Suzannah
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Posts posted by Suzannah
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We've done Omni 2 and half of 3, finishing 3 this year. I use it without the TM. I'm sure it's much better with it, but I'm a cheapskate. :) DS does the introductory reading and we discuss the questions orally, then he's on his own to do the assigned reading before the next class time. Basically we go on like that, until we come to a writing assignment (which I generally don't assign but often have him read if there's good info) or other activity (which I generally do assign if it's a comparison chart, debate, etc.) I slacked-off a little toward the end of the year, but I like for DS to copy the "Question to Consider" into a journal. He doesn't have to write an answer unless he wants to, but I like the idea of letting that question "stew" a bit while he goes through the process. Sometimes we discuss it later. Sometimes I have him go back and read over the questions and think about/answer them. But it's fairly lax. I also like for him to write a short report (1 page) about each reading, but sometimes we let it slide, depending on schedule, whether or not he's read the book before, etc.
No, we don't do all of the readings, but we got most of them from Omni 2 and nearly all from the first half of Omni 3 (trying to stick to the WTM 4-year cycle) plus a few others.
Oh, and there's a chart at the back of the text, just before the timeline that shows about how long to spend on each book. That has been very helpful in my initial planning.
I've really enjoyed the books and look forward to circling back to Omni 1 next year. Then I'll have to decide whether to go on to the later Omnibus books or switch to TOG or what. Good luck!
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I'm not sure whether Square Foot Gardening and Raised Bed Gardening are exactly the same thing or not, but they share many of the same properties. I've been doing SFG for about 8 or 9 years. For us, the appeal of maximizing our space and having good soil were the big draws.
We live in a townhouse with a very small back yard. In our old townhouse, we hardly had a yard at all. By doing SFG in large containers on my deck I was able to have beans, peas and lettuce at the old place. Once we moved I wasn't sure where the garden should be so I kept using containers until I had a good feel for what part of the yard got the best sun. Then we built a new deck and changed our fence line so I had to move the garden again. Now that I have the perfect spot, I've switched from containers to raised beds. They are very easy to make and to customize for our space.
The soil is "Mel's Mix" (1/3 each of compost, peat moss and vermiculite or perlite) and everything grows beautifully. You don't use the existing soil, you make your own and set it on top of the soil (no tilling.) That probably helps to reduce weeds. And because the whole garden is divided into squares, it's very easy to see things that don't belong there so pulling weeds isn't a chore that takes some set block of time. It's just "Oh, a weed <pull>" Done. We had late frost this year so some things that I should have harvested by now are a little behind. But so far we've gotten several quarts of strawberries from my 4 x 4 bed and a couple of salads-worth of lettuce and chard. The tomatoes, peas and beans are just almost ready, and I expect peppers very soon too.
Take a look at the SFG site
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I don't know whether or not these are mentioned on the Living Math Books site, but we've enjoyed the "Sir Cumference" books from our library:
http://www.amazon.com/Cindy-Neuschwander/e/B001ILKFYG/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_1
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I did all of my lesson planning on paper until DS was in 6th grade and DD started 1st. I decided that a program would be invaluable once I had one in high school and was trying to manage assignments and grades for multiple students. I used the free version of HST for a year before deciding it was worth it to upgrade to the PLUS version. I have never visited a Yahoo group for it or taken advantage fo the lesson plans.
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We work through lunch most of the time. Either I eat before or after the kids so I can read aloud (history, science, French stories, etc.) or we listen to something in audio format (SOTW CD, French CD, etc.) We've done a few videos at lunch, but if I bring it to the table, everyone crowds around the portable DVD player and complains that they can't see it. If we go to one of the TVs/computer screens elsewhere in the house, I lose them. They never want to come back to the table.
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I followed a suggestion from Kendra here (http://www.preschoolersandpeace.com) to make a memory work folder for the kids at the beginning of the year with everything they will memorize over the course of the year. This consists of some scriptures I chose, the appropriate lists from WTM for the grade/time period (kings of England, first 13 colonies, continents, tectonic plates, planets, Preamble to the Constitution, etc.), poems, math formulae and anything else they may need to learn such as the scout oath, memory verses for church, etc. This year I included the Navy ranks and insignia so the kids would be familiar with them when we attended my brother's graduation from OCS. I also included the Greek alphabet (found a chart online with upper and lower case Greek letters and pronunciation examples).
We also use FLL for grammar but we do those poems within our grammar lesson for the most part. Memory work is usually one of the first few things we do in the morning and it is mostly independent for DS.
