khall
-
Posts
220 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Events
Blogs
Classifieds
Store
Posts posted by khall
-
-
We use a great journal titled "My Nature Journal" that we saw at the Queens Homeschool site. ( I actually bought it from amazon because it was cheaper) Each child has one and we absolutely love them. There are lots of pages for sketches, but it also gives you activities to do and helps provide some direction to nature walks or other excursions. For example, one of the activities was to go on a nature walk in the woods, but there was a scavenger hunt list of things to look for (something older than you, something taller than you, something alive, etc.) It's a really fun book and we use it frequently!
-
Well, different approaches work for different kids/families/learning styles, but CLE LA was a big miss here. Lots of people use it and love it but we tried it last year and had to eventually throw in the towel and rethink our approah to LA. I loved that it had everything for LA integrated so I didn't need a book for each subject. However, as someone else mentioned, this won't work so well if you have a child who is not exactly on the same level across the board. For us, one child struggles with spelling so we started right off by substituting another book. The other child is a hands on, creative, visual learner and CLE is very much a textbook approach. Everyday there are a variety of activities that require circling the nouns, correcting the punctuation, finding the proper word usage, etc. She just doesn't learn that way and I ended up doing so much tweaking, and spending so much time looking for creative ways to present the material that I just finally gave up. It was just too dry and textbooky/workbooky for us. Lots of kids do well with that approach though, it just didn't work for "us". We've actually ended up going with a more Charlotte Mason approach with a bit of Waldorf thrown in and everybody is happy, but it's certainly an extreme switch from the approach that CLE takes. I would recommend that you look at as many of the samples on their website as you can, and if you like what you see than just try ordering one or two light units. They're only a few dollars for one, so if you try it and it doesn't work you haven't wasted tons of money.
-
Look up convergence insufficiency disorder. It's an eye disorder that causes blurred or double vision while doing close work (like reading). Most eye exams won't check for it and kids can test at 20/20 vision but still have this problem. Symptoms are similar to dyslexia, such as being able to read multisyllabic words but skipping or misreading small words. Other symptoms would be very slow reading and tiring easily during reading.
Good luck!
-
-
It would've been nice to have the "light bulb" go off in elementary school rather than in my 30's, KWIM?
This is me too :lol:! I loved math, got a 5 on the AP Calc exam, tutored math classes as my work study job in college, taught Algebra II for a summer to Upward Bound students, and prior to taking our children out of ps to homeschool them, I was working at the elementary school teaching Title I math to the students who needed extra help. It's very sad to say that during the past year I've learned so much more by teaching my own kids with MEP and MM. I was really good at applying algorithms before, but now I actually "get it". Happily, DS9 already "gets it".
-
I felt the same way earlier this year when I received an order from them. I had specifically been interested in the Pictures in Cursive books, but had also ended up ordering one of their science books and a history book as well. When I opened the package I was disappointed at the quality, particularly when I found typos :glare:........HOWEVER....DS9 now LOVES cursive and has gorgeous handwriting. He wants to do cursive, it's his favorite subject. He loathed it before, so the end result is that we'll continue to order from them because their materials are appealing to my son and work for him. The thin cover turned out to be irrelevant....and I fixed the typos :D.
-
Count everything, make the "system" happy and then go on with your regularly scheduled programming.
I think I am going to try to do absolutely that! I appreciate all the thoughts everyone has shared. And now.....I'm going to go mark off all five days this week as school. I haven't taught a single thing but after reading through all your responses I am now convinced that Lego Robotics camp must absolutely be counted as school! :lol: (and we listened to audio books in the car on the way to and from :tongue_smilie:)
-
Wow, thanks for your responses! It sounds like almost everybody has a different method of deciding what is actually school.
I do not count museum days, zoo days, vacations-- nothing. (unless we also do all our subjects) One day is when we get through a lesson in each subject of our book work.This is what I did this year also, and it was EXHAUSTING, because we did do so many outside activities. I was always scrambling to get the bookwork in so I could say we did a day of school. I think I need to be more like the person who said that if the sun came up, then it counts as a day of homeschooling. Love it! :lol:
Somebody asked why in the world I don't count our extra activities as school and it's because they are things we always did anyway. For example, I don't feel like I can count chorus at church as music class because they always had music class at school and also did chorus at church on top of that. I feel like if I now count chorus as their music instruction, that it is less music instruction than they had previously and they are now being shortchanged in some way. Does that make sense? Or am I losing my mind?!
