waa510
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Posts posted by waa510
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Another thing that might help you get an overview that gives the larger scope of what is taught in Level A and how to teach it: They do lots of free seminars on How to Teach Level A, B, C, etc. They also do seminars on general RS methods and ideologies with teaching math. I did much better at teaching RS when I had an idea of where we were going with it. I had to learn to trust why the heck we were teaching it this way and just roll with it b/c 5-7 lessons later it would all come together and made sense. If you check their website, they have a TON of pre-recorded webinars (live ones start back in January) I'd at least do that to see if that helps you wrap your head around teaching it.
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In Japan, handwriting is very important, although it may have more to do with their language involving characters and kanji that can look very similar if written poorly. Many things are still hand-written and it's very important to have good penmanship for writing in English as you have a better chance of getting your point across if it's at least legible.
The Japanese admire hard work in school (and everything else) so neat, clear penmanship is a good thing and garners respect. Our Japanese neighbors couldn't read much of what my kids wrote in their Christmas cards to them, but they praised them (and me as sensei) on their handwriting!! They also were very impressed that I teach the kids proper stroke order in their hiragana/katakana (I guess they can tell when looking at them written down??? Not sure how...).
So while a completely different system of writing, yes, it's still seen as a very important thing. And, frankly, I agree!
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Yes, we always end up spending more b/c we're often finishing books more quickly, so I'm purchasing multiple 'levels' in one calendar year. Supplemental stuff like science kits, classes, and thicker texts aren't cheap either!! I think Dh just saw that we were spending more and assumed it had to do with adding in the little one more seriously. It's really been a combination of meeting her needs with older Dd's materials costing more as she gets older. If older dd continues on with her science interests I imagine it will only get worse as time goes on!
I'm willing to prioritize curriculum though. I also will save Amazon gift cards given for holidays or birthdays and use them for school stuff. I also would use curriculum sales if/when I could when in the States. You do what you can, I guess!
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My big goal is to get DD ready for WWS1. She's been done with WWE4 for quite a while so we've used this time to perfect her written narrating skills and enhance her grammar-for-writing knowledge. The curriculum I'm using helps her with learning to organize her thoughts more clearly and to write more eloquently. I'm not looking for essays at this point. I'm really looking for clear, concise slightly longer written narrations. If she can stylize a few of the sentences while still maintaining the structure of the writing...bonus! My feeling is I don't want to just have this huge quantity of writing (essay) that says nothing and is poorly done. I'd much rather go for shorter and well-written, which is where she is right now. That sounds very vague, I think, but it's working well right now.
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I like the idea of expanding on evolution and then moving to Chem. With a heavy science kid I'd do The Elements and Carbon Chemistry on top of it. It can be made more than just memorization with the activities and youtube videos she puts in the playlist. I wouldn't skip those videos as my kids loved those.
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I could most certainly leave it if it were just me, but Dh grew up in a very Christmas-heavy family so it'd be unthinkable to him. The fact that we don't have decorations outside and only a couple inside is a bit of a downer for him. He never says anything but I can tell. :( My kids are also not what I'd consider youngish but they'd be devastated if we didn't do Christmas anymore (and the little one still believes in Santa soo...).
The ugly Christmas sweaters, billions of lights outside, incessant annoying music, movies no one likes but insists on watching b/c of tradition, the endless amounts of $$ I could be investing but instead am using to purchase gifts for family I don't even like or speak to more than 1 or 2x a year....yea, I could be completely rid of all that with no issue!! I'm a total Humbug. I do try to put on a happy face for the kids and I do like to watch their excitement sometimes but it's overall such a drain to me.
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Well, FWIW, we use R&S grammar as well and my dd is in book 5 (I'm assuming it's the same volume your dd is in?) I've read frequently on here that the 6th volume of their grammar is very much a review of everything previously learned in the 5th...no new material is taught until like 3/4 of the way into book 6. So much so that many on the boards recommend skipping to book 7 to avoid re-doing the same info for another year! So, I guess, just know that the series is repeating the info with the expectation that the kid needs a whole 'nother year to solidify those concepts.
Things that work for us for review: Killgallon to reinforce the grammar terms and usage. I try to have her write a few sentences using something we've just learned like appositives or opening adverbs when we're doing her writing. This across the curriculum grammar usage is helping her retain the terms. We'll also discuss the grammar of her dictation sentences and sometimes diagram them too.
Also, do you have the workbook or test book for the level? They're really helpful in getting more review in.
