Lost Tools of Writing

My dd isn't formally diagnosed, but she checks a lot of the stealth dyslexic boxes. (When we started spelling she couldn't perceive the middle of words either aurally or visually as more than an indistinct impression, and her spelling showed it.) Some of her language strengths are pattern-matching and intuiting meaning from context (and her memory is excellent), while weak points are anything requiring auditory processing skills, as well as breaking down the big picture meaning into parts or explaining explicitly how the parts work together to build the big picture meaning. (Half of elementary math for her was learning to show her work via writing equations.) She loves stories and reading, and story-centric LA approaches generally made the hard nitty-gritty details of LA both doable and palatable (and most of our LA work has been remediating weaknesses). We started Latin this year with Visual Latin. I had been planning to go with MP's First Form series as our spine, and incorporating Lingua Latina as reading practice on the side - more "targeting weak points with our LA curriculum", with me adding in stuff that hit her strong points on the side. But I waffled a ton, and eventually decided to go with Visual Latin, which is a much more reading-heavy, Latin-is-details-but-still-don't-sweat-them-more-than-you-need-to approach. I figured that, instead of me supplementing with material targeting her strengths while the curriculum hits her weaknesses, maybe let's try the other way - the curriculum hits her strengths, and I'll supplement to shore up her weaknesses. (I still plan to include LL, and VL has plans for how to integrate LL with VL.) We're on week 8, and it's going pretty well so far. I've incorporated an MP-style Latin recitation time at the beginning of each lesson - chant the endings we've learned, and the model words that go with (plus we do some Latin prayers and songs - dd loves the songs). VL has three videos, with an accompanying worksheet for each video. The first video introduces a Latin grammar point, the second video illustrates and practices it in sentences, and the third video is the instructor reading the translation passage, with time for the student to repeat the sentences after him. The translations are based on the Latin Vulgate, which works well for us because they are familiar and pertinent to our goals. DD loves translating - she's great with meaning - but I do force her to slow down and consciously work through the implications of the endings she knows. After we've read the passage through and she assures me she understands it, but before I turn her loose on translating it, I read through the passage a sentence at a time, and ask her to parse every word she's got the knowledge to parse. With endings that can be multiple things, I have her tell me all the options, and then tell me which one it is, given how the word is used in the sentence. If she doesn't know, I help her think through what the word's doing grammatically in the sentence (she already knows intuitively, since she's solid on the meaning before we tackle parsing), and compare that to the purposes of the various options. She's not a fan of this - doesn't see why it's necessary because she already knows what it means - but my number one concern with her is that she doesn't pay attention to the details till she has to, and by the time she has to, she'll be in over her head. So I'm making her, because I'm a mean mommy ;). One thing about VL, versus MP, is that its focus is on meaning (which is good and why I picked it), but that also means it's not terribly hand-holdy when it comes to the nitty-gritty of memorizing vocab and endings. It tells you when to memorize endings, and does provide online vocab cards for quizlet (and has a place to do quizlet in the schedule), but idk, with a kid who is meaning-centric and detail-weak, I feel like I need to be a lot more intentional about it. So I've incorporated a lot of MP's drill ideas (like recitation) and practice ideas (like fully parsing before translating - but *after* reading for understanding (I don't like how meaning can get lost within the trees in g-t methods)). On the other hand, if you aren't aiming for rigorous Latin, VL is a lot more amenable to fussing less about memorizing and relying more on the vocab lists and Latin charts (both of which are provided). Should it ever become overwhelming, VL is well suited to backing up and re-doing lessons. (The worksheets are a pdf download.) Or even just backing up and re-reading the translation passages over and over again. (I actually include re-reading old passages as part of dd's independent Latin practice.) VL is on the reading method side of things, and doesn't ask for more memorization or explicit grammar work than is strictly needed - he's fine with use of charts and vocab lists for reference while translating, and he doesn't require parsing of the translation passages. The worksheet grammar practice is meant to be just enough so that you get the idea and see it in context - it's pretty gentle, but so far has been sufficient for dd. Gets you used to the idea of paying attention to endings, that endings convey meaning, and the basics of how they are used in sentences. The real meat is in the reading/translation passage. DD likes that, because context helps her - the more context the better. She knows what the sentences mean, and that provides a base for learning explicitly how the endings and such purposely convey that meaning. (Plus there's lots of repetition of vocab in the passages, which helps with memory.) In short, I think that VL hits my dd's meaning-based strengths well - she enjoys and is capable of the work the program demands. I am choosing to supplement with more drill and parsing work (weak points of hers) because I think it's important, and I'm concerned she'd hit a wall otherwise. VL provides a lot of implicit drill and parsing - long translation passages that require those skills - but I'm fairly sure that dd would subvert the point, working off pattern-matching and intuition instead of learning to explicitly think about the grammar, and at some point that would catch up with her. Although VL's solution for that - back up and redo lessons - is a good one, and might work just as well as my pre-emptive teaching and drill. (I have read that many people find that VL gets more difficult around Lesson 10, and that's when the translations go from "take your best guess from context at forms you haven't learned" to "you've learned all the forms used, so translate them accurately", and it may be that students were taking their best guess at *all* the forms, and weren't applying the grammar that they *had* learned as they translated. That's one of the reasons I've been making dd parse everything she knows (where I determine whether she ought to know it before even asking, because she flips at the idea of explicitly reasoning through an educated guess, even though she does it intuitively all the time) - to make *sure* she is applying the grammar she's learned, as well as developing the habit of paying attention to the endings.) Also, Getting Started With Latin is just awesome - we did part of it before VL - and it's a good Latin intro no matter what program you might want to do.

