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sunnyday

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  1. Ah, this is the other one I reference sometimes. It's also about reading skill, plus (down a few posts) has a list of classic lit. http://forums.welltrainedmind.com/topic/509936-so-how-to-work-through-progressively-more-challenging-works/
  2. I had this one bookmarked, is this what you were thinking of for scientific reading skill? http://forums.welltrainedmind.com/topic/467812-developing-advanced-reading-skills/ I think I have the other bookmarked too (hope I didn't just print it)...hang on.
  3. Two lectures. One when the thread was first posted 18 months ago, and the other when it was bumped a couple of weeks ago. Like the OP, when it comes right down to it we've gone with school because my kids' other parent is most comfortable with the status quo. I've made my peace with that. If I felt strongly enough that homeschool would be a significant benefit for my kids, I'd argue in its favor. But there are honestly pros and cons. My kids have friends at public school, and I'm able to use my time and skills to benefit my whole community (volunteering in class, serving on the PTA board) instead of just my own kids. I will admit I crave the flexibility of being able to shuck off the public school schedule and the constraints of the curriculum -- but I am also attached to the freedom of having safe, reliable, free childcare during the day that lets me balance my home duties and personal time with my parenting and other responsibilities. The chance is growing that we're going to hit our breaking point with public school. My kids are outliers and last year was kind of egregious with respect to how little their needs were met. I'm going to keep closer tabs on them and be ready to make a change this year. But if that happens, I won't regret their public school years at all. In fact, I'd almost say that PS elementary and HS middle school (and hybrid high school?) could represent the best of all worlds, for *my* family.
  4. I'm trying to put my kids in Jules Verne and Jack London and Mark Twain. But their interest flags quickly with that material. Lord of the Rings holds them a little better. But it's summer...they're reading for 3-4 or more hours a day, and if a lot of it is low-level (DD8 is on a weird Big Nate kick) I just let that go for now. So on that vein, some material that they've enjoyed around that age but that's well below 10-12th grade in level would include the Chronicles of Prydain, the Enchanted Forest series, and anything/everything Rick Riordan. ;) Oh, and Alcatraz and the Evil Librarians.
  5. How sensitive is sensitive? My daughter still has nightmares about Medusa in the film version of "The Lightning Thief" -- but the first 2-3 in the Harry Potter series were no problem for her, nor were any of Riordan's books, or the Dealing with Dragons series, or the Chronicles of Prydain. She and another second grade friend both went through a Ramona phase *and* a Roald Dahl phase right at the beginning of this year, which I thought was an interesting coincidence. :) I think a couple of her classmates also had a Series of Unfortunate Events phase (DD is currently re-reading the first few). Sometimes I think finding good books for a specific child's reading level is mostly a matter of throwing everything at them and seeing what sticks. We go to the library a lot and DD gets a ton of picture books and Smurf graphic novels, but I can usually toss 3-4 "good" books into her pile and sometimes one will catch on like wildfire. (I still can't believe she won't even try anything by Marguerite Henry though. I LOVED those books as a kid.)
  6. I think a lot depends on the kind of learner you have. My son is a "don't teach me, let me dive in" kind of guy. He'd probably thrive on a meandering multi-stream path like what quark has described through the years: http://forums.welltrainedmind.com/topic/320275-designing-a-non-traditional-math-course-for-a-math-loving-structure-hating-child/?p=3272174 My daughter prefers structure (as far as I can tell) and would probably do well just working straight through BA. I think if I kept her home I'd consider doing math M-Th and taking Fridays to be a "mess around with different topics and approaches" kind of day, which would be a time for pulling out the competition math and such, or programming, exploring in Khan, whatever. For now though, all those "extra" resources have basically just served as stopgaps to keep my public schooled kids from imploding on a steady diet of school math. ;) We use them on occasional weekends and breaks to make sure the kids know that there's a beautiful science of mathematics out there, quite apart from the drudgery of school workbooks. :lol: It's sort of a "slow them down" concept, but also kind of a "feed their need while we figure out where we're going with all this" concept.
