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serendipitous journey

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About serendipitous journey

  • Birthday 10/13/1972

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    Female
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    Northern California

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    Northern California
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    neuroscience; cooking; ethics
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    wife! mama! citizen!

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  1. That looks extraordinary: thank you so much! It would be amazing for him to be around other kids who like Russian + aero- and astro- nautics. 🙂 At first glance I thought it was only for heritage speakers, but the umbrella goals of the organization definitely include cultivating student speakers, which is encouraging. Thank you!!
  2. May I ask: from the site, it looks like Denne only accepts advanced-level students. Was that the case for you? Also, do you highly recommend her as a teacher? We looked at this for Russian instruction this year, but I think that the site somehow put my child off and he was resistant to seeking out tutoring.
  3. Thank you everyone! I apologize for the muddy OP: I am definitely looking for English-language supplements here. I want to add high-interest Russian-culture elements. That's why English-language biographies of Russians can be a good option. That said, I'm going to look carefully at Russian-language suggestions to see if they fit now; if not, I'll save them for later. Plus, I'm hoping to accelerate his Russian study b/c he's definitely under-challenged at the moment.
  4. May I ask you about how you use this book? I could not figure out how to assign the problems, or how to figure out how much work per day was reasonable. Could you share any suggestions for problems (all the odd ones?) and for an estimate of time/day or week? Also -- why the black-bordered if prepping for AP?
  5. Ah. Thank you for clarifying, and also e-hugs: this is so hard. ETA: I do not know anything that would be helpful for your current situation, but I will mention that if you want a four-year high school record for her, you can still label her current year as ninth. Or allow a fifth year. That might not be a good idea for her or for your family generally -- she may be better off moving on to independence, you are the best judge of that -- but it is possible academically, if that makes things feel less pressured.
  6. May I ask: are the issues chiefly with academics right now? She is functioning well within your family, and is behaving well at school & working well, but the problem is that she is simply not able to do the science and math work?
  7. EDIT: This was unclear: I'm asking for Russian-relevant readings in English here. Though I'm flagging the Russian-language suggestions to run by DS and/or save for later. My older son is studying Russian III at TPS and doesn't particularly enjoy this class, so he isn't having much fun with his language at all (he did enjoy his previous 2 years of study at CLRC, but they weren't able to offer Russian III this year). I'm troubleshooting his course options & looking into tutoring for his second semester & want to add some pleasant reading in the meantime. Which is sort of a good thing anyhow, since I like all subjects to have a reading/lit component. 😉 He is not gonna be looking forward to any Tolstoy study. 😞 Or a gulag history, either. He LOVED "Open Mic Night in Moscow"; he does read fantasy and some sci fi & had an okay time with some Stanislaw Lem (Polish, I know, but that's all he's had of Eastern European sci fi/fantasy reading). He also has a fascination with the Soviet space program and very much enjoyed "Korolev: How One Man Masterminded the Soviet Drive to Beat America to the Moon" and he likes the twisted/fractured fairy tale genre; he has enjoyed Philip Pullman's Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm, so good folk or fairy tales might work here. Are there any Russian-related books y'all can recommend?
  8. That does look like it could come in handy. Looking over the medieval section, I was delighted with the notes for Don Quixote: really interesting, stuff I hadn't thought of for sure. But I was terribly disappointed with what I saw in my quick overview of the notes on the Divine Comedy. These have a fairly traditional/moral tone. They skip right over moral ambiguity (such as the happiness of Beatrice in Paradise, where she is completely unperturbed by the brutal suffering in other regions and no longer even really cares about the poet) and bypass the irony, politics, satire, and generally pointed commentary for which Dante is so well known. It seems to me that this site is a good resource for teaching the great books from an orthodox Christian perspective, one that shares the Arts of Liberty's ambition "to equip all who seek the True, Good, and Beautiful with the arts that free us from vice and free us for virtue" and believes that the person teaching the great books (or writing the guides) has a more reliable definition of "vice" & "virtue" than either the author of the great book or the student-reader. I find this a flawed resource for teaching the great books along the lines of classical liberal education. There the goal is, roughly, to grapple with the best works, with radically different worldviews and realities, in order to see a truth which has not been predetermined and which may differ from the instructor's truth. This is my approach, and so I myself prefer drawing from How to Read a Book, though it is harder than to use in our day-to-day school.
  9. Thanks! If you have time: are you already, then, having them take notes? And how do you find this works best? I'm particularly wondering about how many subjects you start having them take notes in, and if you have them work preferentially from videos/classroom-type material or written material at the beginning; and then what you expect to see happening as total note-taking-output in, say, a high-school student with college-ready skills. Thanks so much for any perspective you have. My older child especially is education-resistant, and for him to do well I always need a pretty firm idea of what the expected behavior & output is, some sort of rubric with the essential standards. So that he can see what is expected and know whether or not he has done it.
  10. I just came across this, and was wondering: how would you approach practicing/assigning the CN? I've been trying to figure out how to pick this up with my 7th & 10th graders. ps -- @SilverMoon-- thank you for "neurospicy", which I'd not heard before. ❤️
  11. [This thread is a couple months old.] Centripetal Press has some strong science options, and they fit your requirements -- sort of. The books are not designed for homeschool as such, but the publisher knows that they are are used in homeschools and one can find some supporting resources for this (ie, help grading open-ended questions if the parent does not know the science being taught). The labs are NOT homeschool-friendly but are largely homeschool-feasible. A lot of people seem to sub out the lab portion with stand-alone lab kits, such as those from Quality Science Labs. The books are secular, and old-earth, but they are a secular version of their Novare equivalents, and Novare is a Christian intelligent-design sort of situation: Centripetal Press is their secular/charter school imprint. Final caveat: I don't think Novare's biology offerings are as strong as the other books, but the Centripetal imprint doesn't have any biology at the moment so that's not a problem. One thing I love about Centripetal Press is that the history of scientific discoveries, and information about scientists, is taught hand-in-hand with the scientific principles. [edited to correct some out-of-place middle school content]
  12. Morning -- and thanks for helping me be accountable! Dinner today: ordering takeout Indian + I oughtta make some black rice to go along Fitness: yogas, bodyweight, aerobics for me; strength + runs for boys too School: Full Week. Huh. Frankly, gonna start that tomorrow; today: composition; Greek; history memory work; math; School Latin: start this today, go over chart + review vocab RPG: today is the day to prep the module & run the game. Maybe get a map going on a virtual tabletop. Home: try to hit routines & water plants. And here's something cool: the downside of opposable thumbs -- they make even monkeys susceptible to sleight-of-hand. Happy Monday, y'all.
  13. Over the summer, one thing that might help is stepping each child through WTM writing a la SWB's A Plan For Teaching Writing K-12. That links the audio lecture. When we've been struggling with writing, it has been helpful to me to back up to wherever the child is along this path and teach the next step. Just an idea! ETA: doing this, and doing the outlining/summaries across the curriculum, has been so helpful. That, and teaching the child to outline an essay before writing it. Sort of like Arcadia's bullet points, I imagine.
  14. Anyone else want some extra accountability this week? Short list: Dinners! Fitness! School! esp. do a Full Week with younger. School! part 2: Latin with younger. RPG: process my module, run game. Home! FLYlady stuff. Water plants. Repot poor indoor wilted plants. And a tardy little Easter Egg for everybody, but especially for those with friends & loved ones living in Xi's China. Something Chinese, beautiful and unexpected ... a marvelous inversion of Swan Lakes "Dance of the Cygnets": a very masculine, very Asian Dance of the Frogs. Enjoy!
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