I have mentioned somewhere that I wished that I already had CC Fable/Narrative under my belt BEFORE I started with WWS, because it would be helpful to have those skills in place before embarking in WWS. I think WWS would be great alongside CW Maxim/Chreia. However many would say that one or the other would be more than sufficient. ;-) We have completed a year of Writing Tales and 1/2 the CC Fable book and are planning on integrating CC Narrative & CW Homer OB in the coming semester. I typically do 1/2 hour of grammar daily and 1 hour of writing. That has worked fine for doing both CC type work and WWS. DD10 is learning A LOT with WWS, but I still am finding enough value in the progym. exercises to continue with a more indepth curriculum on the side. I realize that WWS does have aspects of progym. so things are carrying over nicely for us.

I would soooooo use this. We are almost done with the 15 week sample and I am WISHING she would release the rest of it.. I don't mind if it's long. I can work with that!

Thanks for the link to her video. I enjoyed listening to it this morning!

I also have the KISS Grammar workbook in a Pages Publication format and it tells me that it could not be opened in Dropbox. Not sure what I am doing wrong.

Oh, I also downloaded Notability and would love to have dd10 work on the KISS Grammar on the ipad, but since I can't get the file INTO the Dropbox I am at a loss. I can directly email the pdf just fine to my Kindle App on my iPad, but that isn't going to help me get it into Notability. HELP!!! please.. ;-)

I have an iMac and I am planning to start KISS Grammar soon. I downloaded the workbook for 6th grade Level 1 and saved it as a pdf file. Then I downloaded Dropbox onto my computer as well as my ipad. Every time I try to drag the KISS pdf into the dropbox folder of my computer it says "The Document "KISS Grammar 6th grade Level 1 student pdf" could not be opened. Dropbox cannot open files in the "Preview Document" format. Anyone have any idea what I might be doing wrong? I would love to use this to drag all the KISS stuff into the ipad. Thanks!

http://www.welltrainedmind.com/forums/showpost.php?p=3431259&postcount=30 The above is a link to dd10s sample of the assignment. I haven't had a chance to type of ds8's yet. But, you are so right in saying that it is stretching them. I am very impressed with what we all are learning, myself included. ;-)

I would imagine it would stretch your 9 year old.. it's stretching my 10 year old dd for sure! We just finished this week with the Week 15 writing assignment, and I stretched it out over three days. The first day we dug around and watched Alvin on youtube, watched interviews from the scientist (Robert Ballard if I remember correctly??), also read other essays about the expedition and took a look at Hydrothermal Vent footage on youtube. Then we wrote out on the board all the areas that needed to be included in the narration. The following day I had them 'start' it.. then the weekend hit and we started again on Monday. I think I corrected it and we finished our final drafts on Tuesday. So, actually it was a 4 day process. ;-) I would let it go if you would like to really be able to dig into the assignment and take a break until after the holidays.

We haven't had to copy much at all. They each have a 3-ring binder and labelled sections for Summary(I think), Outlines, Topoi, and Reference. This next week we are adding a Copia section to it. They have just used lined paper in all sections and I print out the Day 4 work a lot for them, as it has the section they use to develop their own narration using the facts given. Those also get put in their Topoi section with the rough draft and final versions of that week's narration. It's been a great way to organize it, I do almost no printing beyond the occasional section where they are supposed to mark up paragraphs when defining them in some way.

I bought the pdfs and loaded them onto their laptops. They have the student pdf, and I have both the student and teacher pdf on mine. There are weeks where I print the assignment, but not every week. It has worked well this way for us.