We've followed WTM from the beginning but memory work was just kind of hit or miss before I started doing the notebooks. I would have an idea of what I wanted them to memorize, but we never seemed to get it done. The notebooks are a part of our daily routine. And while it does always seem like an awful lot at the beginning of the year, we generally have completed it all and are just in review mode by February or March.
I also have a 2yo (nearly 3) who is beginning to learn his own memory verses. Generally they are the shortest of the verses the older two are working on. I haven't really asked him to do any poems or lists yet, but he probably could. It all comes down to implementation. :)
Blessings!
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This obviously for much younger kids than yours, but it's a great picture book for younger kids, about a New York Fireboat called back into service on 9/11.
FIREBOAT: The Heroic Adventures of the John J. Harvey
http://www.amazon.com/FIREBOAT-Heroic-Adventures-Harvey-Globe-Horn/dp/0399239537
Thanks so much for this thread. We'll be covering modern history next year and I've been thinking about the best way to address the last 10-20 years. I'll be checking out these recommendations.
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Sounds like a plan! :)
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If your oldest has done modern times in high school, then I don't see anything wrong with circling back to ancients. Like others have said, it is important for high school students to have some exposure to modern times. A separate states/capitals/presidents study wouldn't hurt, but isn't necessary. However, depending on your state's graduation requirements, your DS' area of interest and the admission requirements of whatever colleges your DS may be looking at, you might want to include a semester of Civics &/or current events.
I don't see anything wrong with the youngers waiting a while on modern history if that's your preference. But honestly, I think every time period is dark. Yeah, the Holocaust and Hiroshima and segregation are shockingly bad. But what about the Black Plague, the treatment of indigenous peoples under colonialism, ancient armies killing every living thing in their path, slavery? I mean, it's all pretty dark. I think people balk at modern times because it's so recent--because we know some of the participants are still around--because we can still see some of the effects today--because there are photographs and newsreel footage of the attrocities. They aren't just in our imaginations and we can't just shrug and say "Well, we don't really know for certain..."
In our house, we just go right along through history and try to cover it all in an age-appropriate way. I am blessed to have a 97 year old grandmother still living whose memory is wonderful. I have learned so much from her about so many things I can't possibly name it all. I don't know the best way to articulate this, but part of my attitude toward history comes from listening to her stories. Some are funny. Some are sad. Some have a moral. And some are just matter-of-fact. When her grandma died, they placed her in the front room and the neighbors all came to pay their respects, right there in the house. When a neighbor boy was dying, her mother stayed with the family for a time, helping them care for him. The family gave her some blood-soaked bed linens. They didn't want them, as you can imagine. But they were perfectly good linens, once cleaned, and it would have been a shame to throw them away. Life is hard. Some things are bad. But you make do and go on the best you can.
If "covering" modern history is hard to do with your youngers. Have them interview some of your oldest relatives and neighbors. They will learn SO MUCH!
"When an old person dies, it's like a library burns down."
Blessings!
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I would say 10 isn't necessarily too young for LOF: Fractions. However the next one, Decimals & Percents is more challenging that Fractions. The story is so engaging though, and the lessons are in nice, bite-sized pieces. I think just about any age could get something from it. If he doesn't actually master Fractions from it, just have him read it again. We love Fred here.
Blessings!
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We haven't gotten our scores back yet this year, so I don't know how it worked out. But DS' scores were somewhat low last year in Language Mechanics so I had him work through a book called "Improve Your Punctuation" for a direct attack so to speak. We have used Abeka's grammar from 3rd-6th grades, but decided to wing it this year since DS' schedule was so language heavy (spelling, writing, poetry, lots of Omnibus readings, Latin.) He knows a complete sentence from an incomplete one, all the parts of speech, how to find the topic sentence, etc. We just really needed to nail down punctuation.
I'll try to remember to update once we get his scores and see whether it was a reasonable gamble. Oh, for about half the year he also did Daily Grams, but there is no instruction so it wasn't the time-saver I thought it would be.
As to the sudden drop, it could be that the material was just more challenging this year. Or that he was hungry/tired/in a hurry to finish and didn't pay close attention. But one year DS' score in math just plummeted. On a closer look I saw that he had only attempted something like ten out of thirty problems. I asked him if he'd had any trouble with it and he said no. I also remember talking to him after he finished the math section on test day and he'd said it wasn't too hard then. We finally concluded he must have skipped a page by mistake. :S That year I had him take the CAT so I could submit both scores to the county with a written explanation of what had happened, just to be sure we wouldn't catch any flack over it.
