Meaningful Composition

We were surprised, over the past four years of distribution of CQLA and past six years of distribution of WBLA, to discover that there were moms out there who did not want all of the “extras” in our programs - copying, dictation, comprehension, vocabulary, character tied throughout the student’s daily language arts study, grammar lessons linked to the student’s essay writing, etc. These moms often had a grammar program they were happy with (usually Easy Grammar, which didn’t surprise us since that was one of the programs we modeled the grammar portions of CQLA from) and just wanted composition. They often had already been using a Key Word Outline approach to essay writing but desired a writing curriculum with each step of the writing process laid out for them - from directed paragraph writing in original compositions to passages and outlining lines provided for essays from given materials. Thus, we have excerpted the “writing only” parts of CQLA/WBLA to give you Meaningful Composition.

Meaningful Composition (MC) is a consumable, user-friendly writing curriculum containing grammar/usage applications and revisions via a checklist called the Checklist Challenge. It uses what Training for Triumph calls a “directed writing approach” in which each paragraph and each sentence of each paragraph is “directed” for the student. It tells the student how much to write, what to put in each paragraph, how to find sources, etc., in a step-by-step format. MC is not a writing idea book but rather is a complete writing curriculum with instructions from pre-writing (outlining, early determinants, finding source material, researching, and more) to rough draft writing to revising to final product writing.

Each level contains two levels within it so that more advanced students in each level are expected to write more details and complete more revising items than beginners in each level. Each book also contains helpful appendixes for the teacher and student including lesson plans for co-ops and small groups, editing and revising marks chart, and Checklist Challenge helps. Note the + following MC 4, 6, an 8 (first semesters) indicate that those books, in addition to being good writing books for those levels, are also strong remediation books for reluctant writers a couple of years older than each level.

Meaningful Composition may be used as a stand-alone one semester writing curriculum or may be combined with a grammar-only program (such as Easy Grammar or Jensen’s Grammar) to be used for an entire school year. MC teaches the Key Word Outline approach with all passages and details given, including how to outline longer sentences and what to do with unusual sentence structures (semicolons, quotations, etc.). It also teaches other outlining techniques, such as formal outlines, split paper outlines, 5 W outlines, and more. Finally, a step-by-step writing program that contains grammar application within it!