I like the Poetry for Young People series, which is mostly by author (there are a few that are by topic). They don't have any more poems than the SCM ones you mentioned, but they are illustrated, and I was able to get them used for an average of $5 with shipping. If you have a decent library, they probably have them (our old system did). I bought a bunch of anthologies at the same time, but we've mostly just used the Poetry for Young People ones. Oh, we have used "A Child's Book of Poems", illustrated by Gyo Fujikawa, quite a bit as well - that's the only anthology we've used (we love her illustrations - have her fairy tales and nursery rhyme books as well). I also really, really like T.S. Eliot's "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats". It's not part of the previous series or anything, but along with Edward Lear, they are my favorite poems to read aloud - they are just so much fun to say.

With my 7th grader, we're doing both AOPS Pre-Algebra (done with me) and independent computation practice. I bought the Math Mammoth Blue series during the HSBC sale, plus I got some of the Key To books, and as part of her independent work, she does 30 min or so a day in them as "math review".

I used to photocopy the student pages (which the book says is legal for single family use), but I got tired of all the loose pages. So now we use a notebook. I handwrite the copywork model as we go over it and discuss it, as well as handwrite the narrations as the kids give them to me. Dictations are likewise done in the notebook - I just make sure it's on a fresh page where she can't see the copywork.

We started WWS last year, and dd12 was very inconsistent - good at outlining, in tears at the summaries. I stopped after 6 weeks or so and did a hodge-podge of other things. This year we started IEW SWI-B, and dd12 just told me this morning that she much prefers this way of doing summaries (making a key word outline and then rewriting from it) to the WWS way. DD12's also bright, creative, and good at memorization. She's also a voracious reader, very visual-spatial, very intuitive, and in general has found putting what she knows intuitively into words to be hard, especially in the "explain how and why you know this is true" sense.

I took AP Lang and AP Lit in school. One potential thing I can think of, wrt exemplary essays not seeming very good, is that on the AP test, essays are meant to be done in 40min or so. Good in that context is far different from good edited, polished writing. Also, maybe the teacher is trying to be encouraging, by holding up models that are good *at this point in the learning process*. Not that they are examples of where she wants them to be at the end of the year, but that they are examples of where she wants them to be now, at the beginning of the year. Related to that, maybe her grading is similar to IEW's, in that she's starting off with a defined checklist that doesn't have all the things needed, but just the starting things. So those exemplary essays were good examples of the things on the current, starting-point checklist - but that doesn't mean that the current checklist reflects the final checklist - she's going to build up to that over time.