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Well here's why we jumped ship. I did my research before we started hs-ing because I didn't want to jump around from one thing to another, trying to find what "fit." Looking back, I wish we'd started Saxon 1 in K, only because DS was well-prepared enough by the WTM suggestions that his enthusiasm for math diminished after a couple of months in first grade. He was a big first grader and he was bored going over all this stuff he already knew. But at that time I thought it was better to review rather than skip over things so we stuck with the progression from 1st-6th grade.
Saxon 1-3 was fine. DS neither loved nor hated math. 5/4-7/6 were difficult. When I saw that DS was struggling in 5/4 I considered switching programs and did all my previous research over. Then I decided that it was probably just a phase, that it really didn't matter whether or not DS liked math, but that he learned it. And through 5/4 and 6/5, DS did learn math, but it became a more and more arduous journey.
We added the DIVE CDs in 6/5 and 7/6, which helped, but by mid-year in 7/6, we were having to go back over lessons sometimes 2 and 3 times before moving ahead. And sometimes even that wasn't enough. So we'd move ahead, hoping it would click later, but the next lesson would be the same way. We were both frustrated and often angry. At some point it seemed the new concepts were becoming more and more difficult and were being introduced faster and faster and we just had to stop. We switched to Teaching Textbooks 7 in February and I also got Life of Fred Fractions at roughly the same time. Both of those programs brought an immediate change to DS' attitude. LOF was directly responsible for DS scoring really well in the fractions section of our standardized test last year.
So this year we have done LOF: Decimals and Percents, finished TT7 and taken advantage of the free trial available to homeschoolers for ALEKS.com (2 months if you refer two people.) We'll do LOF: Pre-Algebra over the summer to make sure it's really solid, then begin Algebra in the Fall (if not September, then by November/December.)
I think TT has served its purpose and we will not continue with it. I have nothing against the program, but my main hope in using it was to get DS out of his funk of "I hate math! I can't do this! It's just too hard!" The format with the cute graphics, doing the assignments on the computer, the "buddy" (his is a tank) aren't available in the upper levels as I understand it so if that was the attraction, it won't be there next year anyway. Right now I'm trying to decide between all Life of Fred, or LOF and MUS DS loves Fred. There's no way we could ditch him.
So that's our story. Right now DD is about half-way through Saxon 3 and loving it. But she is legally blind and while the font size on the 1-3 books is fine, trying to find a large print version for her in the next level is impractical ($400 a book!?) We're actually thinking of going with TT for her since she can see it on our large computer monitor and have the audio explanations.
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So is this the new version of Latin Primer? Or something different?
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I don't know how far you might want to stray from Corolla, but we've gone all the way down to Ocracoke for a couple of years. (LOVE IT!) Last year we camped on the beach. It's not for the faint of heart, but what an amazing experience! There are billions of stars! We had the book One Small Square: Seashore by Donald Silver which we looked at some. The wild horses were penned back in the 60s I think for safety (to keep them off of the highway) but you can see them. There's a pirate museum (quite cheesy and not worth the money unless you just want to be able to say you went) and a lighthouse and the "British Cemetery" where some British sailors from WWII are buried. Blackbeard the pirate met his end just off of Ocracoke. The island is only accessible by ferry (free) and while it does cater to tourists, it is strictly locally-owned. I mean, no franchises at all. The ferry ride alone might be worth a day trip.
And of course there's the Wright Brother's memorial at Kitty Hawk. I still haven't been but will try to remedy that in the near future.
Have a fabulous time!
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Thanks for the link Saille. I don't know whether I'd seen that one before, but it does help confirm what I thought I'd seen in other comparison posts. As to plain text, DS loved Latin Primer which is just as bare bones as it can be. He didn't like Cambridge which has interesting pictures and a story line. Go figure.
Would you say that Greek Alphabet Code Cracker is necessary? We actually added the Greek alphabet to our memory work this year so DS is familiar with it (name, appearance and sound) and DD is somewhat less familiar with it. I had planned on getting Code Cracker for DD for next year while having DS begin on whichever Greek program we are going to start with. But I think with five years of Latin under his belt and a familiarity with the alphabet, he would be bored spending even a few months on just the alphabet again. This was his choice of language for the purpose of (beginning) to read scripture in the original Greek. Which program would get him reading quicker do you think?
