DS 8 - Week 6, Day 4 - The Titanic On April 14, 1912 the new ship Titanic was launched. Peopled cheered because it was a great ship. One night when the Titanic was on its first voyage, an iceberg was spotted ahead. Quickly the captain turned the ship, but it was to late. The iceberg hit the side of the ship and made a hole there. On the deck people were playing and chatting; not being aware that the ship was filling with water. Quickly the officers boarded the passengers on lifeboats. At first there were not many people on the boats, but when the deck started to tip, more and more people got on them. They did not have enough life boats, so an officer sent SOS signals. A ship called Carpathia responded, but it was four hours away; they only had a few hours until the Titanic would sink. They did what they could, but no one could stop the ship from sinking. Carpathia arrived at 4:10 am, picked up surviving passengers, and brought them to New York. DD10 - Week 6, Day 4 - The Titanic There was once a great ship called the Titanic. Nobody thought that it could sink. One day, on its first voyage, it was in the Arctic Ocean and had collided with an iceberg. The passengers on board thought that it was a big joke, as they played with ice cubes, and built little towers. They laughed and played because they thought that the Titanic was unsinkable. As soon as it began to take on water, sailors rushed around telling people that it was fine. A shipbuilder, Thomas Andrews, announced that it would sink in 1 1/2 hours. Captain Smith’s face was ashen as he said, “Give the command for all passengers on deck with their life belts on!” But the life boats could carry only half the passengers. A white distress rocket was launched, and the closest ship, the Carpathia, responded but was four hours away. The passengers were reluctant to leave, but didn’t want to die either. Up until now the lifeboats had only held 3 or 4 people when they could have held 20, because people didn’t want to go sit on a freezing cold life boat in the middle of the ocean. The last lifeboats were over loaded. Meanwhile, the propellers of the Titanic rose above the water, and finally it broke in half and sank. Carpathia picked up as many passengers as it could, and set course for New York. The survivors reached New York on April, 18th. The Titanic had started with 2,200 passengers, and only 706 lived. Here were links we watched before we wrote the stories - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xD9-z6Nw2FM http://www.titanicuniverse.com/category/titanic-stories

Last year when ds was 7 he worked in WWE and also Writing Tales. Both dc loved retelling the stories, and it made me realize I liked the idea of the progym. exercises being incorporated into our writing. This year we moved over to CC Fable (Classical Composition) and WWS. Both of them are enjoying the assignments and doing well with the material. I like kalanamak's idea as well about writing letters.

So, if we were to start with the Grade 6 Level 1 books would it also incorporate prepositional phrases, compounding and subordination? I assumed that all the levels gave the same info, but it sounds like it's to varying degrees. My dc have done all of MCT Island, are currently working on MCT Town and ds has done R&S 4 last year. They can identify all the parts of speech within MCT Town, parts of a sentence, phrases and clauses. I was thinking I would still start with Level 1 though.

I wish I could figure out how to just download the pdfs for KISS onto their laptops and then find some sort of device or program that would allow them to do what Spy Car is using on an ipad. That would be helpful in getting started with using KISS. I don't want to have to print everything! ;-)

No worries on my end Colleen. ;-) I agree that grammar is very important. My kids are a bit younger, but if I remember right you are working (yep.. just looked at your siggy there) with a 13 year old, so you are definitely in the mode of concentrating on that type of grammar assessment. I'm not sure my dc would know what the heck I was talking about at their age. We will get there ourselves one of these days if we keep moving forward. Yes I loved the info on Erasmus.. I originally learned of it through CC. I think WWS blends nicely because she does incorporate some progym. skills into the mix.

This doesn't exactly relate to WWS, but we are also working through CC Fable. Over 10 days we work on the same Fable. The main difference is that we take sentences out of the story and do variation exercises (or copia) skills on them. We outline the fable, then we paraphrase the fable in our own words however we wish. The next lessons have us incorporating 2 or 3 figures of description in the next retelling. Occasionally my dc will decide on their own to tell it from another characters perspective to switch things up. Towards the end of the 10 days they tell the story either in media res (from the middle), in reverse (from the end to the beginning... as if we were retelling a story from our present point to when it first started) or summarize the story ala WWS skills. They LOVE it. They never get bored with rehashing material because it allows them to tell the story so many different ways. Plus they are interested in building characters they enjoy writing about and with interest comes better writing. They don't mind the mechanics and having to do rewrites because they are invested in what they are writing about. If you have a chance take a look at this link - http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0811207897/ref=ox_sc_act_title_9?ie=UTF8&m=ATVPDKIKX0DER Raymond Queneau in his book, Exercises in Style, chose to rework the same story 99 different times. Talk about copia skills!!! Anyway, I think ultimately your dc have to care about the topic at hand. Ideally you would take the skills being learned in WWS and use them on a subject of your choosing, but honestly we all are just beginning this journey together, and for now I am going to work with the examples given and instead try to garner interest in them the best way I can. I am appreciating all of the instruction and I am bringing aspects of classical writing into the mix when I can as well. Roxanne, I will say that I have both my dc doing WWS together as I couldn't teach everyone separately when it comes to writing. ;-) I truly take my hat off to you with 5 children you are trying to teach.

