msk
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Posts posted by msk
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I loved the Hero and the Crown in middle school, too. The Children of Green Knowe and its sequels were favorties of mine as a kid and have been a big hit with my 8yo. That series is from the 50s and the language used to describe some of the characters (especially non-white characters) is different from what we'd use now, so it might not hurt to skim ahead if you're sensitive to language that sounds a little "off" by normal standards today.
It's funny to see people mention The Rescuers. My daughter really enjoyed them too, but was completely flummoxed by the concept of a "Ladies' Auxilliary" to the mouse Rescue Aid Society. When I explained the concept she just stared at me as though I'd grown an extra head or something. The idea of boarding school common in some of these books was also bizarre to her. I guess these are extra bits of knowledge we pick up from "classics."
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@OE-- It does sound like the NHD projects help with these skills. So does debate (which some people mentioned above). Its kind of comforting in a way-- it seems to me that many, many different programs (if done well) teach the same set of skills, just in slightly different ways and with different labels. I feel like writing instruction is one of the areas where involved parents (in the whole spectrum from HSing to just giving their student's papers more thorough comments than an overwhelmed teacher in a poor-to-average public school would) can make the biggest difference.
I should have mentioned that most of the students I see who are at the level I thought early-stage college students ideally should be are in the honors programs at the community college and state university where I teach. I think the average student at the fancypants university where I did my undergrad was at that level, but it's not "average" in most places. I don't think people bothering to read this thread are going for mediocrity, though. :-)
PS-- I teach prehistoric archaeology, especially New World but a lot of general prehistory too. I don't know much about Biblical archaeology, it's a pretty specialized field and my knowledge tends to end around the time written records start proliferating in any given place.
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Thanks everyone! I think the book in post #8 is the kind of thing I was looking for (more of a background on why the patterns exist), but several people also mentioned much nicer rule-list-oriented things than I currently have. ABCs and All Their Tricks looks interesting too.
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I am trying to help my 2nd grader learn the funky, random-seeming spelling rules in English, and I keep wishing I knew the explanations for them that keep them from seeming so random. It would be a lot more interesting for both of us, and maybe help her remember them in deeper way than just a load of memorization (which is not her strong suit).
Can anyone recommend a good book on this? I have been looking at "Spell it Out" by David Crystal as a book for me to read and use to report interesting, relevant items from as they come up for the broader patterns in her spelling lists. If there was a teaching-oriented book structured around these things, that would be even better. Unfortunately the spelling books I've seen for elementary grades are heavy on lists with brief mentions of the rules, and no explanation of the "why" behind those rules.
I do understand why most spelling books are structured the way they are, but I have one of those kids who seems to have been born in the "logic stage" and retains things much better with a detailed big-picture explanation. Has anyone seen something like this, either as an interesting book for me or as a teaching tool?
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OE (and others), my oldest is 8 and I am just supplementing her public school. So, I don't really know what/how to teach in high school level writing, just what I wish the "end product" were. I teach primarily archaeology. Many of my courses are geared towards non-majors, so I've tended to focus on writing arguments (and writing clearly and convincingly in general) as skills useful to non-majors and majors alike. Papers in my field are usually science-based arguments. Creative and descriptive writing are a different ballgame whose rules I don't really know at this level.
When students have a basic paper structure down with clear organization, proper grammar, etc, the first thing I do is breathe a sigh of relief and wish everyone understood how much just doing those things improves the way their paper is percieved (and thus their grade), regardless of what their paper's content is! Then I look for other things.
One thing many students have trouble with is turning a paper about a topic that's new to them from a description into an argument. Often people need help finding a "thread" that winds through their paper and holds the different sections together. If they can find that thread and phrase it in the first paragraph or two as the point their paper will be arguing for, it makes the descriptive paragraphs much more interesting as readers feel there's a point to it all. Again, that "thread" doesn't need to be ground-breaking or hugely controversial, just something it's possible to argue for or against or try to convince someone of. It takes practice to figure out how to articulate this thread clearly at the beginning, keep highlighting it as they go along, and tie things back to it at the end. I think this is something people get exposed to in high school (or at least they should) and refine early in college (hopefully) in classes like Tiramisu's daughter had. (I had a class like that my freshman year, and in hindsight it was one of the most important courses I ever took.)