I've tried a bunch of different programs for grammar (not CLE though!) and none were as thorough yet open-and-go at R&S. I'd honestly add in a second more spiral program vs. getting completely away from R&S. This is not having seen or used CLE, however, so take that with a grain of salt. ;)
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Mine will occasionally remember to put his clothes in the hamper, will do dishes if he feels like it while listening to a podcast with headphones, walks the dog on the last-walk-before-bed, takes out the trash/recycling when he gets home if it needs it, scoops the litter box always (not on my radar as had to stop when pregnant and he just kept going with it), pays the credit card and phone (other bills too when we're in the States), takes the kids to stuff only if I have 2 activities in different places on same day/time for both kids...that way both kids get where they need to go, borrows the car to fill it with gas (less than 1X month), and does the taxes.
I do all cooking, all cleaning (except dishes and kid's rooms/bathroom are kids' chores), scheduling of dr appmts (including for him, pets, kids), driving kids to stuff, all schooling, all laundry, all grocery shopping, buying kids new clothes/shoes/blankets/etc, all mopping of entire house (which is every day w/ these horrible floors), and all present buying for birthdays and Christmas (even for his family lol)
I try to go easier on Dh during the times of year when work is insane and ask for a little help with starting a load of laundry or getting library books returned when things are relaxed. This is rare though, honestly. He already does a bunch, IMO. I'm really lucky ;)
On how to ask him to do more, I also had that issue when my kids were younger. I think Dh got used to things being a little disorganized (like when little dd was 2-ish I'd say) and I think he didn't want to offer to do anything because he didn't want me to feel as though I was failing and he'd noticed. KWIM? He worried it would stress me out more if he offered to help. Which is probably true. ;) I did start asking for small tasks to be done, though. Later, he'd start doing them more regularly once I confessed that I couldn't do it all in a bit of a melt-down one night. I think a lot of the things that I was doing years ago just weren't on his radar! I think it's easy to just autopilot the stuff you do and not think about any of the other stuff. I'd assume your Dh is just used to the house the way it is and hasn't realized it's not working for you. :)
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Yes, that's normal. I have a 1st grader and a 4th this year. The 4th ( turned 9 in early Sep.) makes careless mistakes lately. Drives me bananas but from what I've heard from other parents at her Girl Scouts meetings, it's completely typical of her age. She also has bad days and good ones like everyone else!
Yesterday, she struggled with some word problems and I was gnashing my teeth last night trying to figure out how to explain these problems that are so intuitive for me, spending almost an hour just googling different teaching methods for these types of problems to try to get the point across. This morning?? Took the sheet of harder problems I'd typed up and did them quickly, explaining what she needed to do while smiling the whole time. This was me: :blink: Oh, OK, so I'm not an abject failure at teaching my child! Sometimes she just needs to 'marinate' on a problem and then come back to it later, refreshed.
The 1st grader also sometimes needs to sit on my lap and get cuddles in order for her brain to click in! It's all OK.
Kids are kids. They can feel our anxiety which translates to "must do well so Mommy is happy" and then they feel crushed under the pressure. Homeschooling is such another vein of parenting..it's important that we don't become slave drivers in the process of teaching our kids! (Talking more to myself than you! :blush: ) Times like these I try to circle back to why I want to do this in the first place...besides the strong academic side of things. It also helps to think of the many, many *years* we have left before they leave the nest and need to know all-the-things!
Teaching from Rest was a good read, btw, although not a secular read fyi. And, yes, the holidays are probably messing with everyone's focus.
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May I ask what book she recommended?
Regards,
Kareni
Of course! New Seeds of Contemplation by Thomas Merton. I believe she was asked about a book that helped give her direction and meaning in her homeschool and this book was suggested. It seems to be a very good book about finding purpose and meaning in life.
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-new cardigans (many are from when older dd was born so are starting to die)
-SWB's new books and the one she recommended in her recent podcast
-homeschooling reference books
-Harry Potter's Bookshelf: the Great Books beyond the Hogwarts Adventure
-dorky coffee cups
-National Geo subscription
Yes, I'm a nerd. ;)
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My kids didn't need an ID for themselves (6 and 8 at time of passport-getting). It was more an added hassle for me in proving they were my kids and that both legal parents were authorizing the obtaining of the passport (Dh and I both had to sign their forms *in person* for a worker to witness to attest to the fact that we both were aware)...Maybe for those who are trying to flee the country with kids without the other parents' knowledge??? It was a pain in the rear. We also needed those 2 little pictures for their passport photo...went to CVS photo studio and they just pulled a screen down from the wall, tucked their hair behind their ears with hair down neatly and took a few pictures with a very bright flash. Printed it out then and there, paid $30 for them I think. The kids passports were...around $80 I think each for their first ever passport. It took a long time to get because of all the paperwork from me and Dh to get them completed and sent to us. You can call the office at any time to get progress reports though. :)
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As someone living overseas, I get what you're saying. Part of being in Japan for us was..wait for it....experiencing Japan ;) That said, being at home with you doesn't have to be isolating.