Ruth - And here I was telling Capt. Uhura yesterday that I didn't think the 6th grade workbooks would take more than a couple of years!!! ;-)

I will say that it has been empowering to both my dc to be home with us the past few years. They have continued to play sports in our community and each year they join the local team of kids (their public school buddies) for soccer, basketball and spring sports. This past fall both dc were on the same soccer team. I had moved ds up to the next level. Anyway, a girl was trying to intimidate ds8 about "hurrying up" and "what are you even doing here, etc." Dd went right up to her and told her, "That is my brother and you aren't going to talk to him like that!" The little girl ended up apologizing to ds. Mind you, I am not trying to create my own bullies here .. but I was grateful that dd felt empowered to stick up for her brother under those circumstances. Had she still been in school, she might have feared punishment from the same kid the following school day. Nowdays, she gets along with everyone there ... even those I would consider the bullies, because she knows she doesn't HAVE to put up with anything from them. I have even had several friends who took their dc out of school for a year or so for the same reason. When they went back they also felt empowered, like they had options and didn't have to fear what might happen the following day.

I love how McHenry has all those links to youtube videos and other sources within each lesson on The Cells... that kind of thing would be very helpful with WWS, but I imagine for printing purposes it would be difficult to keep things up to date. We've been able to do the extra research with virtually every writing assignment so far, except Johannes Kepler. For that I acted out how I might have been feeling virtually going mad at looking up at the stars for that many years and finding no real answers. We tried to bring in figures of description from CC (astrothesia - vivid description of stars) within the writing as well. I believe that last week's assignment was on Ivan the Terrible and we found a great History channel 13 min. video on youtube to watch before hand. My dc have not gotten to the point in history where they know who he is, so having a video brings it alive for them. So far the research has only taken me a few minutes to check the video content and that I am happy with it, and also to pre-order books for the library. I only have two active students though and one little one running around.. it would be nice for you if it was already done. You can always pm me or email me (pm me for address) and I am happy to share the links I come up with. Although we will continue working on our volcano story for Mon of next week and wait to take back up with WWS Week 13 the week following Thanksgiving. For some reason I hate only doing parts of a week.. I like doing all 4 days each week together.

Thanks AprilMay, I am also happy that she is home and away from it as well. Kari, I noticed it made a huge difference how your child was treated if their parents were on the school board, or happened to be BFFs with the teacher. My dd picked up on that type of thing and how different she was being treated compared to others early on. Oftentimes it took a more 'popular' kid with the teacher's and staff to say something in order to get any attention. Unfortunately when some of the other popular kids ARE the bullies, it's virtually impossible to get the teachers to take note of it. One little girl that was just awful to dd before I brought her home apparently still is, as I have heard several parents recount stories of how their child came home with hurt feelings or torn clothes from this girl cutting them in class. And we are talking of maybe 20 kids in each class. In 3rd grade my dds teacher spent most of his time on his Ipad. Dd said she rarely could get him to look up to answer questions, and much of what happened to her would occur when he was in the room and not paying attention. Sometimes it was when he would step out of the room.. and more often than not it was during recess. They just need more attendants, and teacher's that are actually paying attention during class.

I agree as well .. it's not something that we read about, watch, or talk about. My guess is that other kids would have been able to tell her all about it at public school, or possibly she watched something on tv. I ended up having to have 'The Talk' with my then 2nd grade dd because of what kids her age and older were talking about at the school. *** more than likely the actual bullies may have told her exactly how she could go about killing herself *** I am not saying this is what happened, but it would seem likely that while they are teasing her they are also telling her what she should go do.

crazyforlatin.. yes I hear the 'what doesn't kill you makes you stronger' type of stuff also. In this case though it can absolutely kill. Children don't understand cause and effect and they can't possibly perceive a world that could be any better than what they are currently stuck in. They don't have all the coping mechanisms in place, and if you have a child who is more of a sponge and soaks up all the drama and issues around her then it can be a big problem. Some kids are just oblivious and sort of float through school.. my dd had 5 different things going on in her head at once.