The Discovery of Hydrothermal Vents Week 15, Day 4 dd10 In 1977 a submarine named Alvin went underwater 2,500 meters below the surface to the murky depths of the ocean floor, lifeless and dark. Prior to this, scientist Robert Ballard had been searching for geysers underwater similar to Old Faithful in Yellowstone National Park. First they had looked around the Mid-Atlantic Ridge for two years. Finding nothing, they next tried the Galapagos Rift near the Galapagos Islands. They went down in Alvin, their trusty submarine, and what they found was fantastic. They saw vents, some as tall as 200 feet, which were shooting up scalding water caused by the rubbing of ocean plates. Colonies of tube worms lived near footpaths of scuttling giant shellfish. The tube worms had reaching, waving arms of long stalks with plumes at the top filled with blood. Some were as tall as 10 feet. If you were to touch one it would likely feel like a worm, soft and squishy. They also stared in awe at the multi-colored fish basking in the heat of the vents. Robert Ballard himself said, “Suddenly our floodlights revealed a swaying field of orange and pink dandelions, their puffy heads pulsing with fine webs of filaments. The lumped mounds of pillow lava were thick with jutting chalk-white clam shells, some of them a foot across.” Alvin was the first submarine to be successful in finding geysers on the ocean floor. Prior to Alvin, no one could explore the depths of the deep sea to this extent. The crew in Alvin floated back up to the surface and told the world what they had seen. ** As far as what I did to help her edit, I noticed in her rough draft that she had moved into her scientific description by immediately talking about all the abundant life around the vents, but had completely missed talking about the vents themselves, so she had to add in a section just for the vents to begin the scientific description. She also had to be reminded after her rough draft to add a personal point of view to her scientific description. She had two grammatical errors switching there / their, and three spelling mistakes to correct. It was a good assignment that challenged her to incorporate many of the things she had learned in prior weeks. Honestly, I told someone had I taught her how to write a report about Hydrothermal Vents we most likely would have researched and wrote about three or four things to do with Hydrothermal Vents. I didn’t realize how to incorporate a chronological narrative, or how one paragraph might lead into the next in this fashion. I would say we are all growing in our knowledge with this curriculum.

Occasionally it's just one page a week, but this past week I printed the entire assignment for Week 15, Day 4 so they could mark up the resources to work on their narratives. As far as being able to find WWS each day, my dc just minimize the pdf so that when they pop it back up it's on the next days assignment. They generally have to scroll through the material for the outline & summarizing days, but it's working fine for us. I knew I couldn't print it all, but they have grown accustom to working with their computer this year as I also have them view their MM assignments on the laptops and complete the work on lined paper. There are sections of that I have to print, but it's minimal compared to printing the entire thing.

I have the student pdf loaded on both their laptops and we work through it that way. I also bought the teacher's guide pdf and loaded both it and the student pages on mine. On the larger writing assignment days I have printed out the information for them, but for the most part this has worked beautifully for us.

I use the Light Blue Series grade level CD.

We use MM and I am very happy with how the material is presented. Even when you are working on a specific chapter about decimals, they still have you doing word problems that require the knowledge of fractions, multiplication and perhaps metric conversions to get the correct answer. I have heard of some who just do two or three pages from each chapter and then go back and rotate through them this way, but I have always just worked from the beginning to the end and I find that it is solidifying the concepts. There are cumulative reviews at the end of each chapter that include all of the chapters before, and there are tests for each chapter as well as information about how to grade them.

Honestly, having used 15 weeks of WWS with my 5th grader, I think these are useful skills if you are needing to learn how to organize and write a report. Just this past week dd10 was working on her report about Geothermal Vents. Had I not used WWS I would think you research a few books, and then write a report about 3 or 4 things that had to do with Geothermal Vents. I would have never learned about starting the story as a historical narrative that told about the biologists and what they had to go through in order to find geothermal vents in the first place. I knew about transitional words, but never really categorized them into time & sequence words, or space and distance words. Teaching a child how to include direct quotes, figurative language, and then learn how to seamlessly go from a chronological narrative into a scientific description would be helpful for any student 5th grade and older to learn. I honestly think if dd10 had a few more years on her, she would do better with WWS, but even with that said we are learning a lot. I have been using it in conjunction with CC Fable this year, and will continue in January with CW Homer/CC Narrative combined with WWS. I honestly wish the local middle school would use WWS, as I can't think of an easier method to teach kids how to write. Maybe I am wrong, and there are ps out there teaching their 5th graders a different method that works equally well, but I can't imagine what that would be.

Yes, we do it as well. I do all the core subjects daily .. grammar, writing, math. Science is 3 days per week and History is 2 days per week. Latin is 3 days per week and being read to outloud is 2 days per week (currently we are on A Christmas Carol, but have also read My Family and Other Animals). The remaining subjects get split into 6 or 9 week increments. We started the year off with 9 weeks of typing and cursive work. Then switched to 9 weeks of vocabulary building and spelling workbooks. Next we will move to literary analysis, then critical thinking/philosophy, geography, art (may only get 3 weeks in towards the end of the year). I may be forgetting a few, but it is working out well for us doing this. Then we only have 5 core things we work on each day.

I second using the 10 week WWS sample at Peace Hill Press. It would be a great way to guide her through a writing curriculum that is mostly written to her, and provided rubrics to help grade the writing as you work through it. By the time you are done with the sample you would know whether to go ahead and buy the full thing.