Another issue for many people is balancing evidence, experts' arguments, and their own opinions. It's important to have the student's voice in the paper as the person pulling evidence together to support the "thread" I mentioned, but their opinions need to be backed up with arguments they've read (and original data for students farther along who have some to work with). Pure opinion or "common sense" without research to back it up doesn't work in this context. Obviously this involves library research skills, but students also need to be comfortable reading others' arguments, understanding the pieces that will be useful to them, restating those arguments entirely in their own words, and weaving them into their own arguments in a way that seems both logical and natural. It's hard to break people of the habit of quoting all the time, but (as I repeat approximately 1 million times per semester) being able to put something into your own words shows a much deeper understanding of it. I think this is what "reading comprehension questions" and "summarize the main events in this story" type activities in the lower grades are building towards, but in college those skills are getting pulled into an original essay in a way many students aren't quite comfortable with at first. The descriptive "reports" and personal opinion essays students write in earlier grades are also pieces that feed into this-- again they've (hopefully) built skills students can now combine in new ways.
With people who can do the things above, I focus on improving the logic of their argument, whether the evidence they use supports their argument well or could be interpreted a different way, whether their references are balanced without overreliance on a specific school of thought, how well they critique opposing views, whether they notice flaws in their own argument and have a way of hedging against them (even if it's just to point out some uncertainty and say "more work is needed on X"), and things like that. In an ideal world, this is the level I'd expect people to be working on early in college-- they'd have the skills in I described earlier down pretty well and just need a little refinement. They'd have some experience working on the skills in this paragraph, and be working to improve them with input from someone with expert knowledge in the field they were writing about. In my mind, this process of refining ideas by working with someone with expert knowledge in a subject is why students pay to take classes with someone who has an advanced degree, and this is where I think my kids should be when they start college.
As people get farther along, writing becomes more field-specific; I think about whether students referenced key theories and seem familiar with the major arguments and "big names" for a topic or region, etc. In my field, there's more of a focus on working with original data at this level, and fitting a student's analyses into both a specific research question and a larger theoretical or methodological issue of importance in our field more generally. Hopefully this is what a student will get to later in college once they settle on a field, and if they already have those earlier skills it will be much easier to focus on this level of work.
That got really long, but it's something I think about a lot when I'm trying to help my beginning college students, hopefully it will help somewhat.
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I think the thread has moved on from the original questions to things like comparing curricula that I'm unqualified to do (my oldest is only 8), but as one of those college instructors who's complained here about writing I thought I'd throw my two cents in.
Many of my students don't know how to structure an essay. I would like them to write an introductory paragraph (or maybe two) that introduces a topic briefly, states what their argument or point about that topic is going to be, and very briefly introduces the types of evidence they're going to use. Then, I'd like them to write something x-y pages long (with the length appropriate to the assignment) in which each paragraph makes a point related to their argument. This could be a discussion of something that supports their argument, or a discussion of one of the major arguments against their argument and why it's not really a fatal flaw. Finally, I'd like them to end with a conclusion that summarizes how they've drawn all these different pieces of evidence together into a convincing body of support for whatever their argument is. In a longer assignment there are other things they could add, but this is pretty typical, and I make it as clear as possible that it's what I'm looking for.
The organization I've just described is, I think, what the infamous "5 paragraph essay" is supposed to teach younger students. The problems come up when it's made into an overly formulaic grading tool rather than a teaching tool. "Five paragraphs" is just supposed to force students to write a coherent introduction, explain 3 supporting points, and write a conclusion that matches the rest of the essay. There is nothing magic about the number five! In fact, when the essay is only 5 paragraphs long, writing an intro and conclusion gets to seem kind of silly-- who is going to lose track of the thread of an argument in 1-2 pages? The format should be a training tool to help students learn the structure for longer and more complex pieces of writing, not something to be slavishly followed under all circumstances.