I saw the Today show segment and it really upset me. I pulled my dd out at the end of 3rd grade when she was about 8 or 9 years old. There had been relentless bullying, both emotionally and physically for a good part of her 3rd grade year. The teacher's told her to ignore it. The counselor would tell her to just ignore them. We are talking being knocked down, kneed in the back until someone pulled them off of her, newly sharpened pencil being poked into her arm, told by certain girls that they could beat her up. Now.. my dd is a very cute kid and communicates easily with people .. this is a small communit,y and she had known all of these kids since she was in preschool. They get empowered by the fact that no one is watching them closely in classrooms, and on the playground, and it creates a sort of gang mentality. I just eventually felt like it was going to change who I thought she could become, and I couldn't stand it anymore. She is a content child now.. smart, gifted, articulate and capable of doing whatever she sets her mind to. They weren't teaching that there. The teachers would not differentiate instructions and if she read a TON more minutes in a reading contest than all the other students they would back her down to a max. of so many minutes because they didn't want her to outshine the rest. Now.. if you are a sports star at this school you can get as many goals or whatever as you want and no one tells you to stop. They weren't allowing academics to shine though, and I just felt like they were also ignoring behavior problems and eventually everyone conceded that it was just 'normal' for the kids to act like that and virtually ignored it.

Hey Roxanne, as it happens we are doing this exact assignment today. Most likely we will also work on it Monday. I have dd10 and ds8 working their way through WWS. If I get time I will try to put up more samples of their WWS work. We should make a WWS folder on the writing board to put examples up in one spot. I think that your dd wrote about several key parts of a volcano, and also used a simile in her first paragraph. Perhaps she could have separated each section a bit more and added more material within each part of the volcano?? You are correct in saying that she veered off a bit, but if she is an older student and it is your choice to add to the assignment in that way, then I would say that is fine. Although I am enjoying the WWS assignments, I often find that I need to add to them in order to get their interest and knowledge to a level to be able to write intelligently about the subject. In the case of The Titanic assignment, we searched youtube for videos of the original Titanic as well as SOS recordings of when they called for help using morse code. We also read survivor accounts. I have tried to do that with each assignment so that there was enough interest generated to WANT to write about it. With the volcanoes assignment we researched from several books, and watched you tube videos. We also drew our own volcano and labeled it. Then we talked about types of similes we might use. My dd spoke about the similarity between a volcano and the Greek Monster Typhon who presumably is encased in Mt. Etna. (She is a big Greek mythology fan) We talked about fireworks, witches cauldrons, the ash cloud resembling an angry Typhon. Now.. I am not sure how much of this will result in a well written report about volcanoes, but I have found that it helps immensely to get them excited about the project ahead of time.

Thanks for the continued guidance and explanations Ruth. ;-)

There seems to be a lot of material you can click on in the 7th - 11th grade sections, but I wonder if any of it is the same or redundant??? I guess if it was new material, it would be a way to stay on top of what you have already learned... I can't really tell though if it is the total and complete instructional material as would be in the 6th grade downloadable workbooks.

O.K... I think I understand where all the levels went then. ;-)

There is something about Stewart that reminds me of SWBs ALL.. it might just be all the recent Verb Tense work though and the fact that it showed that in the christianbook sample. I need to work through a few weeks of KISS I think to decide... oh and I need someone to sell me the CW Homer Core Text already!!!

Halycon, have you figured out whether it's going to be Stewart or KISS yet? lol. I have also thrown CW into the mix and the grammar that goes with Homer... grief... I am kind of liking KISS at the moment as I downloaded Grade 6 workbooks to peruse through. I need to go back and look at the Stewart samples now. ;-)

Thanks Ruth. When you say made the books for 2nd - 5th though I don't see all those grade level workbooks available as one doc. to download per level. There are a lot of --- sections which presumably means that I would have to go and individually download each lesson for each grade (say.. level 1 grade 5, all of those are somewhere else and not on the easy download place where it's one workbook). So, I think I am getting that I would either work with Grade 3 Level 1 or Grade 6 Level 1 at first before moving onto Level 2 in either grade, as those are the workbooks that I can see to download. Grief... I hope I am not confusing you all. I have actually downloaded Level 1 of both grades to compare. I would only need the student book for that level as well as the answer key and then I am set, right? Oh.. and I agree about the website. I have looked at this countless times over the past two years and always stepped away as I couldn't make heads or tails of it. I soooo appreciate you all taking the time to explain it more. It is worth someone making it more user friendly!

Thank you Lewelma. So, did he used to have grade level workbooks for 3rd, 4th, 5th grades to download or are you talking about the individual downloads for each assignment and having to download them separately. I thought about starting dd in 6th grade one, but now with your description I am not so sure. ;-)

The combining exercising in KISS at the later stages reminds me of Killgallon, but I also have to wonder if the work a student might do in CW Homer might be helpful? It is all very interesting though.