Do you know how she's trying to tell apart b and d? Does she have a method to do it, even if it's sloooow? With DD8, she just noticed the difference, but with DD4, I had to constantly repeat "b is looking forward, d is looking backwards" for the 2 months we had to remediate this for.

Of course, some systems don't work for practically ANY children...

Oooh, I really really really dislike her. I mean, not personally, but her whole thing.

For a slightly counterpoint, DD5 has TONS of trouble with this and has really excellent visual memory. Almost too good -- so good that it's way too easy for her to reverse and rotate things in her head, and they just look the same to her. We've remediated this for b's and d's and all the other rotations, but I'm currently steeling myself for doing this for 5s and 2s -- she's persistently confusing them, at least in their less recognizable digital formats 😞 . She's also still occasionally writing numbers with the digits reversed.

And I'm going to blog about how it works shortly 😄 .

Oh no 😞. I missed this update -- glad I saw a quote from it below. This is not sounding good. What program were they using before, if any? Can you give me an example of a conceptual question he's missing? I might have suggestions.

Well, this thread inspired me to tell DD5 about WHY we add an s to a word and how that helps us read it. We were already working on adding s's, but I suddenly realized that I never talked about what the point of this was grammatically. Can someone summarize the idea of this approach for me by any chance? We've so far used phonics with both the kids, and I do think phonics is important... but I'm intrigued.

Ah, OK. I don't have so much experience mixing programs like this, so I hope someone chimes in. I know that some people use Alcumus for fluency, if you wanted to match it up.

I'm going to keep an eye on the numbers. Since my kids are little and won't be vaccinated, I expect we'll do outdoor playdates and that's it. But that's more than what we've done so far -- we've kept our socializing virtual this year. Thankfully, that has gone surprisingly well after a slow start during the first few months of the pandemic.

OK, so you say you've used both context-free CVC words and also nonsense words. Which ones have you seen more of? For DD5 (she turned 5 today!), only nonsense words helped appreciably. And we had to spend literally months on each pair she confused, without ANY context clues to whether it's a b or a d. DD5 does all these things, too, by the way. I don't know if she's dyslexic or not, but I know we've remediated it successfully without needing any outside intervention. And it was hard work.

Yeah, that also made me wonder what was happening here.

I've definitely found this with my kids. It's best when rules are clear and consistently enforced. Frankly, I've kind of failed at doing this in my homeschool, since I had a half-baked idea of having our learning be completely delight-driven and voluntary. That didn't go very well for me with my very stubborn children 😛. I don't know why I thought that observations I've made from the rest of our life didn't apply, but... lesson learned.

I haven't, but wouldn't that kind of be problem overload? I know there are plenty of people in here whose kids took a good long while over AoPS books.

Whereas I do run things like that 😄 . I give kids different stuff depending on level.

Oh, you absolutely need both teaching expertise and subject expertise. I often run into issues with AoPS that come from cluelessness about how kids learn. And that definitely comes from hiring people who are NOT teachers as the online instructors.

I'd do it with a decent salary. I really would. I actually LIKE teaching.

I think it's possible to be culturally non-homogeneous and yet have high levels of trust 🙂. I would guess that's where New Zealand is -- not that it's become homogeneous.

Oh, I'm so glad you like them!! I've been surprised how much I've been impressed with them. They actually have a LOT of information given how funny they are. And they're organized relatively well.

Funny!! DH went to CTY camps in middle school, I think, and he loved them. That’s why he wanted DD8 in their system 🙂 . We’ll see if we use the camps, but I’m pleased she scored as having mastery of elementary math. Not that I didn’t know that she did, but this the first official result that tells us so!!

I guess I see that, but we don’t even agree on having evidence-based education for things which we basically agree how to evaluate, like math.

Yep. This. Graphing should be done by hand. You start working point by point and work up from there. But the “point by point” work is absolutely essential for getting the mental model right.

So they are teaching people to teach math, but not teaching people the math they ought to be teaching. That’s amazingly absurd.

I’d like us as a society to agree that education should be evidence-based, no matter what “side” we’re on. As is, NEITHER side believes that, as far as I can tell.

They are strangers when they start out, but certainly by the end of the year, they are not strangers. They are highly regimented relationships but certainly relationships. And in that thread, there's a counterexample, too. It doesn't have to be either/or.

Institutions can't replace relationships, but kids have relationships within institutions. Kids have relationships with their teachers. As for the school system, I can't imagine it cares about what I think, but so what? It's still interesting to discuss.