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Clemsondana

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Everything posted by Clemsondana

  1. I haven't dealt with this as a parent, so I don't have any advice on that front. But, I do have a couple of thoughts based on talking to teachers and volunteering -feel free to disregard if it doesn't apply. First, the fact that she was 'behind' at 5 shouldn't be an issue with learning to read. Retired teachers will say that when kids used to come to school in first grade (before there was K), they often didn't know letters, numbers, counting, colors, shapes, etc. They learned that in school. Most were reading by the end of first grade and almost all were by the end of 2nd. So, since she is still struggling despite a lot of effort on your part, I'd try to find out what is going on. Dyslexia? A processing problem? A memory issue? I have no idea, but 'more' of regular teaching might do nothing if there is a disability that isn't dealt with. Also, one of the most frustrating things that I saw when I volunteered (helping kids with homework at an afterschool program) was what happened in the effort to keep kids on grade level. There is no point in moving on to more advanced concepts if a child doesn't understand basics. They can expand their geography, science, and history knowledge with read-alouds or documentaries, but they can't move on with math or reading comprehension until they can do the basics in those subjects. And, it always felt wrong to me that kids who struggled to get it the first time around were expected to learn at twice the usual pace to catch up. Catching up can sometimes be done with more time on task, and sometimes a kid is missing a basic concept or skill and once they get it they rapidly catch up. But, if a student needs more time to learn then they may not be able to learn at the regular pace, much less an accelerated pace that will let them cover 2 grades worth of material in one year. Schools don't seem to know what to do with that, but it ought to be OK to cover 3rd grade skills as a 10 year old instead of an 8 year old. Maybe the student will make a leap at some point, maybe they will graduate a year later, or maybe they will learn every year but never move beyond a certain 'grade level' of work and they'll need all of high school to get through 8th grade math. I can't imagine how frustrating this is, but I don't think a student's inability to understand things is proof that the parent or teacher are teaching poorly. They may need an entirely different approach, more time, less content...it's hard to know.
  2. I'm not sure how noting that some countries are more homogenous is racist. Some countries have stronger cultural identities than others, whether race-based or not. One challenge in coming up with any sort of national framework is that there is little agreement in the US about what should be taught or how it should be taught. I think that Finland is a country that starts school at 7 and apparently everybody is fine with that. If we tried that here, some would be thrilled and others would sign their kids up for early enrichment preschool, similar to what already happens, just for longer, potentially leading to less equal outcomes. Even on this forum there is a lot of disagreement about early start or late, relaxed vs rigorous, how history should be taught, whether advanced science or math is a necessity or a waste of time... If most people agreed about what was important, or even agreed to 'trust the system', the results would look different than one in which people all want their priorities to determine the plan, at least for their child, whether others have the same priorities or not.
  3. I think we overestimate the benefits of nice facilities. Obviously there are places where buildings are falling down and that is not OK. But, I'd guess that the room that I teach in at our co-op, an often-crowded windowless classroom in a church basement with folding tables and chairs, is worse than any of the high school facilities in our city. We have English and history classes taught in the chapel, where students sit in pews without desks. But, most of our students are expected do do their work and they do. Our Science Olympiad team meets in an empty Sunday School classroom with no lab facilities (we do labs in people's kitchens) and we routinely outcompete private schools. Where I went to high school, a super nice new facility with high tech capabilities, nice gyms, etc was built in an underserved part of town while my middle class school still lacked AC...but my school still outperformed the other academically. I think the bigger deal is home stability, cultural exposure (what Core Knowledge was attempting to fix), early childhood behavior and vocabulary, exposure to books and good nutrition. But, these things are HARD to fix. Based on my volunteer work, I'd say that what is needed is decent volunteer coordination to match up willing volunteers with jobs that need to be done and a lot of person-hours invested in giving kids the kinds of things that most of us do without thinking. I don't know how to replicate the hours of conversations, book reading, museum trips, and watching of Animal Planet for kids whose home life includes none of that, but I think it would be very difficult for a standard 6-hr school day to bridge that gap. Some of the charter schools have after-hours programs that attempt to replicate some of those things, but it's hard to do in an institutional setting. One of the places that I volunteer takes the kids to do things in the summer - zoo, museum, pool, theme park, etc. But, I've been at children's museums when a school group comes. It mostly seems to be a drive-by experience where the kids touch everything and only have 2 hrs. Meanwhile, my kids and I spend 4-5 hrs, read the explanations, and talk about how things work. So, even when an effort is made to try to replicate those experiences, they are more giving the appearance of doing it but possibly missing the most important part - the interactions that get the information into the kids' brains. Is it possible to give those kids the same experience? Probably so, but it would take a lot of willing and invested adults to make it happen. I've been thinking a lot about this over the past several years because this sort of thing is what I plan to do a lot more of once my kids are graduated. After 6 years of volunteering, it is less obvious to me how to approach this than it was when I started.
