Typing!

We dropped: SOTW activity guide -- I love the idea... but all my youngest wanted to do was color the pictures. She didn't understand any of the reading and didn't care at all about. Plus if all it was was a coloring program, I didn't even like the style of the coloring pages. The hands on activities only distracted my kids from the point. MCT - Fizzled midway through the year. We'll probably finish it up over the summer when we have some time, but I was disappointed a little bit. For the price, I didn't feel it delivered. I had to regularly explain the mistakes in the text. I'll hang on to it for my youngest in a year or two. My daughter would like to drop: TT5 - I don't know why. It started out so well. I gave her a choice of several programs and she *chose* it. Her complaint is that 24 math problems (plus the 5 practice) are way too many. So really, it's probably not about TT. She's certainly learned from it and retained the information, so I'm having her continue to the end on principal. We'll either go back to MM or move to Singapore. None of these are bad programs, but for some reason, they didn't work all that well for us.

I think we're going to give Singapore a try next term too... I ordered Singapore 1b and 3b textbooks for summer review... When 1b arrived, I was surprised how few problems were in the textbook. So I ordered the workbooks for 1b and 3b. Now 3b textbook has arrived and there are really plenty of problems in each lesson. So it might be that the further along you go in the series, the more problems appear in the textbook?

Story of Science Math Mammoth Killgallon Lively Latin

By living books do you mean selections that are authentic texts rather than writing developed by the textbook author? If so, MCT does have some quotes. But Killgallon's "Sentence Composing" is all taken from children's literature.

How about the "Fly Guy" series? Or "Mercy Watson"?

I haven't gone out of my way to plan anything, but I always watch the lesson with my daughter, then we grab some manipulatives or sketch a picture or look at Khan academy or brainpop or do a few problems from MM -- any resource I have on hand. I think you could definitely supplement once a week, but I don't think it'd always fit with the TT syllabus or be particularly effective. For instance, last week in TT5, my daughter had two lessons on converting percents to fractions and back and then one on liquid measurement and one on length.

These are all great books, but maybe not for 6 yr olds! The Hobbit is great, but might be appreciated more in a few years. And the Roman Mysteries are rightly aimed at pre-teen/young teen audience.

I would choose math mammoth for your daughter over Singapore. The lower level Singapore books just *look* babyish. Math Mammoth will give her just as strong a foundation and is ungraded (if using the blue series or printing off the pdfs). Put your son in Singapore and let your daughter have the book that looks more grown up. Plus you don't need your daughter feeling worse about her performance in math as she compares herself to her brother.

Hooray! :001_smile:

I like it! Or perhaps I should say... "Mi ŝatas ĝin!"

Of course I love my partner and being around her, but things are so much more smooth when she's working. We get more work done, there is less stress, kids go to sleep on time...

I don't care for soft doughy cookies... I like mine well-done. I'd go for fresh crunchy cookies... where the sugar and butter in the cookie is almost toffee-like.

When I was an undergrad at a very good small private liberal arts college, attendance was not taken -- but since most classes were around a large table, it was pretty obvious who wasn't there! It was also obvious who hadn't done the reading... I also took a year at a university in the UK. I was really surprised that many students didn't attend the lectures, and many didn't do the assigned readings... in fact, I was surprised that we were just given a gigantic book list and told to read whatever we wanted, rather than a model where students were told to read a certain book and then we got together to discuss it or listen to a lecture about it. At a low quality state university teacher ed program, it was more like high school. Attendance was taken. For grad school (ivy league), it was like my undergrad... a few lectures, but mostly classes seated around a table... though I think professors might have taken attendance. I'm not sure. When I taught in community colleges, I did take attendance. It was pretty much like high school... I would like to have assumed that students were responsible adults who could manage their own attendance, but they really couldn't. I was teaching remedial reading and writing classes and the kids were 18 and 19 year olds with pretty low skills and generally disenfranchised by the entire educational system at this point. If nothing else, taking attendance allowed me to field questions like "Why did I fail?" with answers like "We met 33 times for class. You were there for 6 lessons. You didn't turn in any paper or assignment. And you missed the exam." "Can I make it up?" "No."

I don't understand your question. Dialects are different variations in a language. Is Australian English more acceptable than South African English? I don't know! Can you even say that one language is more acceptable than another? I mean, would you say that French is acceptable, but English is not? Or would you say that French is acceptable in communicating with French people and English is better in communicating with English people? As for, what is the point of grammar? Grammar exists. Grammar is how we know how to put together words into sentences... and how we pronounce (and even perceive) words. It is in my brain and it is in yours. Your grammar may be slightly different than mine. Mine is certainly different from Shakespeare's grammar and different from the grammar of a speaker of a black 8 year old AAVE speaking child. Again, I don't really understand your question. Slang is about register, not dialect. The language you use around a child is different from the language you use with your grandmother which is different from the language you use when you go out with friends your own age. Slang is that really informal language you might use with friends. Is it appropriate to use in other contexts? Probably not. Are you suggesting that language change is an act of disbedience and selfishness? If so, which English would you propose that we ought to be speaking? Should I brush up on my Anglo - Saxon? Or would you go whole-hog and reconcile your disobedience with some Proto-Indo-European? :tongue_smilie:

I always figured that a prescriptive grammar is trying to be an unchanging "standard" grammar that at one time was someone's actual descriptive grammar. But then language changes and a disconnect grows between what we speak and what is deemed 'proper grammar'. So the grammarians scramble around and modernize their expectations... Don't you think that in 100 years, a prescriptivist grammar will no longer include 'love' as a stative verb (I'm loving it) and the present perfect will have disappeared and modal + of (could of been) will be standard? I agree -- I firmly believe that academic English needs to have a standard and that written conventions, in particular, are important to be taught. I think the problem comes with prescriptivist grammar being associated with the old-fashioned view that grammar is unchanging and infallible... and anyone who doesn't adhere to it is uneducated or improper or somehow primitive. That's when the whole descriptive grammar idea came along... with the idea that other dialects and languages exist and there is nothing uneducated or improper about any other language. But that shouldn't stop us from using the right register of English. It's like... wearing clothes. It would be inappropriate to wear a black dress and black veil to a wedding or to the swimming pool or to a nudist colony. It would be inappropriate to wear a swimsuit to a funeral. It would be inappropriate to wear a wedding gown to do your gardening. These are all equally good articles of clothing, but they ought to be used in different contexts. Similarly we should not use the same writing style to write academic papers as we do to write legal briefs or love letters or text messages. It's all about register and context.