I've been induced twice for medical reasons, and I've never understood why women would voluntarily choose to have one. My pitocin labors were much more painful and more difficult than my spontaneous, non-induced-or-augmented labor. Although I've heard that it's common to augment labors that started spontaneously, so maybe most women don't know what it's like to not have pitocin or some other augmentation done.

I think a lot of human-centric things just don't scale up well. You can't reduce or eliminate the personal relationships, the need for human judgment, without eliminating some of the necessary intangibles. And the quest to do so - to try to turn a perfectly good rule of thumb (that needs an actual person to judge when and how to apply it) into a scientific law that allows us to apply the insight to people en masse (without having to actually *know* the people we are "teaching") - just destroys most of what was good in the theory in the first place. Because people aren't widgets. Reading "Mindset" was a game-changer for me, so I'll take a stab at it. Carol Dweck talks about two different, and opposed, mindsets: a fixed mindset, and a growth mindset. A fixed mindset believes that what we can and can't do is largely set in stone. Success at something is proof that we are the kind of person who can succeed at that, while failure at something is proof that we aren't the kind of person who can succeed at that. Failure doesn't just mean that we can't do it *now* - it means that we can't do it *ever*. Failure uncovers an inherent lack that is unchangeable. If we can't do it *now*, that is proof that we are the kind of person who just can't do it, full stop. On the other hand, a growth mindset believes that we can always become better at something than we are right now. Failure only means that we can't do it *right now* - we can still work and chase future success, because we always can improve. Failure now is only failure now, not proof that *we* are inherently failures. A growth mindset frees you to assess your failures with a clear eye, because today's failure is just today's failure, not a sign that *you* are a failure at this. And it frees you to risk failure, to see failure as a part of learning something, instead of proof that you *can't* learn it. It allows you to combine optimism with realism - to realistically assess current problems without those problems *requiring* you to give up at ever achieving success. People can have a mix of growth and fixed mindsets, depending on the issue. I did. My parents instilled a growth mindset in me wrt hard work being the most important thing - doing the best I could with what I had was what mattered, not how much I had in the first place. But I managed to develop a fixed mindset in school when it came to intelligence and grades. I definitely had some covert assumptions about how low achievement (on my part) would "prove" the limitations of my intelligence. And I know I see it a lot with my kids - they hit something hard, and they wail and moan that they can't ever do it. They assume that today's failure proves their inherent inability. The language of growth and fixed mindset really helped give me the words and concepts to address it. I'm always saying that, yes, it's true that they can't do it right now - but we're going to keep working and trying so that they can *learn* how to do it over time. Does that help any?

1.3M in our rural county will get you 6bd/4.5ba, 5500sqft on 85 acres. There's also a guest house and a barn, plus woods and a lake. It looks gorgeous. More common are working ranches for 750-800K - the house is "normal-sized", but it comes with outbuildings and a few hundred acres. Eta: Where I grew up, 950K will get you 4800sqft on a half acre. There's also a surprising amount of multi-million dollar homes there, too. Eta2: Where we used to live, 1M will get you a 5bd/6bath, 4900sqft on a .33ac lot. Eta3: Honestly, I vastly prefer the custom build here to the mcmansions you can get in the suburbs where I've lived. Even the working ranches are much more preferable to the giant house on a proportionately small lot, if I had that kind of money to put into a house.

I think there is a difference between ignoring voluntary and mandatory evacuation orders. My parents have never ignored mandatory evacuation orders, but they tend to stay when there's voluntary ones. Which boils down to leaving for cat 4 or 5, and staying for cat 3, unless there's something that makes it esp dangerous. They are on locally high ground and can withstand 25ft storm surges, and the house can handle cat 3 winds. In general, they would rather be there to deal with problems than leave; they leave when they don't expect to have a house to come back to if the hurricane hits. As for why people stay when under mandatory orders, from what I've heard, it's a combo of "boy who cried wolf" wrt evac orders (its been fine more often than not), the hardship of evacuating, and preferring to go down with their house than to leave it.

