serendipitous journey
-
Posts
3,899 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Events
Blogs
Classifieds
Store
Posts posted by serendipitous journey
-
-
3 hours ago, 8filltheheart said:
.... My older dd graduated from high school with a B1+/B2- level after working Ms. Denne privately for 4 yrs. ...
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.
-
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 minutes ago, NittanyJen said:
The Practice of Statistics— I really like the problem sets in this book. They tend to be well-written, and they scaffold the learning well. The book itself is still very readable while being solid on the rigor. It contains excellent examples as well as activities you can do at home with playing cards, pennies, candy, and online simulators. This is the book I use in my class.
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?
-
1
-
-
3 minutes ago, bethben said:
No. She has issues with my husband and I also. Trauma brain. I am looking for outside help
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.
-
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?
-
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?
-
Thank you so very, very much!
-
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.
-
1
-
1
-
-
1 hour ago, 8filltheheart said:
I watch a CN video with them and intensely monitor their notes for a few days to ensure they are understanding the process.
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.
-
On 9/12/2023 at 5:28 AM, 8filltheheart said:
Have you tried watching some Cornell notetaking videos? 7th grade is when I start having my kids taking CN. I don't expect them to be very good at it in middle school. The goal is that they grow in skill over the yrs.
Learning to take CN helps them develop the skill of finding key pts from their reading. The summary paragraph at the end of every day's reading helps them develop synthesizing skills.
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. ❤️
-
1
-
-
[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]
-
1
-
-
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.
-
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.
-
3
-
-
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!
-
Oooh, what a delicious question! and: thank you for pointers to the resources you mentioned. I'm hotlinking them here to make it easier for other folks: John Bean's Engaging Ideas (2nd ed.), Nicole Wallack's Crafting Presence, and Best American Essays (that's the most current collection, these come out annually).
Prompted by your post I found two resources that are intriguing. At least to me.
- John D'Agata's Lost Origins of the Essay -- okay, I'm sort of giddy that the first chapter's essay is from 1500 BCE: Ennatum of Akkad's "Dialogue of Pessimism." Wow. I want to build next year's writing around spines that include this.
- Roundtable: The History of the Essay. Free on JSTOR if you register: the transcript of a roundtable on this topic. It looks just as annoying to read and as discursive as transcripts usually are, but I like eavesdropping on academics generally so I'm thinking of giving it a more thorough go-over.
-
Just now, Malam said:
Don't any two different activities activate different parts of the brain from each other?
Yeah, you are right.
I think that the significance of the claim being made is that cursive writing uses the brain in a way fundamentally different to manuscript writing. Not just a little tweak, but recruiting areas that are distinct in their anatomy (basic patterns of connnectivity to other regions) and physiology (their function). Which doesn't signify that manuscript or cursive are either superior necessarily.
I have a hard time finding good primary literature on the cursive vs. handwriting thing. What does seem compelling is that handwriting offers cognitive benefits over typing/keyboarding, though I haven't time to back it up with references.
-
So, what worked best in my house (we're weird) with my children (super weird) was Memoria Press's K-2 work. Most of it, wasn't 100%. And they teach manuscript in, I believe, K-1 and switch to cursive in 2. Worked well, though the child I put through this treatment occasionally complains that his manuscript isn't very natural to him.
I think that their K-2 stuff comes in secular, but MP's secular books aren't always as high quality as their standard ones so we just used the mainstream ones and I gave running editorial commentary to my secular humanist child as needed.
Fine print: My littles were extremely resistant to writing. Extremely. They are hard to teach generally. And whenever I've tried to outsource something that's hard for me to teach, the hired teacher fails despite my children being unfailingly polite. So it isn't just me.
Anyhow, forewarned is forearmed, so when it came time to get #2 going in school I gave him the MP treatment just so's we'd arrive at 3rd grade able to write and do some focused seatwork. I did sub out math (used MEP) and reading (used All About Reading 'cause I knew we'd be doing All About Spelling).
-
3 hours ago, Clemsondana said:
Not sure. They may be home alone, but also a grandparent lives next door. The family looks after the grandparent so they won't be supervising, exactly, but kid wouldn't have to be alone all the time. This kid's afternoons, evenings, and weekends are filled with ball and likely church stuff too - social isolation isn't a concern, but there won't be an adult to help with work except for when a parent would be home after work.
I really can't imagine what is going on with this kid at this school - this family isn't the type to coddle their kids (I'm not saying that pulling a kid out of a toxic situation is coddling - I just know them well enough to know that their first instinct is to say 'tough it out' and 'respect your teachers'). And, like i said, their older kid went to school there and there wasn't any drama.
EDIT: you know, I think Renai's suggestion below is probably more apt: an online public school.
If they are Christian I would most highly recommend dropping in at Ambleside Online. There is an emergency homeschooling page on their site, and the forum there would be more than happy to give support to parents (and to the child, if they got an account).
My thinking is that Ambleside is set up to be very very affordable, to focus on reading & rich content, and to ensure mathematical fluency. I think he could have a great year, and there is enough focus on non-academics like sketching & listening to music, looking at art that his mind could be fed without burnout.
