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Diviya

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Everything posted by Diviya

  1. I think the downloads the other person mentioned referred to how many times you are allowed to download the same file (ie to different computers, etc).
  2. Embarrassing to admit after my long speech earlier in the thread, but threw in the towel yesterday. We are going to do the pre algebra book. At least that's the plan for now. My poor guinea pig. :D
  3. We are almost through the first chapter of Algebra. We went through SM 6B and did the first four books of Keys to Algebra and the first four chapters of Sinagapore's New Math Counts last year. I am cautiously optimistic, but we are having to go pretty slowly. I had hoped she could get through one section a day, but it is more like 2 to 3 days per section. I really wish their pre algebra book had come out last year - it would have been perfect! I was getting worried and second guessing myself because she is not the type to try to figure out something she doesn't know at all. I was ready to drop it and then I reread the introduction and they said that that approach doesn't work for all students, and so those students could go ahead and read the explanations without first working it out on their own. That gave me some peace of mind, and it is going better that way. We will see. I'm hoping as she gains confidence that she will be willing to play around with it more. I'm still keeping the pre algebra book in reserve, but I hate to do a whole other year of pre algebra when she already knows the stuff! Looking forward to seeing how it goes for everybody :001_smile: and getting some tips! Oh, I did also toy with doing Discovering Mathematics instead, but the format didn't appeal to her at all.
  4. You can never have too many math books. At least, that is my philosophy...:D
  5. Take a look at Art of Problem Solving. The pre algebra just came out. It is written to the student. No cartoons. Very little review/repetition. There is a pretest online.
  6. Yes, that's a great book. Professor Landes taught one of my favorite classes in college! I would also recommend The Rational Optimist, by Matt Ridley, as another book on economic history. It's a wonderful read, and much easier to get through! Loving this thread.
  7. I buy the workbook and then student pages for each child. One less thing to think about.
  8. My kids, 7 and 9, just finished up at SIG camp. They absolutely loved it. I can honestly say I have never seen them that happy in a group setting. I'm not sure they learned anything though :). The camp is mostly boys, something like a 4:1 ratio, but that didn't bother my girls. The other kids were nice and they each made a good friend. I had three goals: classroom experience, social interaction/possible friend making, and getting their minds stretched. Definitely got the first two, not sure about the third. My kids aren't the types to gush about what they've learned, unfortunately. But my feeling is that their minds remained unstretched. Depending on the age of your kids, Duke may be a better option. I'm probably going to do SIG again next year, but my kids are young and it's still a day camp at that age. Once they are old enough to do residential, we will most likely do something like Duke, CTY, or a math camp. (if my husband can bear to let them go :D)
  9. This is from The Heart of the Mind, by Michael Clay Thompson, which is a collection of essays. This is from the essay entitled "Give Me Rigor or Give Me Mortis". My apologies if you have already seen it. "Imagine a vertical continuum of challenge. The challenge at the bottom is zero; every student can do everything asked already, and no new learning or mental effort is required. Much of American education falls into this category; research consistently shows, for example, that bright students can answer eighty percent of final exam math questions before taking the course. The challenge level in the middle of the vertical continuum is minimal. Students already understand most of what is required, and the few details that are new do not provide enough growth to generate excitement. Students come home every day and answer "Nothing" to you-know-what question. Higher on the vertical challenge continuum, we find a level of genuine difficulty. There is some real demand, some interesting complexity, a bit of abstraction, and a dash of depth. Here and there, the minds light up, and begin to read and learn, feeling that at last, their time is not being wasted. Still, no deep growth is required; students do this work with equanimity, feeling that though more interesting, it is well within their ability. Even higher on the continuum, there is a level of stringent, severe difficulty, that makes strong demands of students through advanced levels of reading, abstraction, complexity, and pace, but which nevertheless remains within the realm of familiar terrain. Students here are doing more complex and elaborate varieties of things they have already done. They are learning more, faster, with more mastery and discipline, but no change is required in the way they think of themselves. Above this, high up on the challenge continuum, there is a thin, almost unnoticeable band. It represents a level of rigor so challenging that beyond requiring students to study difficult content, it requires students to reconsider themselves. At this level, a small amount of fear creeps in. Rapid breathing ensues. The thrill factor jumps. Students not only do not know the material at all, they are not sure they are in the right place. They are not in Kansas anymore. Moses-like, they are intellectual strangers in a strange land. To answer the demands of the assignment, they must not only learn what is new, they must be what is new. Master teaching, for gifted children, involves positioning the learning demands right at this seam, forcing students not only to learn, but to molt, to crack off the crusty shells of exoconcepts and get bigger. The unthreatening hard study in the level below is insufficiently rigorous because it builds their knowledge without developing their selves, and the really threatening impossibility in the level above is inappropriate because it will bruise them with failure, but between the difficult and the impossible is the rigorous." My thoughts later...