I used Smithhand - it groups by stroke type.

We're using Visual Latin, not Henle, but here's two general Latin things that come to mind: 1) Read through the Latin sentence/phrase aloud at least once or twice, making sure you *understand* what the sentence means *before* you attempt to translate it. (If once or twice doesn't do the trick, then re-read it very closely, paying attention to the endings and sentence structure, just like you would with a difficult English sentence. Paraphrase it into easier Latin, or strip out some of the more complex sub-bits, till you get the main idea, and then figure out how each of the rest fits in.) It's easy, with grammar-translation methods, to fall into the trap of seeing translation as the means by which you figure out what the Latin is saying. I know I fell into that trap as a Latin student. I had zero idea what a Latin sentence meant until I'd laboriously parsed each and every word, translated them individually, and then tried to stitch the results together into a plausible English sentence. Once we got beyond the basics, and cases could be doing multiple things, I had no idea how you could reliably translate - how could you know which possible meaning applied? It was like you had to know what it meant before you could translate??? Bingo ;). Translating is *not* how you understand what a sentence is saying - it's how you convey the Latin meaning *you already figured out* into an equivalent (or mostly equivalent) English sentence. Understand first, translate second. There's a lot of good advice out there about how to approach a translation, but they all assume that you *already* understand the sentence you are trying to translate. If you don't understand it, then you aren't ready to translate it. 2) After dd12 has read the Latin aloud and assures me she understands it, I re-read each sentence and then make her orally parse each and every word. (I jot down the results above the Latin sentences for her - she's already not thrilled I make her do this, and the act of writing is tiring for her.) For endings that could apply to multiple cases, I have her tell me all the possibilities, and then tell me which one applies here, and why. We work through the passage sentence by sentence in this manner - she parses everything before she goes to translate. It's just mandatory, and she moans and groans, but she's getting used to the routine. I'm trying to help break down the huge amount of fiddly details into manageable chunks. FWIW, when my kids are making random guesses because they can't/won't put in the effort to actually do all the hard thinking work, I try to break the task down into smaller steps, and have them do each step individually. If they baulk at one of the smaller steps, then I break it down even more. What exactly *is* involved in doing this task? Let's do each part of it, step by step. It's kind of me being their brain for them, till they internalize the process themselves.

The two I know of are Fix-It Grammar, by IEW, and Editor-in-Chief, by the Thinking Co. They are actually both focused on editing writing for mechanics and grammar errors, but you could also add in a discussion on editing for clarity and conciseness and other make-writing-better things. And there's a decent bit of overlap between grammar errors and thinking errors - the unclear grammar often reflects unclear thinking (SWB makes that point in her discussion of the three stages of writing in the beginning of the WWE Instructor Guide). Coming from another angle, Killgallon's Sentence Composing series involves rearranging and rewriting sentences and coming up with the best arrangement (both other people's sentences, and sentences you wrote from a model) - it gives you a chance to see the possibilities out there for what you can do with a sentence, and how the order you use and the grammatical structures you use affect the impact of what you write.

The only trick I know is that there are more than twice as many words with -ur than with -ir. So when in doubt, try -ur first.