Often, my students worry much, much more about the number of paragraphs to include, the sizes of the font and margins, and things like the use of first-person and passive voice than they do about conveying any meaningful information. Essays written like Yoda, one receives. Horrified, one feels. I can only assume this is the result of silly grading practices in younger grades, when a swamped (or not-so-good) teacher has graded by skimming and looking for formatting errors rather than paying attention to what the student is actually discussing. Students end up thinking it's okay to turn in papers that sound like incoherent rambling as long as they avoid whatever those "grading triggers" were (passive voice and first person seem to be the biggies where I teach).
Once people get the issue of organization figured out, style and content are also big tripping points. My friends who teach college courses were reposting this like mad on Facebook and laughing: http://www.collegehumor.com/post/6941975/if-everyone-still-wrote-like-they-did-in-college. (Caution, that website's language and content are not child-appropriate.) People above referred to this too-- students need to be comfortable with just making a good argument for something without feeling like they ought to pretend to have a brilliantly original idea or a life-changing epiphany every time they write a class paper.
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I'm a big fan of the Kuhn Rikon "safety lid lifter." I think the America's Test Kitchen people liked it as well. I bought it when my oldest was born; she's almost 8 and it still works perfectly.
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I see homework as both a little extra practice for my 7yo, and a time for ME to notice if there's something she hasn't understood well and take responsibility for helping her with it. Perhaps this is because her school limits homework to 10 minutes per day per grade level (usually much less!) and/or because I've always had a non-antagonistic relationship with her teachers, but if she can't do a math problem I tend to assume it's because *my daughter* didn't understand the classroom explanation that time around and needs to see/hear another explanation-- I don't blame the teacher by assuming the teaching was poor or the homework is inappropriately difficult.
If my girl was getting hours of busywork a day I'd be bothered, but I really don't see 10-20 minutes of writing or math practice as a huge intrusion into our lives.
I teach college students. Sometimes I give what I consider a good explanation, and 18 out of 20 students "get it." I tend to think the two who didn't were either not paying attention or should have asked for extra help, rather than blaming myself for poor teaching when nearly everyone did well. I am always happy to give the lagging students extra help outside of class of course, but the rest of the class has moved on and those couple of students need to keep up. I think of my daughter's classroom the same way, and once in a while she needs a few pointers so she can keep moving along with everyone else.
I am in the room doing something else during my daughter's 10-15 minutes of daily homework, and I answer questions, check her work, and ask her to fix errors. I think most people learn a lot from fixing their own mistakes. I am fine with doing this for the forseeable future if necessary. My parents checked my English homework until my senior year of high school, unfortunately-- I was writing well enough to get A's in my classes but not well enough to be prepared to do well in college, and they knew it. I am SO glad they forced me to go "above and beyond" or I wouldn't have learned to write good papers. In the upper grades I think my role will transition from checking to make sure my daughter has understood things well to checking to make sure she's doing her best and living up to her potential, and I am fine with that.
I am often surprised by what comes off as an antagonistic feeling towards schools and teachers in some of the threads on the *afterschooling* board. I've seen a number of threads on afterschooling (not this one) in which people's dislike of teachers was palpable, and the way they reported speaking to and interacting with teachers was openly rude. I expect it from some people on the main boards (unfortunately), but I would hope people *afterschooling* have their kids IN school for good reasons rather than resenting the heck out of school in general but sending them anyway. Obviously that's not the case-- I wonder why?
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I agree with the suggestion above that you get something for teaching in addition to practice. The Ordinary Parent's Guide helped me a lot in terms of remembering what the rules were (I'd forgotten how to articulate them eons ago). My daughter hated that book with a firey passion, so we ended up using it for our own explanations in the context of things like using BOB books for practice, but it was very helpful from a parent's perspective.