My kids are in US Girl Scouts Overseas (West Pacific region). The American troops frequently set up events with the Japanese scouts. Could you enroll your kids in Scouting in the UK? (I think it's called Guides or something?) Or some other UK-centric activity for kiddos? Maybe a UK HS group too? This would get them interacting with the culture quite a bit. Also, just being surrounded by it when you go out and about does more than you'd think. My kids used lots of British terms for things just when their best friend has a British 'mum' :D back in VA! Here, my kids have picked up *so* much just from having a few friends who go to Japanese school, elderly Japanese neighbors who think they're adorable and love talking to them, weekend outings and trips, restaurant visits...everything. I too thought I'd need to be way more intentional about it but so much is happening from simple immersion.
I'd go with your gut on this one. It sounds like you were uncomfortable with some aspects of the school. I'd homeschool for now (if only to give your kids a while to adjust to their new life while maintaining their 'normal' of being home with you) and then revisit next school year. JMO.
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Just because it didn't work for a *few* folks doesn't mean that using a program like AAS after phonics instruction is a bad idea. For me, with both my kids, after (and towards the end of) phonics instruction they were concurrently learning how to write letters well enough for someone to read. Both of my kids were starting to try to spell words on their own and getting very frustrated when they didn't know how to spell the word correctly. Even worse, if they went back to read the story they wrote and couldn't figure out what it said! Lots of tears and tantrums ensued with pleading for spelling instruction. To help them out with their frustration, I started rapidly going through AAS with them. I think for (some) accelerated kids, earlier instruction helps calm their little frustrated minds. Only you know if you have one of those kids on your hands.
I found a phonetic spelling program to work well b/c it reinforced the already-learned phonetic rules. FWIW, we dropped the tiles portion early on as it was just a tool that was getting in the way. Still love the program; the tiles were just not needed for us. When people talk about AAS being a flop, they may have been speaking about managing the billions of magnetic tiles!!!
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Yup, could have written the OP. I find it beyond aggravating. It caused me to really hate any gift-giving occasion as a child because of all the baggage attached to it. There was always so much pressure behind gifts. And woe to everyone if I didn't show that I loved the gift *enough*. Here comes the rant of the gift-giving martyr who is never appreciated blah, blah, blah.
This is why I hate the holidays. It's become so much of a tit-for-tat gift-giving consumerism bonanza that I just don't have the emotional stamina for anymore.
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I really am not an expert by any means but a tweak that helped us get read-aloud done that I just couldn't get done before:
I use Overdrive with the library card I held on to from the States to find a few audiobooks in classic lit or recent big hits for this year. I find the BBC classics to be well-done and well-received by my kids. We listen once our lunches are made and ready to eat at the table. This gives us a good 15-20 minutes every day for read-aloud. My sitting on the couch and reading just wasn't getting done consistently so this worked well for me. This tip may be obvious to everyone else in the universe but it really never got into my brain until recently. :blushing:
Also, if your 2nd grader did all that..good for you!! That doesn't sound like failure at all! My youngest is 1st and does a similar (2 pages MM a day, half lesson of AAS, one lesson FLL) amount of work every day. SWB said something in a talk once about getting through schoolwork with littles is a lot like "nibbling to death by ducks." (Probably said way more eloquently, of course) So a teeny tiny bit at a time but it gets done and you're at the next level before you know it! I know plodding along at a death march and feeling frazzled with kids needing you to sit and teach at elbow can be exhausting though.
Hang in there! I moved once in April and it set us back a lot!! I can only imagine moving twice in a year! :svengo:
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If you do Eat to Live for a couple weeks you'll definitely lose 2 pounds!!
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Duolingo is working on Japanese right now but due to its using non-roman characters it's been a little difficult to figure out an effective way of going about it in their format . (according to their forum) I agree that this is a really great format for kids and wish it would just come out already!!
For now the kiddos use memrise, Tuttle Flashcards and the Mindware Japanese app for vocabulary, Dr. Moku's app for recognizing hiragana/katakana and the Tako Japanese app for learning how to write and read hirgana and katakana and I think it has about 300-450 common Kanji (like the ones you'd see a lot on street signs, newspapers, train stations, toilets etc). It splits Kanji into 3 at a time that are similar (up to 34-35 lessons at each level like N5 or N4)
The blog Hiragana Mama has a lot of leads on free sites and stuff for Japanese. My kids also do My First Japanese Kanji book when they feel like it. We also speak conversationally to our Japanese neighbors behind us and out and about to Machida or Ebina (although they usually want to speak English to us *sigh*). There are a ton of sites online like italki.com that help find native speakers to converse with too. Youtube is great too for language learning.
