Would Writing Tales and CLE Language Arts be overkill?

[mcmom4]

I keep thinking I have come to a final decision about writing and then read something else. I just looked at WT and it looks pretty good....sort of like CW if you ask me. Looking at Book 2, it looks like there is also a good bit of grammar in it and I was just concerned that it would be overkill.
Any thoughts? TIA!

[TracyR]

Yes. Writing Tales follows the same approach as CW . But is way more "mom " friendly in holding your hand on how to teach writing . We're using WT1 right now and my girls love it . No more complaints from them .
I don't think doing CLE LA with Writing Tales 2 would be overkill at all . There is grammar in WT . But it only focuses on the grammar that is needed to write sentences . It doesn't get into diagramming and I believe a few other grammar subjects . Actually Amy recommends by the time you reach WT2 that you will want to supplement with another grammar program . Now wether the grammar you teach from CLE matches up with WT2 I can't tell you .
I believe this was a question that was asked on the Writing Tales yahoo group as well http://groups.yahoo.com/group/writingtales

I'm sure Amy will pop in here as well to answer that .

[BizyPenguin]

If I'm not mistaken, WT is more than just writing. There's a lot of other lang arts included. You only need a simple writing program to make CLE complete. We use Bob Jones English (just the writing portions). You could also use something like Jump In or Writing Strands.

[OhElizabeth]

Well what grade student are we talking about? And you're looking at WT2? There's a LOT of grammar in WT2. They need to be proficient in that grammar already, or they could really bog down, meaning I'd definitely do a grammar program concurrent with someone who is not proficient. My dd had previously done quite a bit of grammar, so we just did SG4 lightly this year (just the sentence parsing, not an aggressive pace). See the models in WT2 are quite long. The older the student, the more they'll be able to handle assignments in WT2 and writing assignments in another full program. The younger or more delicate the student, the more you're going to have to trim to keep it reasonable. Would the CLE LA be writing and grammar and conventions? You might need to prune that to keep it reasonable, depending on the student.

Now one thing I did add, because we were only doing the sentence parsing from SG and not a full LA program, was editing and punctuation. We used the Take 5 Minutes Daily History Editing first semester, and 2nd semester I had them work through pages from the Punctuation Puzzlers books.