-
We've only been using it a few months, but I love the understanding that DD8 seems to be gaining by using it. We're currently in 2A, because after a year of Horizons she knew how to "do" math, but didn't understand why she was doing certain things. She scored very high on her standardized test, but completely bombed the Math Mammoth grade two end of year test, which is why I started her in the beginning of MM grade 2. I love how different approaches to solving problems are taught, rather than the "this is how you must do this type of problem" approach. We just did a page the other day where there were a few addition problems with carrying and they were already solved (incorrectly, with a variety of different types of errors). The instructions were to find the mistakes and explain why they were wrong. That requires a good solid understanding of what is happening and some deep thinking. Love it!
-
I know that's an odd question! :lol:
Reading the thread about how many days everyone does and I realized that all year I was stressed out about counting the days. This was our first year at home and so many activities that we did are things that I know most people would definitely count as "school", but they were things we had always done when the kids were in ps. The local museum has hands on activities on Sat. mornings, both kids have always done children's chorus at church, and we've always gone to programs at the Audubon Society, and lots of other things.
I felt like counting these activities as school was sort of like cheating because we've always done those things, and I felt like school had to be something else that involved specific curriculum and lesson plans. For our state (Maine) we must do 175 days and I really didn't end up counting the days we did field trips or activities.
So are the extra fun things that are part of life anyway really counted as school? And if I'm counting those activities as school, then are the kids actually doing less than when they were at ps all day and we did the same things at home that we're doing now? :confused:
-
Mine are 8 and almost 10 and have their own. We started them in Jan. and by June there are differences in the timelines due to books they've each read on their own. The almost 10 year old is a Civil War buff and has specific battles and other events in his. The 8 year old is obsessed with horses and has Seabiscuit, first pony penning on Chincoteague, etc. in hers. They love their timelines and flip through them periodically of their own accord. I don't think they would enjoy them so much if we only did one as a family.
-
We go year round, and our state requires 175 days, so we "officially" do school four days a week during the school year and 2 days a week during the summer. These are days that we make our way through the lesson plans for our curriculum. We actually do much more learning than this, but the kiddos are only 8 and 9, so I don't think they realize yet what's going on when we play a math card game, do tangrams, science experiments, cooking, nature walks, computer games, watch Liberty's Kids, etc. on a "non-school" day. They love summer and we have a great rec. program, so they do tennis a few days a week, track a few days a week, and arts and crafts daily. On the "official school days" they know they need to get up and get going and do their math and LA lessons prior to going to rec. department activities. They also participate in the summer reading program at the library, go swimming at the town pool in the afternoon, and each of them has a week at a daycamp of their choosing. This year DS9 is going to Lego Robotics camp and DD8 is going to animal camp at the Audubon Society. They're excited about this and I haven't pointed out to them that they each picked a camp that's five days of hands on science! If you're flexible and creative, you can squeeze in "school work" and still have fun! Oh, we also do a read aloud after lunch every day and they really look forward to that also.
-
We are doing EXACTLY what you want to do. After a few months of Horizons this year, we switched over to MEP as our only math program and we all really liked it. However, I had great intentions for supplementing for U.S. measurement topics, and well, this never actually happened :001_huh:. The kiddos are consequently very very weak in those areas. We've switched over to Math Mammoth as our core program, and it's a little simpler to present, though I love that it uses similar strategies and methods as MEP, while at the same time including U.S. measurements so I don't have to search for other material. We've continued to use the puzzle/logic/thinking portions of MEP. For example, DS9 is beginning fourth grade with MM and the current topic is subtraction. So I pop over to the MEP website and find the appropriate lesson for that and there is typically at least one or two activities in some type of interesting puzzle format. I prefer if it is from the lesson plans and NOT from the student worksheet because the lesson plan activities can usually be found as one puzzle on one sheet under the blackline master section (did you follow that very confusing sentence :tongue_smilie:?). The kids really like the extra "fun" activities from MEP, and it seems to be a great supplement for MM. I don't agree at all with the pp who said you shouldn't bother using MEP unless you are using all of it. If you already have MM, then you already have a complete program, and using bits and pieces of MEP will be some fun practice from a slightly different approach. Just my $0.02, but hope it helps.
