For those that use Rod and Staff for English and/or Omnibus

[Excelsior! Academy]

I am piggybacking a question off of the k-8 board. Did any of you spread a level out over more than one year? We are thinking of doing Omnibus starting in 8th grade. It never occured to me that Omnibus with Rod and Staff would be very intensive. Would you suggest spreading out Rod and Staff or just following TWTM's suggestions for English while doing Omnibus?

[Excelsior! Academy]

Bumping, in hopes of a response.

[mrscopterdoc]

I have not used omnibus but I have used Rod & Staff English for 3 years. We love it. It is a very good, solid grammar and writing program that you don't have to supplement with anything. You can, but you don't have to.
HTH

[Kendall]

I have used Rod and Staff through 8th grade and then I stop formal grammar and we do some diagramming and review of grammar through Latin and writing. If you planned for R&S 8 to be the last formal grammar you could stretch it into 9th grade. I found that with skipping most writing assignments, review lessons at the end of the chapter, and spreading the punctuation/capitalization throughout the year as dictation you can do 3 lessons a week (or less) . We tried Omnibus in 9th grade and didn't come anywhere near to doing all of it. We weren't doing Omnibus at the same time as Rod and Staff so I can't comment on that.

[nutmeg]

Did you see this thread? Several people talk about doing R&S 8 during high school (nothing about Omnibus): http://www.welltrainedmind.com/forums/showthread.php?t=9168


These recent R&S threads have been very helpful!

[Excelsior! Academy]

Thank you. Off to read the thread.

[Jean in Wisc]

We do an English program and Omnibus, but we do not do everything in Omnibus. I decided not to do Herodotus. And unless we find an easier English translation of Plutarch, we will just do portions of the Boys' and Girls' Plutarch. I'm not sure we will do 12 Caesars, either. We've read most of the secondary books already, so those will not need to be done, and we do not do all of the composition in Omnibus.

We were doing R&S up until this year. I changed to Warriner's English Gram & Comp. (I was sick and tired of R&S. LOL!) We do most of our grammar study out loud together. I also do a writing program (doing parts of Put That In Writing, Format Writing, etc.).

We also do history separately (Human Odyssey).

My son has not had problems getting everything done. We do not always go the speed the books recommend, though. If we need to slow down, we do.

If you are flexible, I don't know why you couldn't do both R&S and Omni. If you want to do every thing on schedule with Omni, though, it will take a lot of hours and then you might feel overloaded. It just depends on how you plan to schedule it.

:)

[Grace is Sufficient]

My 9th grader is doing the first half of R&S English 8 this year, and will finish it next year. To cover the whole book in a single year, in addition to vocabulary studies, literature, and writing seemed excessive. It has worked well for us.

[Julie in GA]

then you could skip the writing lessons in R&S (or vice versa). This would enable you to get through the text more quickly.

I see no reason why you couldn't spread R&S out over two years, though. I would just take it one chapter at a time, and see how it goes. (As some on this board say, "just do the next thing.")

When you get to 9th grade, you'll need to decide what's going on the transcript, and how you will fulfill the English credit. You can easily do this through Omnibus while finishing up R&S 8, but you may also want some sort of writing or rhetoric instruction (like maybe Classical Writing?).

[Excelsior! Academy]

Is Classical Writing the name of a curriculum or a method? How much writing does Omnibus include?