Diving into Literature
While our younger learners have been learning alongside Mud the fish and Fishmeal the duck, our older learners have launched into classic literature and more advanced poetics and writing. We still make ample use of the Michael Clay Thompson Language Arts Curriculum even as we begin to add more classic and contemporary literature of interest to our learners. In recent months learners have been reading such classics as The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Hound of the Baskervilles, Frankenstein, and Murder on the Orient Express. Learners discuss characterization, setting, plot, themes, and poetic elements of these novels. They make comparisons among the novels, imagine new settings and characters, and add their own plot twists in creative thinking and short writing exercises. Finally, they write an academic essay exploring one of their own ideas arising from these discussions and exercises. This essay work is supported by MCT’s Advanced Academic Writing series.
In addition to their literary studies, learners expand their vocabulary through focused study of Latin, Greek, and Germanic word stems in The Word Within the Word. In addition to learning the stems and several words derived from each stem, learners complete creative thinking activities, analogies exercises, and classic words identification challenges. Learners are expected to begin using their new vocabulary in their academic essays as appropriate.
Poetry and Humanity continues exploring sounds, rhythms, and figures of speech using classic poems by Keats, Yeats, Burns, Dickinson, Shakespeare, and many other respected poets. At the same time, learners consider what it means to be human. This marriage of poetry and philosophical ideas continues and deepens in the next books in the series: Poetry, Plato and Beauty and Poetry, Plato, and Truth. Learners begin to recognize poetic principles in literature and non-fiction and apply them to their own writing as they learn to communicate ideas effectively in various rhetorical situations.
Undergirding all of the literary, vocabulary, and poetics studies is MCT’s four-level grammar study in The Magic Lens series, which helps learners master increasingly complex elements of English grammar. Learners recognize how classic writers apply and creatively stretch the conventions of formal grammar and poetics. With these skills, learners can not only compose high quality sentences, but also parse complex sentences in order to understand complex ideas. Additionally, they are better equipped to revise their own work as well as the work of other writers.
The MCT curriculum continues to be challenging and demanding, but learners are eager to rise to the challenges precisely because this curriculum assumes they are intelligent and capable. At Lotus Learning, any materials we use are tools to meet the needs of individual learners, and we find the MCT curriculum to be one of the best tools for engaging and individualized learning.