Another thing to keep in mind is that different kids learn reading in different ways. I will probably get tomatoes thrown at me for saying this in public, but my daughter's reading didn't "take off" and become a source of fun and entertainment for her until we stopped daily phonics practice and left her to her own devices for a while. She suddenly started reading much better and picking up books to read for fun in every spare moment, and eventually we realized she'd switched to something more like "whole language." (At 7.5 she's currently a poor speller and we *still* have to keep reminding her of phonics rules for spelling purposes, so I'm not necessarily recommending this route, but it was clearly when her reading progress very rapidly sped up and when reading became fun rather than work.) So, it might be worth finding out more about what they do in school and experimenting with emphasizing different ways of learning at home until you both figure out what finally clicks. If your school is incredibly hard-core sight-words-only and won't do ANY phonics whatsoever or something like that I can see kwik's confusion issue coming up, but where I live schools are using a mix of methods and just emphasizing one or the other.
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The K work the OP describes is pretty typical for my area, too. Sometimes it seems like one third of the people on this board live in a place where PS is a waste of space where nobody ever learns to read at all; another third live where it consists of difficult 16-hour days followed by 8 hours of developmentally inappropriate homework; and another third live in a place where it's somehow both at once. Neither my PS nor my kids' remotely resemble any of these, so I guess we're lucky. ;-)
Have you tried doing homework in the morning? Things take half as long before school at my house as they do after. I am not a morning person, but getting up 15 minutes earlier is worth it. Morning exercise helps too (walking to school instead of driving in our case).
I can sympathize-- when my daughter started K two years ago many/most kids in her class could read already and she couldn't, and I hadn't been expecting that. I just tried to keep emphasizing "some kids already did the work to learn this, you are doing that work now" and telling her it would be just as easy for her as it seemed to the others in her class once she'd done the work and practice they'd done. We emphasized that everything is a learned skill that takes practice, including sitting still, following directions, getting along with classmates, etc., and tried to point out which things came easily to her and which took more work, and how different things come easily vs take work to different kids. It sounds obvious and trite, but just repeating variations on that conversation every time worries hit really helped my daughter get over her dismay when she wasn't immediately a superstar at everything. (So did catching up with and then passing those grade level expectations, but that took time.)
It takes much less time and is much easier to teach a normal 5-6yo to read than a normal 3-4yo, so "catching up" is really not as big a deal in the long run as it seems when you're in the thick of it for those first few months (at least in my experience). My daughter is in 2nd grade now, reading well above grade level, and will spend hours at a time reading for fun; I don't think being behind in early K did her any harm at all. She LOVES school, even though homework annoys or frustrates her occasionally-- she definitely sees school and homework as two different things.
I agree with others that having to work hard on things sometimes in elementary school is good, as long as it's framed as "brain exercise" and not stress. Thinking "everything in school is easy for me, so I must be smart" can lead to a serious crash when things eventually get difficult and your definition of "smart" is linked to everything being easy. The later that crash comes the worse it will probably be (I saw this happen to people in college, with bad results). Learning to get past frustration and feel good at the end of a tough project is good, and I think it's the reason a lot of people do extra things after school. A continuous frustrated face would be bad, but intermittent ones are better for my daughter than watching her breeze airly through things.
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Another option for senior year English might be to look for a more specialized CC writing class than English Comp I&II. It depends on what's offered obviously, but some places have courses in things like science writing, writing an argument, etc. that would be useful in many fields, and in future college courses too.
I teach at a CC, and I see many students who've been trained to write in a very artificial style I think of as "too many English classes." They're so terrified of things like first person and split infinitives they end up writing awkward, stilted sentences that don't get their ideas across clearly. Obviously a really good English teacher wouldn't teach in a way that led to that, but it's why I'm suggesting a different kind of writing class. A writing course focused on conveying actual information (instead of writing thoughts and opinions down in a very specific style that's not widely used elsewhere) would fill the English credit, and perhaps teach your student something more or different about writing in contexts other than the artificial one found in an English I-II classroom.