  4. A few years ago i planned to reference the Stanford Prison Study in a class that talked about the subconscious, bias, etc. When I looked for a quick summary reference, I found articles like these https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2019-45337-001 and https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201310/why-zimbardo-s-prison-experiment-isn-t-in-my-textbook . There are a couple of long popular press articles about it, too. I didn't have time to dig too deeply into the topic at the time and was able to use another example, but I wanted to share.
  5. My husband is 6'4 and neither of us is small, but we have found that we don't sleep any better in a king than a queen. We have a queen, but have often vacationed in places where the bedroom has a king. We did find that getting a Purple mattress was a game changer, though. We may hear the other one get up, but we don't feel the bed move so we're more likely to sleep through it.
  6. I don't know what grade they start, but you might consider Singapore Math's Challenging Word Problems. We did those sometimes when we were doing elementary math. You might also like Balance Benders workbooks from the Critical Thinking Company - they may have other things, too - we've used other products of theirs but those are the only math ones we used.
  7. I don't have opinions on what to use as a supplement - my own kids preferred to just move faster rather than use 2 programs in elementary. Once they hit pre-A, they like using Life of Fred as a different way to look at math alongside their regular program (AoPS for one kid, Arbor Press for the other). But, I thought it worth mentioning that you probably don't need to work on frustration tolerance for a 6 year old by adding more challenge. They might need more challenge just so that they are learning something, and you could move more quickly or add supplements to achieve that. But, frustration will come at some point as the material gets more difficult, if not in math, then in something else. It's a tricky thing to manage for advanced kids. One of mine went from liking math fine and being quite advanced to hating it because the 'great challenging program' that we were encouraged to use was frustrating and kid didn't want to be frustrated every day. We ended up taking time off and doing something else for a while. Kid is now doing a great job and finds parts of math fun again, but it took a few years and some detours. For mine, frustration tolerance seemed to be a function of age, frequency, and number of things in their life that were frustrating (a frustrating math problem, learning to write essays, and a challenging music piece in one day? Recipe for disaster!).
  8. From that perspctive, I don't know if it matters if you do a practice test at home or an official one - feeling defeated if you don't know answers would happen either way, although there is less pressure if it doesn't count for anything. If you self-administer something, you could also decide that it isn't a good fit after one section and choose to do something else. If you're going to get/check out an ACT prep book anyway then you could have him work some problems in the 'study' section (not a practice test) and see if it looks like a reasonable fit for him.
  9. I think the crowding/canceling/covid issues are probably very location specific. We signed up for the SAT 2 weeks before the deadline for the December test and had no problems with the facility already being at capacity. They followed the same masking and seating policies that the schools are using and it didn't seem to be a problem (in our area schools have been mostly open since August). As to how to know when they are ready - we've done the SAT, not the ACT, but I found that the practice tests were accurate for predicting my student's score. My umbrella would have been willing to accept a self-administered practice ACT in 9th grade, but that's dependent on who you have to submit to. There is a pre-ACT test like the PSAT, but you can't do it yourself. We have local public and private schools that give it, but they will only let students in the correct grade take it with them (I don't remember what grade they give it to). We considered it and then decided that the Dec. SAT fit our schedule so we went ahead and did that. My kids have never been stressed about standardized tests - they may find them tiring, but not stressful. I think you'd have to judge how it would affect your student and decide what might be stressful and what they need to practice. Are you worried about specific content, a test above their level (intended for jrs, taken by a freshman), the timed test, the group setting...??