DS age 8 and his paraphrase of The Ant and The Dove - One day an ant was going to the clear, bubbling waters of the river to get a drink. As the ant was drinking, a wave of water splashed over the side of the river and forced the little ant deep into the water. A dove, who was quite amiable, felt sorry for the ant's circumstance and flung into the river a little leaf which the ant clung onto and brought him safely to shore. One morning, when the sun was not yet up and the stars were still out twinkling, the ant came out of its house for a morning stroll. Soon the ant came upon a hunter who was exquisitely dressed in a fine cloak, and had a 24 inch shot gun pointed at the sleepy dove that had saved the ant's life. The ant, who was walking up to the mans foot, stung him right there so he would not shoot his friend. The ant therefor saved the dove's life. "Little friends may prove to be great friends"

DD10 The Ant and The Dove Here is the original fable - An Ant, going to a river to drink, fell in and was carried along in the stream. A Dove pitied her condition, and threw into the river a small bough, by means of which the Ant gained the shore. The Ant afterward, seeing a man with a fowling piece aiming at the Dove, stung him in the foot sharply, and made him miss his aim, and so saved the Dove's life. "Little friends may prove great friends" Here is DD10s paraphrase using astrothesia (vivid desc. of stars) , and hydrographia (vivid desc. of water)- One day just as the sun was rising on the horizon, an Ant came to a bubbling stream, bright blue and glistening, to get a drink. Suddenly Ant fell in and was pulled from shore by the current. A Dove who saw this, threw into the river a tiny twig. The Ant grabbed on and the twig safely beached shortly afterwards, depositing the delicate ant on the shore, thereby saving her life. Night came, and with it a full moon, casting shadows upon the ground. The stars twinkled like thousands of flickering lights. Eventually morning came and revealed another beautiful day. Later on, the ant saw a sneaky hunter creep near the sleepy Dove and aim a gun at him. The Ant quickly ran up and stung the man on the foot, making him lose his aim. The man hopped up and down like a grasshopper and then turned and fled. The Ant had saved the Dove's life. "Little friends may prove to be great friends"

DD 10 - Wk 14, Day 4 Mars - Mixing both a removed and a present point of view, include a simile. Mars is the fourth planet from the sun. It is about half the size of Earth and is a desolate, dry desert. Mars has two moons called Phobos and Deimos. Deimos rises in the east and sets in the west, while Phobos rises in the west and sets in the east. Mars has a north and south pole which stay icy year round. If you went to Mars you probably would not like it, because dust storms cover the whole planet. The dust would pummel you from all sides, and you would feel buried in it. Temperatures, in the winter, can get to be about -230 degrees farenheight. Your body would feel like an ice cube the moment you stepped out in it. You also wouldn't be able to breathe because the air is 95% carbon dioxide and there are only traces of oxygen. Mars has many volcanos. The biggest is Olympus Mons which is about three times the size of Mount Everest. There are also many canyons. One of these deep canyons networks is called Valles Marineris. With these huge volcanos and prodiguous canyons you would feel like a tiny ant. ** This is her rough draft. While writing it, I asked her to tell me what the dust would feel like. I also had her change the last sentence, as she wanted to end it by saying 'You wouldn't want to live on Mars' and I thought it should tie in with the volcanos and canyons. It's not perfect, as we could have had an introduction and conclusion, but I wanted to concentrate on these specific skills only and not have her get bogged down with all the other steps that might have gone into it.

I bought both and ended up reselling the original edition. I think the layout is much better in the 2nd and there are new things introduced as well. Capt should be able to tell you more.

Good point 1Togo.. I remember those. I will dig them out. We are doing well with CC but they do need new ways of writing sentences. I am reading through CW Homer now. ;-)

Not that I am stalking you or anything.. .ha

Thowell, Those are workbooks someone created, but if I remember right they are quite expensive. This is the edition I am talking about. http://www.amazon.com/Image-Grammar-Second-Teaching-Writing/dp/0325041741/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1323271621&sr=8-2 You can search inside the original edition on Amazon as well. Thanks Cleopatra, I just received it and am going to dive in and start reading. I think it may be exactly what I am looking for. I thought if I combined it with some of the Image Grammar lessons and other suggestions here that I could create a week that was quite fun and didn't wear their fingers out. ;-) Lewelma ... I have wondered what time it was for you before ... ha. I figured it was 'close' to Hawaii time as I will see you live on here during my afternoons. ;-)