  10. We love it too. Used with 1st and 3rd grades and they often asked to do it first thing, and we often did two days at once because they wanted to hear the stories. It also led to them reading many of the books on their own.
  11. I am finally going to jump in - forgive me if it is incoherent :) As a new homeschooler just finishing up our first year, I can say I don't find these threads intimidating or harmful. They are inspiring. They keep me coming back to the boards, and they are the most valuable part of the boards for me. It is about fleshing out the possibilities. Finding out about ways to do things that I hadn't imagined. I can read Ester Maria's threads, for example, and say wow, there is a whole other level of rigor I hadn't imagined. I can read KarenAnne's posts and admire how she can create whole new subject areas with such creativity and passion. And then I can spend some time considering what may work for me and what may not. I can say, yes, I can incorporate some of what Ester Maria does into our school. I can say, there is no way I can do what Karen Anne is doing with literature, and I don't have any desire to. But its good to know about it anyway. Tomorrow I could meet someone for whom that would be a perfect approach, and now I know where to point them. But the point is that both of those views are important. It's good to know what is out there, beyond the published curricula and published books on homeschooling. It's good to know that not all curricula are equal. Sure, different curricula work for different people, but how do you figure out what will work for you? You NEED people's comments on what worked and didn't work for them and why. It's not feasible to get them all in hand, spend a month using each one and then decide! You NEED to know what skills other homeschoolers have found important. This board is all about learning from each other. I think SWB said it best - take what works for you and discard the rest. What works for me won't work for the next person and vice versa. But if it's never said, I may never find it, or I may take way too long to find it. So, keep those questions and threads coming! A final thought. What I do find harmful is when people get defensive and start attacking each other. I had to take a several week break from the boards after the rigor thread for example - it left such a bad taste in my mouth. And I'm sure I'm not the only one. Easy for me to say, but I do wish people would take an opposing viewpoint as just that and nothing more, and not read into the choice of words something that may not be there. Nobody has to "win." It is ok to disagree. Now I'm going to crawl back into my hole. :D
  12. Really, you can't go wrong with either. I started with US before Standards was available. Considered switching when my older was ready for 5A. I spent a lot of time comparing scope and sequence and got all the books for 5 for both versions. I decided to stick with US. This was right for us because my kids don't need the extra review, I don't use the HIGs, and I was comfortable leaving out the extra stuff and hitting it later. Actually, didn't want some of the extra stuff, like numbers into the billions. I got so much push back on writing out the lower numbers! If you are starting out new though, it's probably worth going with standards, simply because that's what the company is supporting now. There is always the chance that the US edition will go out of print.
