Thinking of the situation from the friend's POV - good friends for years; shared life together through thick and thin; made an effort to stay in contact even after a move; had a bit of a spat but got over it; but all of a sudden, her friend wants nothing to do with her, won't talk to her, not even to tell her what she did wrong, not even to say it's over, just unilaterally ending things without a word, with no chance to try to fix things - I've seen a lot of WTM posts along those exact same lines. I know you no longer think she's ever been a good friend to you :grouphug:, but she has no way of knowing that you've radically reassessed your friendship and now see all those years not as the mutual bonding you once assumed but as her unilaterally taking from you and not giving in return - not without you telling her. I know a common feature in those WTMers who've gotten dropped without a word is how they wished they'd been given a chance to know what was wrong and to try make things right - so that whatever went wrong could have been a wakeup moment instead of the unexpected and final death of their friendship.

IDK that I have any magical method. Once I realized it was happening, I started sitting with them and walking them through the process I wanted them to follow. "Read the whole thing. Ok, look at the first word/phrase/sentence." <I point out anything tricksy they might need to focus on.> "Are you ready - can you picture it in your head?" <If yes, then I cover the model.> "Now, tell it back to me. Ok, now write it." <They write it. I uncover the model and have them double check that what they wrote matches.> "Ok, look at the second word/phrase/sentence...." Lather, rinse, repeat ;), until they seem to have it down and can/will do it unprompted. In general, whenever I notice that the kids have subverted the point of an assignment (a depressingly common occurrence), I sit with them and explicitly walk them through the steps of the process I want them to be practicing. (I generally notice the problem whenever the assignment ramps up in difficulty and they go from doing it easily to resisting and complaining about "how hard it is" - it tends to be a sign that they didn't learn the skills I meant for them to be learning through the assignment, usually because they did it another, easier-for-them-way, that left the weaknesses I was targeting untouched. Sometimes I just can't fathom how they could do the assignment successfully *without* working on the skill I wanted them to practice, but somehow they manage it ;).) Does that help any?

With my kids, I found that they were copying almost letter-by-letter, even when they were capable of copying in larger chunks. Also, they had a tendency to copy straight from the model, instead of getting a chunk of the model in their brain, and then writing that chunk from short-term memory (which made the whole thing just a handwriting exercise instead of also composition practice). No amount of copywork done that way was going to prepare them for dictation, kwim? The point being, I had no idea (until recently) that sometimes you need to explicitly teach kids *how* to do copywork - that it's more than just knowing how to read and write. With my oldest, I make the WWE passages studied dictation. We're in WWE2, where the copywork is the same passage as the dictation, so it's already kind of studied dictation, but I also have her mark up the passage with Spelling You See's visual marking system on copywork day, and then study it for a few minutes right before dictation.

I might have to do that next time - get out the bowls and water and let her have at it :). (I remember doing that with some other tricksy capacity problem last year - the joys of pouring water overcame her "but it's *impossible*!!!!! so I won't try" screaming meltdown resistance ;).) Eta: It took a surprising amount of flexible math thinking on *my* part to figure out which measures we had that would scale up or down properly to match the problem, that was straightforward enough that *she* didn't have to already understand the problem in order to solve it with the manipulatives ;). (It took a few iterations before I hit on the right set of containers.)

The bar diagram difficulty may have been her general resistance to bar diagrams, and how, with the c-rods, she kept trying to see relationships between the "unknown starting amount" rod and the "declared to be 21" rod that would allow her to figure out the starting amount. I illustrated it twice, with different rods for the "unknown starting amount", and she *did* get it in the end, more or less, but she was really invested in trying to figure out that starting amount, and kept bringing in outside relationships between the manipulatives to inform her understanding of the illustration - thus subverting what I was trying to show with the manipulatives :doh.

No, my math major sister suggested the same thing :). And I did that with manipulatives - made the problem smaller and did a few iterations with different starting amounts. The only problem was that, as soon as we moved to using manipulatives with the actual numbers in the problem, she latched onto my made-up starting number as *the* number - because she was so convinced we *had* to know it in order to solve the problem. It seemed to be teaching her it was ok to invent numbers as needed to solve problems, instead of illustrating that the missing numbers in *this* problem were irrelevant to the solution. Maybe I need to think of a way to illustrate this with manipulatives that solves it while "hiding" the starting amount the whole time - better mimic the math involved.