  10. I think it's just asking if transportation issues will affect your ability to get to work and giving notice that it's not a valid excuse for being out. A bike, a scooter, or even 'on foot' is reliable transportation if you live near where you work. They don't care if you don't drive yourself, but if you're going to be out every time the person who drives you goes on vacation, gets sick, or has a sick kid then it's a problem for them. If you ride with your neighbor and get an uber when they're unavailable, that should be fine.
  11. Posters have given good advice about the skills subjects (reading, writing, and math). I'd do a math placement test and then see if he can read something and write a one page report about it that is well organized and grammatically correct. I remember one of the Jeopardy champs saying that he had gotten a lot of his knowledge from reading children's nonfiction. It lacks nuance for complex topics but he said that it was a great way to learn a lot of information quickly. If you're worried about content knowledge, that approach might help. You might also want to work on note taking - if you are looking at transitioning to a public high school as a non-freshman, especially, most students will already have experience taking notes during a class. He could practice by taking notes from the nonfiction that he reads and then by taking notes from anything that is like a lecture - a sermon, a podcast, a documentary. You could also self-administer a basic skills test, which can help you find any gaps that you didn't think about and also give an idea of where he stands compared to what is considered basic for his grade.
  12. I have a teen boy athlete with a very high metabolism...if he didn't have protein smoothies we'd have to load him with carbs constantly to keep him full - he'd think nothing of eating 1/2 lb of meat per meal if he was hungry. We do whey plus milk plus fruit in smoothies, but his favorite is peanut powder, which is just dried ground peanuts. He has 3 bananas plus 2-3 scoops of protein powder plus milk to make a quart as a snack before bed many nights. That being said, my daughter is the carb queen and I think that fluctuating blood sugar can create mood swings. She doesn't put the 2-3 scoops of protein that workout boy uses, but a 1/2 scoop of protein powder seems to keep her satisfied. I don't really know of a reason why it would be worse than eating 1/2 of a chicken breast or cup of yogurt, which would both be fine. I am careful to get ones without a lot of additives - we use stuff from Naked Whey (we get the 'almost naked' which has sugar and vanilla since I'm not worried about some sugar for the kids, both of whom are active and much less likely to want a junk snack after having a smoothie).
  13. We've given away some things, but I love that my kids have enjoyed reading some of my childhood books. My parents kept a closet with good toys that my kids played with. My in-laws got rid of almost everything, and then bought, and gave away, things as grandkids came along. It would have been cheaper to just keep things to begin with, but they like to declutter and they like to shop it works for them. I have a basket of board books and a shelf of Seuss. We've gotten rid of some of the fluff early chapter books and picture books that weren't favorites.
  14. I have a wisdom tooth that is unobstructed and has been slowly coming in for more than 20 years. The dentist of my youth had suggested letting it come in and then be pulled rather than cut out...nobody anticipated this. It's the kind of thing that they look at and just say 'Huh...' 🙂 But, despite having all of my normal molars come in painlessly, there were times when this tooth was incredibly painful, often for a week or more at a time. It's easy for me to imagine that most kids don't experience much but some have discomfort or pain for a long time. And, both of my kids were weird with teeth - one had none for ages, then got 8 in 2 months. The other had a more normal schedule but when cutting their first tooth actually had blood dripping from their mouth one day. They looked like a little vampire. Then they lost their last baby teeth right around the same time as their sibling, who did it on schedule and was 3 years older...that's been good, though - they mostly had their braces at the same time, so I wasn't having to visit the orthodontist for years on end...so, yay for weird.
  15. With my kids, I could encourage it by having things that they could do on their own - handwriting, a reading comprehension workbook page - that I expected them to do on their own. At times it became a thing - maybe a 'pround of myself' independence step - for them to have those things done by the time I was ready to start school. But, there was nothing I did to make independence happen. One kid has been very independent since they were 7. The other alternates between wanting to work by themselves and only wanting to work if I'm sitting beside them, and they are in middle school.
  16. A low histamine diet is fairly easy, so that wouldn't be bad to try. I love Indian food, but something in it causes a histamine response so I'm selective about eating it, unfortunately. But, if it isn't otherwise contraindicated, maybe trying a benedryl before bed might be worth a shot - it doesn't sound like you're likely to wake up feeling worse, anyway. Early on I saw the recommendation to take benedryl if you got covid - I think it was maybe to help suppress the overactive immune response or inflammation, maybe? I hope you find something that helps.