I sympathize with the lit analysis pangs. I disliked that intensely in high school, when we always applied it to novels. Those ideas are a lot more interesting applied to nonfiction and historical documents, though, so if there's something like Western Civ that fills that requirement in college she might enjoy that more.
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We've prioritized homemade family dinners and calm downtime in the evenings, since my husband and I both work full time and our kids currently need to be in bed by 8:30 to feel good the next day. So far everything my 2nd grader does is within 2 miles of home and/or something we do with her, but as my preschooler gets older and both kids ask for different things I am sure this will get harder. Her homework load is very light right now and we just do light and informal supplementing of academics rather than any formal programs, so that helps too.
Right now, my oldest is in four activities; one is after school once a week, two are on weekends, and one is one weeknight plus one weekend afternoon per month. Whoever drops her off either sits and reads or does the activity also, depending on what it is. The evening activity (a scout meeting I'm also involved in) wreaks havoc with our "family dinner and calm downtime" goal, I am very glad it's just once a month! I dread adding more evening activities, although as the kids get older I assume they're less apt to be volatile in the evenings and can stay up later too. I am really, really hoping most of their extracurriculars can be after school programs so all they'll need is to be picked up later than usual.
I personally can't imagine doing as many things as many people here seem to do, but obviously some families thrive on being really busy and love it! It must be really rough when a constant-activity-type kid has stay-at-home-type parents, though, it would be very hard for me to keep up that pace.
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Kindergartens vary a LOT. My older daughter was one of the only kids NOT reading at the level the OP describes or higher when she started K, because (unlike most people where we live) we chose a non-academic preschool and didn't do academics at home unless she was interested-- and she wasn't interested in reading by herself at 4. Obviously some places are not like this, but there are also many public schools where most kids are reading before K and the teachers are fully expecting it. The OP may be in a school like the ones previous posters describe, but she could also be in one with plenty of kids for a 3rd-grade-level reading group in K, weekly art, science, music, library, and PE time, and all sorts of other ways to keep her son engaged.
I think the "being bored" issue is often more related to personality than to giftedness or academic level. I had a great time in public school. I loved our gifted pull-out program once a week, but I also enjoyed having time to read everything I could get my hands on when I finished my work early. I found my own challenges-- writing long and complicated stories and poems for our writing assignments, finding multiple ways to solve math problems, and watching all the different ways other kids behaved and trying to figure out different social situations. My own daughters seem similar so far; when my oldest gets a list of vocabulary words she already knows and is asked to write sentences with them, she makes all her sentences rhyme, or makes them into a funny story. I know there are gifted kids who are bored or feel stifled when challenges aren't directed to them regularly in the classroom, but there are also gifted kids who learn to occupy themselves productively and happily (and teachers who let them do so)-- and there are lots of kids who are behind in the classroom and still bored.
If a child is likely to be bored in a classroom, that will probably happen whether parents spend time on academics at home or not. If your son wants to do academic work, I see no reason not to. I agree with previous posters about using math manipulatives in meaningful ways; Kindergarten math is very simple, but fun and interesting practice will make later concepts seem more intuitive.
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If they like historical fiction, Miranda the Great (Estes) is on Kindle. That might be a good complement to the nonfiction your oldest will be getting at school, and it's short enough that my oldest enjoyed it at 4.
We really like the Usborne Time Traveler series Lori D mentioned too, but it's not on Kindle unfortunately. Tiger Tiger (Lynne Reid Banks) might be a possibility on Kindle for your oldest, but the tigers are treated badly enough that some kids (like mine!) won't enjoy it at that age.
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You could also remind her that learning to write in different styles will make her writing stronger overall, even if she continues to dislike "academic" writing. Academic writing can vary a lot between fields too (some don't care about active vs. passive voice or first-person pronouns as long as things are clear, other fields seem obsessive to an outsider).
