I’ve used both over the years. IEW was a good help for a year with one child when she was super resistant to writing. She really needed the handholding of IEW, which begins with not really writing anything of your own for a very long time, just rewording what is already written. You read IEW’s paragraph and rewrite it in your own words. After a year with the program she was done, could sit and write something, but didn’t enjoy it, and we moved on. She did a variety of writing programs over the years, but the biggest key was simply handing her an old laptop without internet and inviting her to write what she loved, along with a round of NaNoWriMo. She did use TGTB for her senior year, and it was a good help with fine tuning her essay writing. She is now a college sophomore who has been on the provost’s list every semester, who loves writing and is in a special writing program with Orson Scott Card and people he brings in from the writing and publishing industry, in addition to her psychology major.
We’ve used TGTB for 3+ years now with a bunch of kids (the oldest her senior year, and my currently 10th, 9th, 7th, 6th, 4th, 3rd, and 2nd graders). We really like it. I have several kids who love to write (college girl, both high schoolers, and another younger one). Having used nearly every level of TGTB language arts, here is what I have found:
– The writing is gentle instruction, and not too many projects in the earlier years.
– They have kids do a mix of things: writing a letter(about something they’ve read), writing a couple sentence narration, learning about a topic and writing a report-ish, creative writing/stories, writing poetry, and as they get older they learn to write essays.
– The grammar is introduced earlier than CM did, but not a lot of it in the early levels. In the early levels it really is just introducing terms – for example they talk about what a noun or adjective is and then they use those terms when asking kids to do a picture study and name nouns in the painting or read a story and find some of the adjectives used in it.
What I love the most is that many of the different areas I want to cover with my kids (reading, writing, grammar, spelling, vocabulary, picture study, geography, making art, etc) are already built in to the language arts curriculum in a rotation. I don’t have to think – ok, have we done all those things with each of my kids this week? Have we forgotten anything? What will I plan out for next week for my family of 12 that won’t be a repeat for the big kids or way over the head of the middle or younger kids? It is already there and ready for each one.
At the same time, we love using their history because it is family style – we are reading and learning together, with extra reading for the older kids to go further and deeper.