Have them revise *your* rough drafts? Or use a learn-to-edit curriculum that involves revising other people's work? I think it's very normal for authors to find it hard to kill any of their babies. So it might help to introduce the idea of revising to make things better by working to make *other* people's writing better - that way you don't have to deal with emotional attachment to the work being revised. After they've accepted and internalized the idea that revising improves writing *in general*, then you can take baby steps into the idea of revising *their own* writing. Also, do either of you sons have issues with perfectionism and having to get things right the first time? If so, that could contribute to the idea that revising their writing is like being sent back to do corrections because you got it "wrong" the first time - aka, when you want them to do corrections, they feel like you are telling them their first effort completely sucked and is utterly unworthy. But, really, revising writing is about identifying what is good and building on it, while removing things that are wrong or that get in the way. (Honestly, one of the hardest parts of revising for me is getting rid of perfectly good things that nevertheless don't quite fit smoothly in the overall piece.) AKA revising is a way to make good writing even *better*. It doesn't mean the original writing was bad. (Although, wrt perfectionism, even if your original writing *was* bad, or filled with mistakes, it's not the end of the world. Learning from your mistakes is at least as effective as not making mistakes - arguably, you learn *more* through aiming high, missing, and fixing your mistakes than you would by aiming low and succeeding.) And even the best of writers revise, revise, revise - no matter how good the first draft, you can almost always make it better.

Thanks so much :). I ended up getting MM's Integers pdf. (Actually, when I went to MM's site to look, I saw that it was the last few hours of the hsbc MM sale, and ended up getting the whole Blue series, lol.) Dd12 and I did the beginning of the Integers pdf this morning, through absolute value, and then moved into AoPS's negation section. Went pretty well so far, and we can always do more sections of MM as needed. Thanks again for your help and advice.

I was inspired by that discovery, courtesy of this thread, to switch my monitor for dh's old monitor. Wow! It is *so* much nicer than what I had. I hadn't switched before because the monitors were the same size (19"), and of comparable resolution wrt number of pixels, although dh's was widescreen and mine wasn't. It hadn't occurred to me what sort of impact the difference in general quality could make. Everything just seems crisper, and I can now see the scroll bar on this site even at the bottom of the screen, which I haven't been able to do in a while. It's pretty spiffy :).

FWIW, my new pair are somewhere between 32 and 34 - definitely shorter than my old pair - and it hasn't been a problem.

Just thought of this wrt computers and progressives: the monitor height does matter for me. Too low, and I *am* looking at the bottom half through my reading lens, and then I find myself leaning way in to compensate. Right now I have it where my eyeline is about 1/3 from the top (which is 4in of monitor above and 8in below), and that is pretty good. When I had it 8in lower, so that the lowest part of the monitor was 16in below my eyeline, it was too low and I was constantly leaning in. I got a 4in monitor riser and that got it high enough to not be annoying, but I still had to remind myself not to lean in. Now I have a higher desk and that combined with the riser is pretty darn good. My dh's monitor set-up is even better for me, and I thought it was because it fell better wrt my progressives, but nope, turns out it's the same height as what I have (and it is on a riser, too). So it's probably because his monitor and video card are a lot better than mine - his display is just crisper and generally *better* than mine, and that's why it feels better.

At least for me, my doc was rec'ing *some* kind of multi-lens to help with eyestrain - he thought either bifocals or progressives would be fine. I went with progressives because I was 19yo and didn't want to "look old" with lined bifocals (for whatever reason, unlined bifocals weren't an option). I exercise and do everything in my progressives. I've never had separate glasses for my computer, which is not currently a problem, but has been a minor/medium one at times in the past. I've gotten eyestrain at times from extended computer use, because I'm looking through the top, distance lens. I think I shade into the reading lens a bit toward the bottom of the screen, but it's not a problem. In any case, I hold my head naturally and don't have to do anything odd to see through the top lens - experimenting, I'd have to tilt my head up and then point my eyes down in order to look at the screen through the bottom lens (so it's good I don't want to do that ? ). What someone else said applies to me - I just point my nose at whatever I want to look at. I can see the appeal of workplace progressives, esp if your doc is rec'ing them - it would be nice to have a mid-range top lens for computer use, instead of a distance lens. (My dad once tried trifocals, but that didn't work for him.) I generally make sure I'm well back from the monitor to mimimize eyestrain (about 2ft, which maybe isn't really that far, but it's the best I can manage with my set-up, and it does the job well enough).