I think learning to write an argument that weighs different pieces of evidence against each other is a useful skill that is different from writing fiction or opinion pieces. A well-written argument will seem more convincing to many people than a rambling, crazy-sounding one even if the actual evidence in the rambling one is stronger. Writing an argument yourself also helps you evaluate others' arguments better. I'm not sure whether this is the kind of thing she's doing, but it's a reason to practice writing outside the creative realm. She may still not like it, but hopefully she'll be able to see some educational value in it.
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I love the non-academic preschool my kids attend(ed). Among other things, it intentionally taught kids how to deal with other human beings. For example, there were never quite enough of things for each kid to have their own, so kids had to figure out how to take turns, and the teachers and aides were very involved in modeling ways to do this and making suggestions.
I know a lot of people are going to be very dismissive of this, but learning how to deal with other people, especially people different from themselves or who they wouldn't normally choose to be around, has been a very valuable skill for my kids. My 2nd grader shows a level of tolerance, compassion, and appreciation of others' differences now that I really value. She may be slightly bored when the class repeats a concept she already understands, but I am SO happy she has learned not to sit there seething with resentment at the kids who "hold her back" or looking down on them. She knows from experience that later that day the kid who can't add at grade level will beat her at basketball or paint a better picture than she can. I realize she is not moving ahead as efficiently as she could be, but at the moment I am happy with the pace she has-- we're not striving for our 2nd-grader to be the very farthest ahead possible, we want a good well-rounded education in more than just academics (as do many HSers). My kids are learning to respect those different from themselves by *actually spending time* with such kids every day, not by reading books about it or having occasional earnest conversations with me with no regular experiences to back them up.
Can homeschoolers replicate this aspect of PS? Sure. The posters earlier whose kids were in regular outside classes or clubs are probably doing it. But I've also seen enough posts about how to ensure that one's activities excluded "certain people" (ones from a different religion, or with behavioral issues, or with lower IQs, or whatever) on this board to suggest some people are not doing it. I realize sometimes things don't work out the way they have for us, and I wouldn't leave my 7yo in a situation that made her lastingly unhappy. Still, the fact that she is learning this particular kind of patience, tolerance, and compassion happily at a school she enjoys, while getting an education I am happy with, is a benefit of our particular PS experience for our particular family situation. It's another item to add to the list of things "accomplished" in a PS day-- some people may not value this particular lesson, but I do, and I am glad at least some HSers do too.
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"Home school is attitude, philosophy, and all the time you can give. Public schools are saying that your life is more important than your child's and hoping the public school eventually delivers an adult you'll be able to live with and eventually be proud of." (Quote from a post earlier in this thread)
Statements like this make it sound like the writer believes all homeschooling parents love their children more than all PS parents, and that all PS parents are utterly selfish and neither have nor want anything to do with their kids. Saying "I obviously love my kids much more than you love yours" is just about the rudest thing you can say to a person, in my opinion.
Perhaps this is not quite what this poster meant (although I know there are people here who honestly believe this). When I occasionally open the agony threads here about "my sister/mother-in-law/rival at church is anti-homeschooling and is being mean to me" I often wonder whether these mean, passive-aggressive conversations begin because the HSer has been saying things like what I quoted above, either by accident or knowingly.
It's great that people are proud of their choices and believe in their reasons for them, but please know that implying that everyone who is different from you is selfish and unloving is the kind of thing that puts some people off homeschooling, too. (I realize almost nobody is reading this thread by now, but I had to try...)
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I think people in this thread are using this "2 hours" statement to say it's okay for a 3rd grader to do *focused academic seat-work* for less than 6 hours at home each day, and I certainly agree, but the implication that one could spend 2 hours working and then just throw away the rest of the day altogether and still accomplish more than a PS classroom is completely false.
My 2nd grader has been at a pretty good PS for K-2 so far (though not as wonderful a one as Spy Car's). From volunteering in the classroom, I know they DO get more than 2 hours worth of work done there. Yes, one-on-one instruction just for my daughter would be more efficient and allow her to move along faster, but I definitely disagree with the "2 hours = one day" rule for even a "pretty good" PS classroom, even in K. I am sure one could provide a great K year at home with 2 hours of *academics* and daily extras like art classes, playgroups, and regular field trips, but that is not the same thing as "2 hours = one day" at all.