By this I mean word problems that *seem* like they don't have enough information to find the answer, but when you work them out the unknowns all fall out of the problem - you didn't actually need to know them to get a definite answer. An example we had in CWP yesterday (that had dd9.5 yelling about "not enough context"!!!!!): I tried bar diagrams (but dd9.5 hates them and resists them), and idk that I showed it very elegantly anyway. I tried working out the problem with manipulatives using several different starting amounts - showing there was the same answer each time. And I finally resorted to algebra (which is the only way I truly know how to illustrate how the unknown falls out). Eventually she sorta-kinda seemed to get the point, but idk what, if anything, she actually learned. And this is not the first time she's had a screaming meltdown over a "missing information" problem (although after the last one, she's successfully done a few of them without problems, until yesterday). Any ideas how to teach this? Or how to model it with bar diagrams? (I was using c-rods to do it, instead of on paper, because dd9.5 does better being able to physically set up (and re-set-up) the diagram instead of drawing it, but I think that might have contributed to the clunkiness of it.)

I'm sort of meh about it. Part of it is that I'm trying to strengthen my kids' ability to read and spell by *sound* (a major weak point for them), and the fact that different fonts *do* interfere with their visual image of the word (and force them to think it through by *sound*) - as far as I'm concerned, that's a feature, not a bug ;). But my kids' visual memories are very good - the hard thing for them is breaking a word into phonemes - and building that skill is where we've put the bulk of our efforts; once they can do that, remembering the particular phonogram used to spell a particular phoneme in a given word hasn't been too much trouble for them thus far. I've actually been having dd9 do her word list spelling in cursive *on purpose*, because it forces her to think through the sounds in the words and how she ought to spell those sounds, because she can't rely on her visual memory for printed words. (And it helps her build her kinesthetic and visual memory for cursive words - handwriting, both print and cursive, has been difficult for her, and her word list spelling is the *only* thing she does in cursive right now (in fact, as far as she's concerned, it's primarily cursive practice, not spelling/blending practice).) But if she was visually weak the way she's auditorially weak, I might be more concerned about being consistent there - I do think SYS has a point about different fonts making forming a visual image of the word more complicated. In any case, dd9 does her copywork/dictation in manuscript, albeit more because she's too shaky on cursive than for spelling visualization reasons; Dd7 does her spelling in manuscript by default, because that's all she knows ;).

I do spelling through dictation using the word list from our reading program in a similar-ish way to Writing Road Through Reading - hear the sounds, and then spell and mark the word, and read it back. (My kids have phonemic processing issues, so actually I have all the words written out in Dekodiphukan (Decode-if-you-can) sound pictures, marked to identify which phonogram to use when it's not the most common spelling (I made a sound-to-spelling chart they can reference). So they sound out the word from the sound pictures, and then spell it, mark it (identify digraphs and silent letters and such, plus which sound to use if it's not the most common one), and read it back.) This works with any word list. For copywork/dictation, we use the Spelling You See color-coded marking system (SYS teaches spelling through copywork and dictation, and I've applied it to all our copywork/dictation; I've also incorporated it into the above word-list marking). The way they do it is to mark up the whole passage (yellow for vowel digraphs, green for y-as-a-vowel, purple for r-controlled vowels, blue for consonant digraphs, orange for silent letters, pink/red for prefixes/suffixes; we added brown for consonant blends, because my dds can't hear them well), then copy the passage (or part of the passage, if it's long) and mark up what you copied. SYS stays on the same passage for a week, marking it up each day and copying some/all of it, and then on Friday they mark up the passage again, but instead of copying it, you write it from dictation. So studied dictation, basically, with a nifty visual marking system as the base for the studying. Anyway, that's how I do spelling with word lists, and with sentences/paragraphs for copywork/dictation. I used our reading program for our word list because I like it - logical order and plenty of words - and it enables me to teach reading through spelling with dd7. Our copywork/dictation is from WWE and from our memory work (catechism, Bible verses, hymns). Does that make any sense? Feel free to ask for clarification :).

First Form Latin?