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Full disclosure: Used to work for Rightstart, still would if not halfway around the world
The "not so good" that you've heard about Level C probably applied to the 1st edition of level C. This is because a ton of information was packed into level C to the degree that it very often took people a year and a half to finish...sometimes even 2!!! So, Dr. Cotter has split the info from 1st edition C into 2 volumes (2nd edition C and D) and even created a level F now to help with the shuffling a bit. The info in the 1st edition also was very subtraction heavy and people felt very bogged down with that.
She also hired a woman who was a former teacher to assist her in creating review sheets, activities, etc in the second edition that weren't present in the first. This makes the lessons much smoother and easier to teach. I would go through Level C, 2nd edition in prep for Beast. :)
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Thanks! Such a great way to brighten up a winter day! We should put forth a petition for a new talk in the drudges of February! lol
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It's a humanities thing. :)
:svengo: Surely that is a one-off and unique to that lady and not homeschoolers? I mean how incredibly rude!!!
I think you've hit on a lot of really rude behavior that is in my experience not homeschooling behavior at all.
I always do that and I've been in institutions from age 4. I am forgetful.
:huh: What sort of college was that? I don't remember learning that skill in public school. Some people cheated, but it was usually cheaters and non-studiers in the back and they all failed together.
That's awesome that that's not your experience, where do you live??? I genuinely want to live there! I've lived in Texas, Georgia, Washington, Virginia, Florida, Connecticut and now Japan. Homeschoolers were/are like that in every single spot. Northern VA was the worst by far.
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Have you considered Guam? It's got a lower cost of living than HI but still a U.S. territory so no-language barrier.
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I vote War Horse. There's an app for it as well with the author reading it aloud with the written and illustrated work highlighted for following along. There were also videos in the app of areas, uniforms, etc that helped inspire and inform the author which were very interesting to my Dd. Just something to mention for parents if they wanted to dig deeper with the text/subject at home.
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Well, I've started planning simply b/c getting school books out here is a pain. I'm trying to pre-buy stuff now so that I have it in plenty of time. It makes me anxious to think I may not have whatever we'd like to do next ready and waiting for me. Dumb, I know. Olderdd will be going into 5th, Younger into 2nd. Holy cow, when did this happen? I'm still so uncertain about a bunch of things for older dd which is freaking me out a bit. Ugh.
Older:
Math: Expecting her to be done with MM6 by Sep so right now, Dolciani Pre-Alg with AoPs Pre-Alg. She is great in math but not heavily "into it" so I may lean more on Dolciani than AoPs.
LA: Should be done with formal spelling by then. We'll have gone through 2 different spelling programs in their entirety by the fall and she's a natural speller. Not sure we really need to keep up with this anymore. :confused: Thinking I'll do two different vocab programs now instead.
MCT Caesar's English 1 and 2, Sadlier-Oxford vocab, Rod and Staff 6, Write from History Early Modern, Killgallon Paragraphs for Middle School
Science: Either Holt Physical Science with Carbon Chemistry (again) or some other intensive Chem by itself. I'll have her help me teach little dd The Elements, in any case.
History: K12 Human Odyssey book 2. She loves this series.
Latin: LFC B (I'm slacking in Latin so she's going slowly. It's my fault tho as I don't like Latin :o )
Japanese: Bunch of apps, talking to Japanese friends, neighbors, making her order food at restaurants and read Kanji for me :p
Extras: SCM Geo Africa, Marine Bio course, Raspberry Pi with Dh, HWT Typing (slacked on it this year...must start this now!!), WHD, Logic workbooks, Art class on base
Little dd:
MM3 with CWP 2 and 3 for review, WWE3, FLL4, The Elements, Physical Science listen-in with older dd or EEPhysics b/c I have it, K12 Human Odyssey 2 (loves this series more than SoTW :001_huh: ), WW5 and 6, Evan Moor Geography, Cursive copywork, various Japanese, logic, math and etc workbooks.
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Your Christmas Traditions
in The Chat Board
Posted · Edited by waa510
I'm from the NorthEast, Dh is from South FL..this year is a little funky as we can't do some of our previous church traditions..
Stockings and presents Christmas Day
Cheapo paper Advent calendars for days up to 25th
Making a couple batches of cookies (I'm a horrible baker so keep this to a minimum)
Fake Xmas tree every year
Always purchase a present or two for an Angel Tree or something similar in our area
We let the kids pick out and purchase one ornament every year. Since my cat loves to climb the tree and break all the ornaments we never end up with a ton anyway
Making salt dough ornaments for gifts for friends/family from kids (easy and cute)
Watching Christmas movies all month and driving around at night looking at Christmas lights while drinking hot cocoa in the car
Things we can't/didn't do this year:
Play something in the church Christmas play, Go to church Christmas events all month (movie night, craft night, etc), visit family and/or go to Mickey's Very Merry Christmas party with the in-laws