  17. We rarely/never did a 'going out' date night when the kids were little. But, once they got past the baby years they were in bed by 8 so daily time together (talkng, a TV show or movie, etc) was not a problem and sometimes we'd wait and eat together once they were in bed (occasionally carryout, usually just homemade stuff). Now that they are older, they don't go to bed early and it's become an issue because for one of them, if they are awake they want to be where the adults are, talking. We had reached the point where we sometimes ran errands together or occasionally left the kids home and went out to eat without them - it's also easy to justify if we feed kids early and then each drop one off at a practice and then we meet to eat. 🙂 This has gotten harder with the pandemic. Things are fairly open in our area, but we have chosen to invest our 'family risk' in letting the kids participate in their activities so spouse and I aren't doing anything that adds more exposure other than necessary errands. We are struggling with how to make this work. We've tried going for walks during the day, but if we don't leave the property (we live on a couple of acres and have lots of room to walk) then the kid who wants to talk comes and asks questions every 5 minutes (Can I have a snack? What time is dinner?). We'd be fine occasionally telling one of our kids to be somewhere other than the living room by 8 and they'd happily eat early and then go shower and read in their room, but the other would need something every few minutes - a question, a snack, a book that's in the other room...and they drag out bedtime until slightly before we go to bed. They are both out of elementary school, and we are looking forward to being able to go elsewhere more when the virus clears up or it gets warm enough that we don't mind driving somewhere nearby to be outside.
  18. All of the symptoms that you are describing, minus the headaches, were what sent me to the allergist. I was actually trying to get my allergies under control before what I thought was going to be a long, drawn-out process of finding out what I had that made me feel so awful - I had planned to start wtih the easy thing first. It turned out that treating my allergies treated everything. I'm not saying that you have allergies, but my allergist said that it was mostly systemic inflammation causing everything. People who have issues with diet and histamines complain about some of the same things, which makes sense if it's all hyper immune system-driven problems. I've also had an infection (something normal like a bad cold) kick off some sort of allergy-like purgatory as I was recovering. I don't know what to tell you about treating it - last time I used a mix of antihistamine and I think sudafed, but I don't know if that would be OK in your situation.
  19. Explaining it was how I knew that the approach was mathematically sound and not just guess-and-check. They were perfectly capable of saying that, since the difference was 6, they added 3 to one and subtracted 3 from the other (although they might not have been able to say what 'the other' was since I think they just saw a balance, but I could be wrong), and then they'd say that since one was twice the other that you were actually adding 6, and then on the other side you were dividing by 2, so you had 1.5 and 6 and then... I could understand the reasoning, each step made sense, but it would have been a lot harder to write it out that way. That's actually how I check their current work - first they read answers, and if they are right then we're good - there's no way that they are routinely randomly guessing asymptotes and factors with radicals. But, if they miss a problem then I have them read it to me. If there's a simple mistake they usually catch it, and if not then I look to see if any of it matches the provided solution. Sometimes it does with a little rearranging and sometimes they've gone about it in a different way and I have to sort out whether it makes sense or not.
  20. It could be the food, it could be the antihistamine/anti-inflammatory effect of the medicines, or it could be that, by giving her immune system something to do (fight off possible infection at the wound sites) that it lessened her allergy symptoms. I always found that my allergies were better while I was sick with something else, and once I was well I'd have a few days reprieve before they kicked in again. It's possible that it's a combo of all 3.
  21. Other than Christmas we are not crazy into decorations here - I change place mats, pitchers, centerpieces, and other dining room decorations, and usually something on the mantle for holidays. There are a few odds and ends that I use for specific holidays - a few snowmen will stay out, I have a few pumpkins in the fall, that sort of thing. There are some things that I change out during the year, though. My living room is in blues and grays, wth some coral accent pillows and blankets. In the summer, I have coral turkish towels that are great lightweight covers that I use when my family wants the ceiling fan on. In the winter, I have fleece coral blankets. When there are no holidays, I tend to use cut glass bowls or pitchers that I inherited from my grandmother as dining room and piano top decorations. Since it's mostly in spring and summer, it feels light. For much of the summer, our decorating theme is 'baskets of garden produce' as I process and freeze it. 🙂 One thing that I did this year is get a new winter bedspread. We don't do comforters because I need to be able to wash the bedspread more often due to my allergies. We've always had a white coverlet, which I love for it's light cottage vibe. I wanted something that was warmer so that I didn't need to keep piling on blankets. I ended up with a dark purple chenille bedspread that looks very cozy for winter and still fits the rustic cottage feeling, but is warm. I also have a thing about adding lots of lights. I keep fairly lights woven around the slats that hold my mattress, but I rarely turn them on in the summer. When we take down the big tree after Epiphany, I'll separate all of the ornaments that we buy on trips. I'll put them on the little 3 foot retro purple tree that is usually in a bedroom or in the playroom and tuck it in the corner of the living room. Our 'travel tree' is fun, doesn't take much space, and adds some bright lights when it's still dark outside.
