Voyage into higher grade levels.

Students practice advanced academic writing with four assignments for which they must review their knowledge of grammar and punctuation, learn the MLA formatting method for research papers, know how to structure a well-written paper and use standard proofreader's marks for correcting their own work.

There are sample papers to illustrate good and bad writing, an explanation of grading expectations and ten new focus points after each assignment to use as a checklist.

This is a rigorous and detailed program, essential for gifted students and for anyone who needs to write formal academic papers. The accompanying Teacher Manual has an invaluable CD of comments for teachers to use when grading papers so that students can learn not only from their mistakes but also from when they do well.

The Teacher Manual consists of a book and a CD. The book contains the student manual pages with supplementary material throughout, implementation advice and punctuation quizzes.

The CD has Michael Thompson's extensive archive of his grading comments, compiled over many years and which English teachers may copy and paste to use in grading student papers; they enable teachers to do a thorough job of instructing and helping students in the grading process.There is also a slideshow of how to use the whole MCT Language Arts Curriculum.

Volume Two's Student and Teacher books, published in November 2009, extend this exacting program from Volume One with more elaborate MLA format rules, more competent essay continuity to forge, more proofreader's marks and forty more actual research paper comments to absorb.

So that students and teachers do not have to juggle two books to find out what is in which book, Volume Two also contains the summaries of punctuation, usage and grammar rules of Volume One for review, with additional items and special comments.

The assignments:

• A Paper about Poetry or Shakespeare
• Comparison or Contrast
• Evaluating Ideas
• Creating an Academic Idea

The Teacher Manual consists of a book and a CD.

The book contains the student manual pages with supplementary material throughout and implementation advice.

The CD has Michael Thompson's extensive archive of his grading comments, compiled over many years and which English teachers may copy and paste to use in grading student papers, and also, in this volume, a 3 minute video of Michael addressing the student about the importance of excellent standards in academic writing.

Advanced Academic Writing volume 3 not only requires longer, more complex, and more deeply documented papers of students, it also provides extensive explorations of intellectually advanced attitudes and understandings that differentiate the most mature and outstanding students, teaching students the excitement of aggressive library research and the pleasure of participating in a scholarly tradition that has ennobled research for centuries.

This volume focuses on achieving unity in style and and originality in content and the assignments are: Art and Thought; The Idea of an -Ism; Discovery and Truth; Ancient Ethics.

The Appendix includes punctuation and grammar rules and a list of common errors

The Teacher Manual consists of a book and a CD.

The book contains the student manual pages with supplementary material throughout and implementation advice.

The CD has Michael Thompson's extensive archive of his grading comments, compiled over many years and which English teachers may copy and paste to use in grading student papers.

This 191-page book, with its CD of all Michael Clay Thompson's research paper comments, supplements his three-volume Advanced Academic Writing series and also offers a unique stand-alone resource for grading student academic papers.

It is a sine qua non for grading academic papers, a resource as useful to seasoned teachers as to homeschoolers coping with the issues for the first time.

For the past forty and more years, Michael has graded student papers and written extensive comments on them. He soon tired of writing the same comment for the same mistake year after year and began to put his comments into a word processed archive he could draw upon as he needed. Eventually this archive became extensive and comprehensive.

Opus 40 has the archive of his comments, his approach to teaching students how to write formal papers, his approach to grading student papers, and his reflections on, and explanations of, the comments he has written about structure, grammar, punctuation, format, style etc.

The CD makes accessible all the comments so that teachers and parents can use them when grading. (Note that these are the same comments that accompanies each of the Advanced Academic Writing Books).