With my girls, teaching reading gave me a big clue. They both have phonemic processing weaknesses, and learning to apply phonics knowledge to reading has been a long, hard slog for them both, so I had lots of opportunities to observe their learning, and how *different* it was. Dd9 united a whole-to-parts (and visual) approach with a phonemic processing weakness (which made learning to read by putting sounds together to form words - the usual phonetic approach - very difficult), and the two interacted to make her *extremely* whole-to-parts in how she learned to read. I didn't realize just how much until I started teaching dd7 to read, who united a parts-to-whole approach with the same phonemic processing weakness that makes learning to read in a phonetic parts-to-whole way so difficult. Dd9 used her strengths to *get around* her weakness, while dd7 used her strengths to *overcome* her weakness. Dd9 didn't have the necessary skills to be able to read phonetically (although I didn't know that until later), and though I taught her completely phonetically, she did her very best to subvert the process ;) (it was hitting a double weakness). Dd9 is my whole language poster child - she naturally incorporated picture clues and grammar clues into her decoding efforts from the get-go (even though I taught her strictly phonetically). She read for meaning from the very beginning, and strongly preferred sentences and stories to isolated words. She also memorized whole words effortlessly from the environment, and from the time she was four baffled us with whether she could read or not (she couldn't connect /c/ /a/ /t/ to /cat/, but she could figure things out that required her to be able to make sense of print). Learning to read phonetically (or learning to read visually through phonetic teaching) was very much working through her weak area (and I felt *so* conflicted about persisting with phonics when it was so hard for her, knowing all the while that she'd fly if I switched to whole language) - and she in fact learned to read largely visually from strictly phonetic instruction. At the time I thought something had clicked and she'd overcome her phonemic processing weakness, but I learned later that whatever had clicked allowed her to learn *in spite* of her phonemic processing weakness. I didn't realize how much of that was her trying to avoid her phonemic processing weakness and how much was whole-to-parts learning until I started teaching dd7. She had the very same phonemic processing weakness as dd9, but instead of trying to constantly jump ahead or around the difficulty, trying to read *without* having to put the pieces together (like dd9), dd7 kept working on the pieces, not wanting to add on another piece until she'd mastered the pieces she had. She prefers to read individual words rather than sentences, because there's more parts to put together (whereas dd9 preferred sentences to individual words because she used the context to aid her decoding). Neither of them had the skills to learn to read phonetically, but where dd9 pulled enough information from elsewhere to read in spite of it (which has made trying to remediate it a trick and a half), dd7 both needed to - and was generally willing to - persist in building up those lacking skills piece by piece.

That's the difference between generalist and dilettante to me: a generalist is good at many different things, while a dilettante doesn't persist long enough to get genuinely *good* at *anything*. ETA: I'm a dilettante aspiring to become a generalist :).

I tend to think of dilettantism as not just dividing one's time and interest between many things (instead of focusing on just a few things), but also involving a revolving door of interests. It includes a tendency to *drop* interests when they get hard or when they are less interesting than whatever new thing that catches the eye. So it's not just doing a lot of things, but never progressing beyond dabbling in *any* of them. I do this way too much, and for me it's rather similar to enjoying the rush of a new relationship but bailing when that initial surge of strong feeling goes away and isn't buoying the effort of making a relationship work anymore. I don't have the skills and self-discipline to persist in pursuing an interest once the emotion fades. (unless it's easy-peasy). I'm interested in everything and want to do everything, until it gets hard, and then I'm ready to quit. (I do have one long-term-ish research project that I keep working on, and some of it is fledgling self-discipline, but a lot of it is because I'm driven by how *important* the project is to me. It's more steady than the rush of emotion that comes from uncovering something new! and fascinating! but it still wavers with my overall mood, and so I work in fits and spurts.) I would worry if he's not persisting in *any* of his interests to the point he has to work hard over the long term to make progress. Not everything's worth that level of work, but *something* needs to be. I quit or accepted mediocrity in everything that required persistent hard work over time, and that didn't do me any favors - I dropped out of college over it, and it's crippled my ability to work hard on the things I *want* to work hard on. It's not that he needs to focus exclusively on one interest to deep mastery - steady work on several interests through thick and thin is good, too - just that it's really easy for smart kids who are interested in everything to bounce between interests and fail to learn how to make the transition from "dabbling" to "working to master something" in *anything*. (And it can be hidden because on some things they can externally succeed while internally skating by, or that they get so far in their initial burst of interest that it looks like they've been "working to mastery" for quite a while before they quit because "it was no longer worth the effort".)