-
Here's the link to an explanation about how dictation should work. There's even a little video you can watch that might clarify it for you.
http://simplycharlottemason.com/basics/started/charlotte-mason-method/#dictation
-
The best thing you could probably do is to stop looking at what's out there. It looks like in your signature line that you have the basics. Start with that, don't let all the posts about all the other great programs make you think that you need to add more or switch. After easing in and trying what you have for a few months, then you can decide if you need to add more or if something isn't working. It's very easy to get caught up in thinking you have to do it all NOW and you have to have the best/most rigorous/most popular/shiniest/innovative curriculum and then you end up with 5 different LA programs and 4 math programs for 1 child (I think there was a recent post about this??)
-
I just bought the ebook and I haven't even printed out all the lessons that we've done. We did some of the pages on clocks, but I just looked at the page and then had DD do the problems using a real clock that she could move the hands on. Sometimes I use the wipe board too, rather than doing a worksheet.
-
It sounds like we have a similar background, and have been going through a similar search! We had previously been using Horizons with DD and we had made it through 2A around Jan. this year. We switched to MEP because it seemed like she was just memorizing the process of doing the problems but she didn't really understand what was going on. She started out in 2A with MEP and we both really loved it, but I had her skip most of the metric portions of it and I never really substituted with anything so she's very shaky on US measurements. Last week I bought Math Mammoth for her (2A and 2B because that's where she placed....and I'm having a terrible issue with the number on it....:001_huh:). I've been very pleased with the looks of it and DD has been absolutely thrilled. The approach is similar to MEP, she's been working on completing tens and finding missing numbers, but it seems simpler to use. Instead of a lesson page for me and a sheet for her, it's all combined. If you're only looking for another program because of the metric portions in MEP, you might want to check out the workbooks by topic that Math Mammoth offers. While I'm happy with this program, I can see that I could have solved the metric problem we were having just by ordering the measurement books that Math Mammoth sells. Hope this helps you a bit.
-
I have no experience with the medication, but was just wondering if you've tried using a bed wetting alarm yet? It might be worth a shot before you try medication. We were successful with both of our kiddos with an alarm we bought from thebedwettingstore.com
It took ds about 1 month with the alarm, and it took dd about 6 months, but we are finally finally finally dry at night.
-
We don't do any type of test prep here because it seems to make the kiddos anxious about the test. We've taken both the Iowa and the Stanford in previous years and both of those have one or two practice problems at the beginning of each section and the instructions you have to read explains how to fill in the bubbles. If I've done a good job of teaching basic math/grammar/reading skills for the year, then they know the information and do great. If we've had a rough year and life has interfered with school, then they won't know the information and no amount of practicing how to fill in bubbles is going to help them!
-
We started using some of their materials about a month ago and they've been a huge success with us. I'm planning to order more for next year. We starting ordering from Queens because DS9, LOATHED practicing his penmanship, but he's incredibly artistic so I thought Pictures in Cursive would be a good fit for him. He loves it and he actually enjoys penmanship now. We ended up purchasing some other items too and they've all been favorites with both kids. We bought one of their science books (Storybook of Science I think), and one of the history books also. They have reprinted many out of print, old books that are very good. I do want to add that the printing quality is not fantastic on some pages, and we periodically come across typos, which is a pet peeve of mine, but everything is so beautiful and appealing for the kids that I try to ignore the misprints. I'm toying with the idea of just going with one of their Easy Packs for next year but I'm not certain it would be enough. Then again, it would be simple to add to it, right? :D
-
I haven't actually read this, but Sonlight has "The Boy's Body Book" by Dunham listed as a resource and recommended for ages 11-13. Hope that helps!
-
Check and see if your library has any of the Janice Vancleave books. She has some great ones on science fair projects (and it walks you step by step through how to set it up and present it).
-
I just had to add my own rant in here because improper usage is my pet peeve....the public school here put on a big event that they were calling Literacy Night. Great idea, right? Except that the advertisement read "Your invited to Literacy Night".
Aurrrggghhhh!!!!!
-
Hooray, I thought I was the only one who had to hear ps envy! This is our first year with both children home and the other day dd7 told me that she was missing school a little. When I asked her what specifically she missed, she replied "hot lunch". :lol:
Waldorf Math-Something New!!!
in K-8 Curriculum Board
Posted
Hi, I just discovered the math by hand site and found this thread when searching for info about her products. I'm 99% sure I'll go ahead and purchase one of the kits, but am hoping that the person who said they had ordered it will come back on here and tell me how they like it? Anyone actually have this and can comment on it?
Thanks!