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I'd like to hear more about EG as well. I'm looking at programs for Koine Greek for DS next year (8th grade.) I've seen somewhere on the boards a comparison between Elementary Greek and Hey Andrew... but can't seem to find it when I search.
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Well, yes, but not exactly in a scheduled-out way. We did TT 7 and LOF:Decimals and Percents during the same time-frame. Right now I'm trying to figure out what we need to do next for math. DS will begin LOF:Pre-Algebra now and work through the summer (that's a given.) But in September I'm thinking of either doing all LOF or LOF and MUS. DS loves Fred and I could see it's affect on DS' standardized test last year (haven't gotten the scores back yet for this year.)
I think since LOF is such a completely different approach, it can definitely go with anything, but not in the sense that they track along at the same pace or cover things in the same order. It's its own thing.
Good luck!
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This was discussed briefly in a recent thread.
http://www.welltrainedmind.com/forums/showthread.php?t=175154
Which languages are you considering?
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You don't have to do everything and you're not behind. As you look back through WTM you'll see sections about starting in the middle including alternate suggestions for Latin if you decide to pursue it. You asked "Why Latin?" and we gave you our answers. But they don't have to be your answers.
Good luck on your journey!
P.S. Not even SWB does EVERYTHING!
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Those sound like wonderful choices for your ages. Keep in mind that they are very young and your job in the first several years is teaching them to love learning, read, write and do basic math.
We really love Five in a Row for pre-school and K, but switch to WTM for first grade on.
Have fun and enjoy those little blessings!
ETA: LOL Rosie! I almost wrote just that! I've been around here too long.
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Latin is to the english language as
the piano is to musical instruction. (I don't remember who said that) :)
That's an excellent comparison. As it says in TWTM, because Latin is a dead language, it isn't constantly changing by the influence of other languages or cultural changes. It stays put while we analyse it and take it apart and put it back together. We don't really need to get wrapped up in whether we are pronouncing it properly or whether we'll be able to order from a menu and ask for directions in Latin. We can focus on the workings of language, of tense and agreement and case and gender.
In addition to that, it is the basis for all of the Romance languages and is responsible for something like half of English vocabulary. It comes up in science and medicine and legal terminology. No, you don't need to know Latin to go into science or medicine or law. But it is yet another tool in the box we equip our kids with as we send them out into the world.
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DS is planning to read With Lee in Virginia by Henty either over the summer or next year when we cover the Civil War.
:lurk5:
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I started with Latin Primer in 3rd grade since that was what the original version of WTM recommended. In subsequent editions, SWB has said while that's still a good choice, it isn't as user-friendly as Latina Christiana. Since I'd already invested in LP and it worked well for DS I never bothered to look at LC so I don't know how they compare. I didn't think it was user UN-friendly. But, I will say LP really is ideally suited for 3rd grade or higher. I had thought briefly of beginning earlier with DS since he was reading reasonably well and knew all of his parts of speech from FLL. But it really requires a fluency with both that he was not ready for before 3rd grade.
It has been an excellent program. DS moved beyond me by mid-way through his second year, but the DVDs are an actual classroom teacher so we just learned right alongside each other. He's now about half-way through Henle 1 which we will probably continue with for a minimum of 2 years into high school.
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Now that I think of it, I believe you are referring to different Critical Thinking Logic books. They are recommended in WTM? We did Mindbenders last year and the year before. I had intended to do Introductory Logic last year but after a few weeks both of us had a glazed look in our eyes. And I actually enjoyed logic in college! So we just kept going through mindbenders and did Fallacy Detective this year on the recommendation of a friend. Next year we'll actually DO formal logic. I just have to decide which one.
I hope you get some more responses. Blessings!
A newbie with questions
in K-8 Curriculum Board
Posted
Read The Well-Trained Mind if you haven't already. It might help you organize your thoughts some and help you decide what your goals are if you haven't already. There's great information for Pre-K and K as well as practical advice for later years and recollections of the authors' personal experiences with homeschooling.
But don't get overwhelmed! :) Maybe I should have said that first.
I love Five in a Row for Pre-school and Kindergarten. It's a unit-study program based on classic children's literature such as The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Grey Bridge, Mike Mulligan and the Steam Shovel, Peter Rabbit, etc. You read the story once a day for a week and pull one or more topics from the story to study. The authors advocate the same methods up through 3rd grade I think. I prefer WTM from 1st grade on, but to each his own.