How does Michael Clay Thompson compare to Byrdseed.TV?

A serious language arts curriculum for gifted students, published by Royal Fireworks Press. Multi-year, book-based, student-paced. Byrdseed is press-play classroom lessons, not a curriculum.

How Michael Clay Thompson compares to Byrdseed.TV

Michael Clay Thompson’s language arts books are excellent. The Royal Fireworks Press materials, with their Latin and Greek roots, four-level sentence analysis, and Victorian-feeling illustrations, are the gold standard for gifted-kid ELA in the homeschool world. The books treat grammar like a serious adult subject, and kids respond to that.

This isn’t a comparison where one is better than the other. The two are aiming at different jobs.

What MCT is

MCT is a full language arts curriculum. A level usually means five books: grammar, vocabulary, writing, poetics, practice, literature. A student works through them over a school year, and the progression is multi-year and carefully sequenced.

The student reads the book and does the work. A parent or teacher might help, but the curriculum runs on the student’s own pace through the pages.

MCT covers grammar, words, writing, poetry, and literature. That’s the scope.

What Byrdseed.TV is

Byrdseed.TV is a library of video lessons rather than a curriculum. There’s no first book, no second book, no required path. A teacher (or parent) picks a lesson, presses play, and the lesson teaches. Students argue, defend a claim, notice a pattern, produce work.

Byrdseed covers more than ELA: math, science topics, thinking moves, writing, creative work. The point isn’t to march through a sequence, but to give students somewhere to think hard about something today.

A Byrdseed ELA lesson doesn’t replace MCT. A 30-minute classroom session where students argue about a sentence isn’t the same kind of thing as a multi-week structured study of grammar.

So which one

If you want a serious, multi-year language arts curriculum for a gifted student, especially in a homeschool, MCT is one of the best things on the market.

If you want lessons to use in a classroom (or alongside any curriculum) where students press into harder thinking and produce work in 30 minutes, that’s Byrdseed.TV. Many MCT families also use Byrdseed for the parts of the day MCT isn’t built for.