A lot of PS parents are VERY aware of the limits on their time with their kids and consciously try to make the most of family free time. Not all, of course, but whether kids spend their free time watching the Disney Channel or at an engineering festival has more to do with their family culture than a "homeschool vs public school" division. Plenty of PS kids go to museums and zoos, go hiking, and work on scout badges; they spend hours reading for pleasure, they watch documentaries, they help cook dinner, they participate in their parents' hobbies, and they make up games at recess based on predator-prey relationships or Greek mythology (and then tell their parents about them in excruciating detail over dinner). All these things are common among non-deprived children in homeschool AND public school. It is great when homeschooling allows kids plenty of time for those good things, but it's not really fair to suggest that the vast majority of PS kids are not getting them. Of course, count ballet classes as PE if you want to, but it wouldn't be accurate to double-count them as both PE and something no average PS kid would get to have.
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We were in a similar place a few months ago. It seems like some kids leap from easy readers into "real" chapter books fast, but others need steps in between-- that is definitely where my daughter was! What worked here was just giving her a huge selection of books I knew were pretty easy for her, and then just being as hands-off about it as possible. Books with lots of pictures also helped as she could get through them faster and build confidence.
For what seemed like a long time the only books my daughter would pick up and read unprompted were Elephant and Piggie and Fly Guy-- everything else was "work." For a few weeks, I just watched her race through stacks of those, the various Cynthia Rylant easy reader series, and the old Billy and Blaze books someone here on the boards recommended in other threads (which meant I was at the library several times a week, but it was worth it). After that she enjoyed moving up through the Dodsworth books (Tim Egan), the Commander Toad series (Yolen), the easier Kate DiCamillo series (Bink and Gollie, Mercy Watson), and Ivy and Bean (Barrows) to transition out of the easy readers. As other people mentioned, graphic novels are also really appealing confidence-builders at this stage. My daughter loved Babymouse and is just getting into the Mouse Guard and Amulet series. She will also devote enormous energy to reading anything with "Star Wars" or "Pokemon" in the title.
I think this must be a really rough stage for kids-- it is hard to sit and struggle through Henry and Mudge or something like that when your taste in stories runs more to Watership Down or Lord of the Rings, especially at an age when a month seems like a long time.
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I love museums and work in a related field, so I thought I'd add some events people reading this thread might be able to use. Smithsonian Museum Day (free admission for two to museums on their list) is coming up on September 28. International Archaeology Day is October 19 this year, and International Museum Day is in mid-May, both of which include free admission to museums and/or special events in some places. (I had links to those but they aren't posting correctly-- a google search should turn them up though. The archaeology month listing is http://saa.org/publicftp/PUBLIC/resources/ArchMonth_2005.html)
We don't homeschool, but we go to a museum, zoo, botanical garden, local festival, etc. at least once a month, more often during the good-weather months (which means winter where I live). The kids know some of the smaller places like the backs of their hands now, but we still have a good time. We're in a larger city though, I imagine things would be different in a place with fewer, smaller local attractions.
I sometimes daydream about living in New York or Washington DC (or Paris, or London) and spending each week reading about history in my spare time, and that weekend visiting the appropriate gallery in a fabulous local museum. I wonder if people who live in those places ever do that?
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Find out when Archaeology Month is in your state-- I think every state has one, and there are usually a bunch of free fairs, hikes, tours, etc. offered. These will often be geared to your local prehistory instead of dinosaurs and cave paintings, but that is good prehistory to know about too!
My family's favorite books for young kids for this time period are Lisa Peters' "Our Family Tree: An Evolution Story," Fox and Davis' "Older Than the Stars," Jan Brett's "The First Dog," and especially Lisa Wheeler's "Mammoths on the Move." They're all short picture books, but great springboards for talking about more complex concepts like evolution, domestication, migrations, and changing environments over time.