  13. EM, Just a wild guess, but maybe it's a form of synesthesia. Don't know if you've ever read up on it, or read any of Oliver Sacks' or VS Ramachandran's books. Basically, the part of your brain that deals with these images may be adjacent to a part of your brain that generates the emotions/horror you feel, and so when the image part of your brain is active, it "leaks" into the emotion part and triggers your response. Clear as mud? It may be worth emailing a neurologist, perhaps even one of the ones mentioned above to see if that is a possibility. It is fascinating stuff to read about, but maybe not so much when it is happening to you :)
  14. It may be worth considering BFSU. The third volume, for grades 6-8, is supposed to be out this summer. The only caveat is that I think he just skips evolution entirely. I don't know this for sure, however. It's definitely secular.
  15. I think Singapore could work for you. Here is how I would do it. I'd just do the textbook and workbook. If you want to do the other books, do them at home - those are more teacher intensive. Have him work through just the workbook at school. If he gets to an exercise he doesn't know how to do, the teacher can use the textbook to introduce/explain it to him, and he can work through the textbook orally with him. This is what I did with my daughter last year while she was still in school (2nd grade), except I did it myself, and it worked great. I used the teachers manual exactly once to check a solution for one of the problems in 5A. She did 2A-6B in about a year. The other piece of this puzzle is that she has been doing Kumon math since she was 5. This has cemented her math facts. So what you were speculating about above has really worked for us. My personal opinion is that once you have your math facts, most of Primary math is simple. Most of the time, by the time she hit something in SM, she had already encountered it in Kumon, and so she was able to sail through. Of course, there are many ways to work on the math facts/automaticity; Kumon is just the easiest, most reliable way for me to get it done. It's likely there will be some word problems he can't do with the teacher. I'd recommend skipping those particular problems at school and having him work on them with you at home. The hard times will start for you after he finishes 6B and you have to find what to do next. :D It's wonderful your teacher is willing to work with him and do a real curriculum. Hope that helps - let me know if you have any questions. Oh, I didn't vote, but obviously, I love Singapore!! I think I own almost every math book they sell!
  16. Well, I have to jump in and say that I used to really love the Bosch, but ours just broke after only 4 years and we have to replace it. We use ours constantly too. We are getting a Miele. The appliance guys told us that the Bosch is built on a 7 year platform, while the Miele is built on a 20 year platform. So it's designed to last almost 3 times as long, and it's not much more expensive. Hope that helps. Hope I haven't freaked out all the Bosch people. I also like ASKO, but I cannot speak to how long it will last. It is less expensive.
  17. After much experimenting, we ended up with Colgate PopStars. It's minty, but mild. And it has little star shaped breath strips in it so it's pretty :)
  18. She posts recently in answer to an inquiry that some time next year is the best case scenario. I think you a re probably good for 2013. :001_smile:
  19. My daughter, who is very sensitive, and self-censors when she finds books not to her taste, read this just about when she turned 7 and loved it. We do not remotely use any language like you describe in our house. Obviously every kid is different. You could always start it and if it is not working, put it down and save it for later. ETA: she ripped through a lot of the roald Dahl books that spring/summer. Loved James and the giant peach, and the Charlie books, but found BFG and the Witches too scary.
  20. Story of the World 1 - continue with this Building Foundations of Scientific Understanding K-2 - continue with this Singapore science My Pals Are Here 3/4 - continue with this Singapore Math 4 WWE2 FLL2/3 Spelling Workout C Getting Started with Spanish Mindbenders, Dr. dooriddles, balance Benders and other stuff Free reading choices from what's here at home. Tennis, ballet, piano, chess
  21. Herehttp://http://www.amazon.com/Geography-Coloring-Book-Wynn-Kapit/dp/0131014722/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1305350842&sr=8-1 is the one I have. Sorry I don't know how to make it pretty. Not sure if it's the same one.
  22. I agree the mind benders are pricey. But the newer versions have more puzzles in them. They combined the older books. I'll have to look at those perplexors and the chip thing. You can never have too many logic books, right? Right? :D
  23. We like mind benders and balance benders. I have bunch of other stuff but we haven't tried it yet. I thought they might be good for summer work.
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