I've had regular, everyday progressives for 18 years (distance on top, near on bottom). I got them because I got eyestrain from less than a minute of near focus with my distance glasses - I carried reading glasses with me *everywhere*, even to read the labels at the store. My first pairs had the near set to 18", which turned out to be good for everyday use, but not for dedicated reading - I still used reading glasses, but I could keep them in one spot in the house instead of take them with me everywhere. The last time I went to the eye doc, I asked him to set the near a little closer, around 12". These glasses are *perfect* - I don't even use reading glasses at all anymore, for anything. WRT lens height and progressives, not all frames work with progressives - I remember my eye doc checking that the one I picked would work. WRT switching between bifocals and progressives, I know that when I got progressives, my eye doc said that it would be hard to change from one to the other even in the context of changing from one sole pair to a different sole pair - that to an extent I was locked into whatever I picked, because the readjustment would be very hard. From that I infer that regularly switching between them might indeed make your brain swirl ;). My original adjustment to progressives took a few days, and when I got my new pair (after 15 years with the previous pair), with a new frame shape and a slightly different prescription, I felt kind of dizzy for about half a day (the worst was the first hour).

Thank you all :). I went ahead and got SWI-B. I had dd watch the samples with me, and she figured it would be "ok", although she preferred LToW. But she's willing to give it a try, especially because it's not like we aren't going to do LToW at some point anyway. I think it will be good for both of us to have a year of building up the basics. @smarson, you're right that writing might just be a challenge no matter what. I know a few years ago I came to the realization that school being hard didn't necessarily mean we had a problem or that we needed a change - it could just mean that it was hard and was going to require work and discipline. AKA I learned that "hard" isn't the same as "bad". It was a very necessary lesson. Last year I did let writing slide, but it wasn't so much because I thought that writing being hard was itself the problem, but that last year was a hard year life-wise (job insecurity and then a cross-country move), and between the life stress and the habit-unsettling nature of starting a new writing program, I didn't have (or didn't want to have) the energy to figure out how to make writing happen despite dd's resistance. Obviously not something I can afford to continue, but God willing, I'm in a better place to make writing happen this year, even if dd isn't any more motivated to make writing happen this year than she was last year <sigh>. But, yeah, I've been in the "if it's hard, it must be a problem with the curriculum" frame of mind, and I agree that it's a damaging one. And it's easy fall back into - that the right curriculum will make everything be sunshine and roses. It's good to be reminded that even successful homeschooling is still hard work, no matter how you slice it - there's no easy button, and chasing after one just gets you into trouble.

That's what I had thought, and when I flipped through my U.S. edition of SM6 to check, nothing was jumping out at me.

I've seen a lot of references over the years to how SM (at least the U.S. edition) doesn't cover negative numbers, and that this can be a problem when moving into an American secondary sequence, because they assume you've seen negative numbers before. But I haven't seen much discussion about what people using SM *do* about it - how they go about adding in some negative number work. (My google-fu has failed me twice now on this subject, once a couple of years ago, and then again last night.) The only hint I found was that someone said that Lial Pre-Algebra had a good section on negative numbers, one that apparently doesn't require prior exposure. My oldest (7th) has gone through SM 5B (U.S. edition), and we just started AOPS Pre-algebra, which assumes you have some basic familiarity with negative numbers. At this point, I'm hoping to use either internet resources or what I already have on hand with my oldest (potentially useful things I own: Dragonbox Algebra, the first Hands-On Equations app, and Dolciani Pre-Algebra). That way we can just go ahead and get on with things (otherwise I'd be tempted to get a cheap used copy of Lial's, because it was the only mentioned resource in any thread that I saw last night). My plan, such as it is, is to hit Kahn Academy on negative numbers till she has the basic idea, and then move back into the Negation section of AOPS. Does that sound reasonable? Is there something better to do instead? In addition, since I have younger kids, and also because I'm very curious: what have other SM users done, or plan to do, about the lack of negative numbers in SM?