  22. At the time, kid wasn't ready to write the problems down using their method. They would intuitively know to add or subtract 3 'outside the parenthesis' but I don't think they would have been able to reproducibly translate it into equations. Years later they can write it in a reasonable way. But, learning to write the equations and show some steps is probably more a function of getting frustrated when they miss a problem and have to start over than anything else...they finally learned to show work and if they miss a problem, they (and, if they get desparate, I) can go back and check their work and find that they added instead of subtracted or misread their 4 as a 9. But, they often take a different approach than what the AoPS solutions guide shows. Sometimes it's the same thing but I can tell that they saw it differently in the original setup so their numbers are lumped differently, and sometimes we have to check their reasoning to see that they also used a valid approach, but it's different (and sometimes less tedious).
  23. @lewelmaThanks for that description - I've said several times that I have a kid who sees math in a way that I don't but I haven't been able to explain it clearly, and solving problems like that in their head is exactly what I'm talking about. They did it with those 'Fred is 2 years older than John was 5 years ago and 6 years older than twice as old has he is now' sorts of problems. When we first encountered them, I would sit beside my student and do something normal, like decide what X was going to be and then start adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing to get the various expressions. Kid would look at it a few minutes and then blurt '15'. 🙂 Sometimes kid did something with ratios, and sometimes I think kid saw a balance and added or subtracted from each side - I remember kid explaining that since there was a difference of 6 between them, they added 3 to one side and subtracted 3 from the other. I listened to enough explanations to see that kid was doing some mathematical reasoning and not just super-fast guess-and-check, but I still never would have seen that approach. But, kid is also compliant and has no reason that they can't write things down, so when I taught the usual method it was fine...but I think that with most problems they still do the in-their-head method first if they think it'll be faster. They usually show their work correctly these days, so I think that the traditional method is their check rather than how they initially do the problem. But, they aren't intuitive about everything - if they get a complex equation and are supposed to realize that if they represent part of it as a and part as b, then they have a difference of squares...well, they might or might not recognize that. Which is not bad - learning to recognize it is the skill that they are learning and once they have it they know how to work with it, but it takes work. And, my other kid is completely different. My 2 kids have never gotten stuck on the same concept, so I don't think it's my approaches to teaching them - it's something quirky in their brains, and we work through it, sometimes with repetition and sometimes with a new approach and sometimes by taking a break. 🙂 When I teach my bio students, I know that there are common mistakes and ways to get confused, but there are also occasional unique confusions that I have to sort out.
  24. I agree with those who say that public school parents are unlikely to want projects I find that I didn't appreciate projects sent home from church for my kids because I'd have to budget time or find supplies. I can't imagine that people who are away from their kids for most of the day want to have their time with their kids full of extra projects. I may be extreme in this, though - one of the big perks of homeschooling for me is that I don't have to do crafty projects. My kids don't particularly like them. We are huge museum fans, though.
  25. Domestic has some good suggestions. Some of my worst frustrations were when I had in my head that we needed to be done by a certain time. One other thought is that having every break be a negotiation could be a problem. I had a kid who would get hangry, so for a while we had a set 'do 2 subjects and then go have a snack' pattern, and then there's the 'do 2 subjects and then exercise/physical activity' break. So, there are breaks but not play breaks. Most kids won't get so excited about a banana or jumping jacks that it's hard to get them back to work. It gives their brain a break and may provide needed food or movement but it doesn't start them doing anything that they'll fight to continue. And, if they are regularly scheduled after certain subjects, at certain times, or after a certain number of things are checked off then there's no time lost to pleading for a break.
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