If you happen to be interested in dogs, talking about the histories of different dog breeds and what they show us about how generations of organisms can change over time as people select for different attributes has been an endless source of conversation in our house, and has helped my kids understand both domestication and evolution. That may just be a quirky thing here, though...
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I like the way my Billy bookshelves look and they're pretty sturdy for the price, but they do sag if we fill a whole shelf with tall hardbacks or if we double-layer paperbacks. The side pieces will also bow outward over time if I fill them too tightly. If you watch the hardback content and don't stuff them they should be okay, though.
The Ikea-looking bookshelves my parents passed on to us from my childhood don't sag or bow no matter what we do to them and are several inches deeper, which is very nice-- I think they're solid wood, though, so they'd be much more expensive nowadays. I wish I had more like them!
ETA: Billy is some kind of particleboard, but a better quality particleboard than many I've seen.
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That's not the kind of geometry my DD is doing now and complaining about. She's working through those problems where she has to calculate the lengths of sides of a triangle using the Pythagorean Theorem or calculate angles in a polygon, etc. The only time I've ever had to do that kind of geometry work since 9th grade has been when I took the SAT and then the GRE.
Archaeologists do use that-- if the excavation unit I am laying out has sides of lengths X and Y and I want to make sure it is really square, how long should the hypotenuse of a triangle dividing the square in half be? We'd hammer a pin in one corner, use two tape measures to measure out the two sides, and use a third to get the hypotenuse correct (and thus a right angle) before hammering in the other two pins, then use the two original tape measures to locate the last pin and lay out a rectangle with accurate 90 degree angles instead of the funky parallelogram we'd likely get otherwise.
A more annoying problem comes up when we're excavating a prehistoric room and need to map it. We measure the length of each wall in the field and take a compass reading on the direction of each wall, then attempt to transfer this to paper. Usually the last two sides on the map will not meet, because the tape measure might sag a little and/or the magnetic properties of some of the rocks the room walls are made of throw our angle measurements off slightly. How much do we need to adjust each angle in order to keep the walls as close to the measured angles as possible, change the measured lengths as little as possible, but get the required 360 degrees for the total of the angles inside the room and get all the walls on the map to meet?
You can use geometry to measure the height of a tree or building that's too tall to measure directly, or find the slope of a hill you're standing on; surveyors, geologists, etc. use these ideas. There are also cool examples in construction you can get a glimpse of now and then on This Old House. If you google "tricks to Gothic geometry" a pdf comes up that could easily be made into story problems if you pretend you need, say, a Gothic arch of a certain height. The same could be applied to needing to draw a logo of a certain shape and then making it the correct size to fit on a T-shirt, etc. I know many kids still won't find these problems enjoyable to do, but it shows that at least some people do use this stuff.
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I think geometry is one of the easier types of math to show practical applications of, but I realize that's not much help with a 7yo... Things like figuring out how much mulch to buy for the garden every year, how much wood for a birdhouse, how much cloth for a sewing project, etc. are things we have to do in "real life."
Archaeologists also use this all the time to figure out how to lay out a perfect square or rectangle of various sizes using tape measures, the volume of dirt that came out of said square hole, the density of artifacts on the surface of the square, artifact density in stratigraphic layers of various thicknesses, etc. We use those artifact densities to compare parts of the site, figure out which areas are trash-filled vs filled by other depositional processes, and things like that.
A Great Course on Audible that YOU enjoyed
in The Chat Board
Posted
I really liked John McWhorter's The Story of Human Language.
I also enjoyed the Robert Greenberg course others mentioned.
Two more that are not Great Courses: I really enjoyed and learned a lot from Lawrence in Arabia (Scott Anderson and Malcolm Hillgartner) and Jerusalem: the Biography (Simon Sebag Montefiore), both of which came via Audible and felt like a great "course" and a great read-aloud at the same time.