My one concern would be writing. For that, there are a lot of good options. My favorite for independent work and being prepared for a transition to traditional school is "Winning with Writing": it is approachable and get'er done, and the work comes in daily chunks and is (as I recall) straightforward to correct.
Just an idea. I'm sure it won't fit exactly but may have some nugget of value ... this child is fortunate to have parents so dedicated to their welfare.
ETA: Though the Brandon Sanderson writing course mentioned above sounds pretty terrific!! Esp. for the first year.
-
1
-
-
On 3/24/2023 at 7:17 PM, GoodnightMoogle said:
Thank you for this explanation. My worry too is the formation of bad habits in printing. Perhaps I should just do the easy thing and teach manuscript first. Ugh. But there are so many font choices, too. ZB, LOE, HWT. Sometimes I wish there were less good things out there 😂
If the child learns to write legibly: unusual level of penmanship accomplishment in this day & age!! 🎉
-
1
-
1
-
-
15 hours ago, Clemsondana said:
....
What do you suggest? They are looking at something like K12. Thoughts? The school that they are pulling the kid from isn't great, so the kid isn't likely to get a subpar education relative to school by doing something that is just generic online classes. From what I can tell about this kid from sports, they are a hard worker.
...
Agree with above that I've heard K12 can be stressful.
May I ask what the child's care/supervision situation will be during the day? Will they be on their own? At a grandparent's or something? Hanging in a break room (unlikely, but better than a toxic school)?
No judgment here, just want to understand what the child's context will be for doing the work.-
3
-
-
6 hours ago, Malam said:
Yes, but not necessarily in the early elementary grades.
Makes sense. So would you want more stuff like that mixed in before 8th grade? Would you be concerned about the lack of instruction in multi-digit/larger basic maths problems?
-
On 3/10/2023 at 8:43 AM, Malam said:
I found this a while ago. It looks interesting: https://researchparent.com/learn/mathematics/minimalist-math-curriculum/
It is an appealing concept. It'd certainly be better than a crying child every day or skipping math because of the struggle.
I do think a lot of parents I know would have a hard time effectively teaching the stuff their child didn't know. In fact, the parents I know who'd most benefit from the minimal time have children who are incredibly difficult for them to teach, and most need scripted/explicit guidance.
On 3/24/2023 at 8:48 AM, Malam said:I think it would be interesting to go at the pace of a gifted kids instead of limiting them to one sheet per week
🤣 My children would go at the minimum required pace!
And my children MUST learn to do longer problems by hand (long division, multiplication, etc.).
But it is interesting. And sort of marvelous that this parent is sharing their work for free!
ETA -- I'm curious if you think that it's important for kids, especially high-achieving ones or ones who want STEM-intensive educations, to get practice with stickier, trickier problems than those presented?
-
On 3/21/2023 at 9:03 AM, Nurit said:
Thank you for the thoughtful multi-prong response. Could you share further thoughts on the above? How have you seen this manifest in your homeschool?
Okay! Easiest first:
My older son was a fast, rather sloppy reader and a quick study. So he could get by with skimming, generally. I do think that his Latin work forced him to learn to parse difficult sentences carefully; he still skims, but he also has the discipline to slow down when he's not "getting something" and to work through it. In high school he's been able to independently handle, for example, translations of Aristotle as part of his science reading, and I think the combination of WTM logic-level reading lists, science non-fiction reading, and his Latin work have made that possible.
In terms of the cultural things, well, this can be a fraught and tricky topic. So let me say that we are NOT cultural relativists. But I am trying to teach the children to be humble and willing to learn from people with different values and from different times, and how to begin to sort the wheat from the chaff. So we'll read Aristotle, though it is clear that his thinking vis-a-vis women isn't at the level of our modern standard.
When the children work through translations of anything the least bit interesting in Latin or Greek (or classical Persian, I should think; or classical Chinese) they are beginning to see the world of people who thought slavery was just part of the civilized human condition and so was the idea that women were not fully people, in the sense that men could be.
And the children learn to be willing to learn what those cultures have to teach. How not to "cancel" them.
And stretching that to the next level: we have the chance to discern the difference between the reasonable cultural differences and the grotesque ones. For example -- this next is something I'd only introduce around the upper end of logic stage & in the rhetoric stages -- in ancient Rome it was acceptable to marry a girl of 12, and these marriages were not in name only. Now this is a horrid treatment of children. And we find that some Roman authors themselves pointed this out; Galen thought it was cruel. So we begin to see that within the culture there were shades of ethics & humanism, and I think we can use this as leverage to consider which authors to take seriously on ethical matters, and also to help us critique our own participation in a complex and not entirely benevolent modern civilization.
Anyhow, that's the gist of it. But many people teach Latin and the children do not gain these benefits. Latin doesn't automatically make one humble. And many people gain similar benefits without the classical languages.
-
You're welcome! As always, please take what's helpful and ignore the rest.
RE further thoughts/local manifestations: I'm too foggy-headed with the flu today, but will try to answer later this week.
-
1
-
fun reads to supplement Russian language study for a non-literary STEM type
in High School and Self-Education Board
Posted
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!!