  7. If your student doesn't have the stamina for these yet, then maybe you don't want to push their interest level by insisting on multiple problems like this every day. Pace yourselves. But these examples have all been chosen to demonstrate how, as humans, we can work SMARTER than a calculator and reduce the calculation required and the memory space needed. They aren't difficult at all to someone who's had any practice looking for the clever way. A student who's come all the way up through Singapore, for example, shouldn't have any problem at all seeing a thousand in 997 + 605 and near-instantly seeing the outcome of the addition problem. If they haven't had a lot of practice composing and decomposing units of higher value (eg. making tens) then that's the skill level you need to be working more on, not just brute-force chugging through these problems without the benefit of paper. My DD is working on third grade math but we haven't built those skills and she would be very intimidated by these problems. Our summer plans will include games to build her subitizing skills.
  8. Did you not get answers you liked in your previous thread about this? http://forums.welltrainedmind.com/topic/639389-is-mental-math-a-necessity-in-the-primarily-years/ I think working memory is a muscle that can be built up, one that weakens if left unused. I think that manipulating numbers abstractly requires a greater depth of understanding and number sense than just going through a rote algorithm to perform an operation. And I find that my kids get a great sense of accomplishment if they can come up with a strategy to tackle a large calculation and hold multiple steps in their head. So yes, I do think there's value in working on this skill. "Training" the skill as a separate thing? Not really, not so much. I mean, the goal of getting educated in mathematics is to train the mind to work with patterns and abstractions. If all we needed from math was the ability to calculate, the marvels of this technological age mean that we are almost never more than an arms reach from some type of electronic calculator. Human calculations are largely redundant.
  9. We do karate year-round, plus one sport per kid per season (fall, winter, spring.) We re-evaluate the karate schedule each season once we know about practices (we always have very late notice on that too.) Sometimes we re-evaluate each week. Anyway, I'd schedule a meeting with the principal to discuss homework expectations in 6th grade. What have you got to lose?
  10. Just looking at the table of contents, I'm not seeing redundancy. One introduces the bare outline of an idea, the other fleshes it out with mathematical rigor. I wouldn't go into those Intermediate chapters without the understanding you'd surely get from the Intro chapters.
  11. Maybe a librarian who's engaged with him about areas of interest?
  12. My kids like Reflex Math, IF they are intrinsically invested in improving automaticity after they already have good number sense. Just for building familiarity through repetition I like some of the pages in Beast Academy, like the jumbled times table. It works the brain from a slightly different angle, you know? Still...you don't need fluent math facts to do logic and set theory. And as I'm learning from my 10yo, if they're clamoring for the deep end, sometimes you just gotta toss 'em in. I've spent like two years insisting that if he really wants algebra and beyond, he needs to have solid arithmetic especially on fractions and decimals. Finally I threw up my hands and said, "Fine, do Alcumus on topics you've never seen." He's in heaven and learning like a sponge. Who knew?!
  13. This makes me recommend the Brief Lessons all the more. :) I was a physics major who rolled my eyes at my freshman year professor's attempt to connect the concepts we learned to historical figures in science. I just wanted to do the equations and get the right answer. Now that I'm listening to these expositions on how wildly divergent and beautiful Einstein's epiphany was; how eclectic were the variously conceived bases of quantum mechanics -- to the point that early contributors could be completely flummoxed by the developments of later contributors who built on their ideas; how iterative was the development of our modern view of the cosmos...it's incredible to see the human touch in everything. :)
  14. The Euclidean Algorithm is introduced on page 44, immediately after the page in question. LOL. This stuff is absolutely intended as a thought experiment to introduce the EA. IMO, and take this with a grain of salt because I'm using it as a supplement only, plus my kiddo who's ready for BA5 is 10 years old with great frustration tolerance...but instead of jumping in to teach, I'd jump in to learn alongside. Talk these concepts out. What I like about Beast and AOPS is the mathematical thinking. Why does this work? How? What tools do we have and how can we apply them? I wish like anything that my children had a math circle available, but failing that, they have Beast, and the little monsters' conversations in the Guide, and my interested engagement. (My kids HATE. IT. if they think I'm doing that faux-Socratic thing where I fish for the right answer by pretending not to know it. But they appreciate it if I offer *just* as they're getting frustrated, "I think I see a thing. I have NO idea if it's the right approach, but I want to see where it goes. Mind if I share?")
  15. Just for a literally 15-20 minute blitz that teases some of the relevant sub-topics and invites inspiration, your kiddo might enjoy the second of the "Seven Brief Lessons". We've been listening to it on audiobook, my DS10 loves it. http://www.sevenbrieflessons.com/the-quanta
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