I didn't want to de-rail the question of whether grammar needs to be in a grammar stage curriculum! Unless there is a language impairment, grammar is innate (this is the descriptive grammar that I'm talking about). Native English speaking kids will 'pick it up' on their own without a textbook. A child who was not exposed to English from birth is a different situation. Some irregular parts of our grammar are learned later than others (some irregular plurals, for instance), just as it is normal for some kids not to master certain English sounds until early elementary, but unless there is an impairment, they will master it... on their own... without explicit instruction. As for "Black English" (aka "Ebonics" or AAVE), it is a dialect of English. It is no better or worse than Canadian English or RP English (Received Pronunciation -- "Queen's English), or English spoken in the Appalachians or in Singapore or in South Africa. It's just a dialect - nothing more or less. In academic contexts, we use what we've decided is 'standard American English'. It's also a dialect - no better or worse than any other dialect. Many of us speak it at home, which makes it easy for us to imagine that ours is the "proper English" and others are somehow less... I agree with Chandler mom's sentiments, that AAVE isn't an accidental set of English errors. It is a dialect of English, with its own phonology and syntax. It isn't an intentionally developed sub-language for political purposes, but rather started as a pidgin and then a creole language that developed during the time of the slave trade when a bunch of people with different language backgrounds from different parts of Africa needed to communicate with each other. Native speakers of AAVE pick up standard English in some social contexts and on TV and in movies and books and at school. In order to be successful in the majority standard-English-speaking America, it is essential that speakers of any dialect are also able to communicate in the standard dialect.

I always get a little confused by the term "grammar" to begin with... "Grammar" sometimes just means 'writing mechanics'--- you know, making sure sentences are punctuated properly and capitalized well. I think this is worth doing as early as first grade. There's no reason to put it off. Then there is the grammar that I find a bit weird and belonging more in an ESL textbook. For instance, in CLE LA1, there are exercises where the student decides whether to write "Sam and I" or "I and Sam" or "Five ducks are" or "Five ducks is". In my experience, this is bizarrely unnecessary for a native speaker of standard English. The grammar that allows a six yr old to communicate is not learned from a textbook, but is acquired as an infant and toddler. It's totally unneccesary to teach this grammar -- it already exists in our brains. Then there is the grammarian's grammar -- the language that is not a part of our dialect and needs to be taught if it is to be used. It's the grammar you dust off when you want to sound formal... you know... trying not to split your infinitives or end your sentences with prepositions. I think this one is up in the air whether or not you want to teach it at all. Finally, there's the syntax -- the linguistic side of how we put together words into sentences. This is where we teach about the parts of speech, the different types of phrases and clauses, cases and declensions and how to analyze sentences. It can be done in a study of English grammar or in a study of Latin or any other language or the study of langauge in general. I think this grammar is best doled out in small chunks throughout the years. I do like to talk about language, so even though my kids are young, we talk about adverbs or adjective phrases or superlatives or whatever we come across... but I have no desire to delve into x-bar theory in elementary school.

It was definitely 3rd grade when I was a kid (early 80's). In the TERC Investigations series that is at our local public schools, it is mentioned as skip counting groups (without x symbol) in 1st and 2nd, then taught in 3rd grade and expected to be mastered in 4th.

:iagree:

Congratulations!!! My daughter enjoyed it too -- it was her first real 'exam' (involving bubbles). The medal is an extra cool bonus!

I do use both TT and MM, but I'm not particularly worried about finishing one or the other in a school year, since we also do math through the summer. I use the MM blue (not light blue) to supplement TT when needed, but I don't worry about grade levels. I just pull it out when I think it is needed.

We've got a similar problem with a kind of weird smell (described as turpentine/kerosene/ant killer/burnt rubber) coming from our laundry room. It turns out that it's some kind of tarry paint stuff that we'd painted on the other side of the laundry room (foundation wall) earlier this week that is coming through the laundry vent. Apparently, every time we turn on our dryer, the fumes get heated up more. The solution (according to my google research) is to ventilate and ventilate and ventilate even more. Anyway, you might try cold water rather than hot water. And lots of ventilation until it goes away.

http://www.etclassics.org/nme.html The National Mythology Exam is a once-a-year exam that kids 3rd grade and up can take. It's run through the American Classical League's "Excellence through Classics". I think at third grade you only need to do the basic 30 questions (though my daughter also chose to take the additional 10 questions for older grades). There's also an Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid, African myth, American myth and Norse myth option. My daughter laughed at me when I said I was proud of her. She said "Of course I got 100%, I knew my answers were all correct. I was just waiting for my gold medal to arrive."

Wait until the mango is soft! Also, don't eat the peels. In fact, don't even let your lips get near them. A lot of people (including me) are sensitive/allergic to the mango peel. Apparently it's somehow related to poison ivy/oak/sumac....? Anyway, I'm fine with mango unless my lips touch the skin (trying to scrape away at the yumminess of mango). Google "Mango mouth" for more info. It causes a nasty rash.