I also wanted to say that I've felt the "throwing program after program at the problem to no avail" feeling - where dd9 successfully completed the program but showed zero improvement outside the program (or was too weak to even *start* the program that promised to work on that weakness) - and it was very frustrating :grouphug:. In dd9's case, she had enough underlying weaknesses that no amount of programs for "typical kid weakness in this area" was ever going to solve the problem - they all assumed certain underlying skills were present that were *not* in fact present for dd9. We had to look into more intensive programs/approaches that explicitly targeted those underlying skills (or deliberately worked *around* the lack of those skills) before we saw any progress. I second looking into dyslexia - idk if dd9's dyslexic (we don't have a diagnosis), but she has/had a lot of dyslexic symptoms, and we're making progress using dyslexic approaches.

I'm assuming by "OnTrack Reading" you mean the multisyllable chunking method? Was it effective? By which I mean that when you walk them through chunking a word that way, they can then read it correctly? (Not that they fluently apply that method in their own reading without your help, but that whenever they *do* apply that method - even if it's only when you explicitly have them do it in a lesson - it *does* help them read long words correctly.) My oldest has struggled a lot with reading long words correctly, and with spelling in general. In her case, much of it was due to poor phonemic processing skills and difficulty breaking words down or putting word parts together. We have done lots of blending work to help improve her phonemic processing, plus using a visual color-coded marking system for spelling (based on Spelling You See's marking system) to help her visually see the details in words, and we're working through REWARDS, a reading program that teaches a chunking system to help break down and read long, unfamiliar words. I think we were over halfway through REWARDS before dd9 started applying it to her reading, and in general, whenever she stumbles on a word I have her go through the chunking method explicitly (pencil and all). And though we learnt the marking system in SYS, I have dd9 mark all her copywork in WWE (and chunk any long words). It takes a *lot* of practice, and any system we learn that seems to help, I extend and apply it to all our language arts work, to hit those weak skills at every opportunity and help her become automatic at using the new skills. So if the OnTrack chunking method helped, I'd use it with everything else - bring it into Words and WWE and your spelling program. And bring the Words method (if it helps) into your other spelling and WWE. Anything that helps them read or spell - explicitly bring that into everything you do for LA - don't expect it to be mastered and to automatically transfer just by doing the program.

Looking at the IEW website for Phonetic Zoo, they talk about having the teacher "present the rule" (introducing it, explaining a bit about the history of it and helping the student understand why a given animal was chosen to represent that rule, and spelling some of the words orally) and "present the small zoo card" to the student before the student moves to spelling the words from the CD. And they have the students re-write *all* the words correctly from the "corrections" track before moving to the "compare and correct" step. And to stay on a given lesson until they've gotten 100% correct twice in a row. I can't tell from your description how much of an introduction to the rule you're doing; or if he's re-writing *all* the words as he hears the correct spelling, or if he's just checking without re-writing, and then re-writing the ones he got wrong; and it doesn't sound like you are aiming for 100% twice in a row, but for 100% once, before moving on. If you aren't doing those things, then maybe you could give them a try and see if the extra practice helps. Also, every fifth lesson is a personal lesson - you could bring in review words like you've been doing, but have him stay on that personalized lesson until he gets them all 100% correct twice in a row, so he gets more practice with them.

How long have you been doing Phonetic Zoo? And what does not working involve?

Before curvy jeans were a thing, I wore at-the-waist relaxed fit jeans because they were the only ones that both fit in the hips and didn't gape horribly in the back. But I *much* prefer mid-rise curvy jeans, which are cut high enough in the back to fully cover my derrière but are mid-rise in the front - I hate how tight at-the-waist jeans are over my (not exactly flat ;)) stomach. But regular mid-rise jeans are an exercise in frustration - if they fit in the hips, they inevitably gape horrifically in the back. Heck, jeans can be uncomfortably tight in the hips *and* stomach, and still gape horrifically in the back. I don't even bother to try on non-curvy jeans anymore. (Although I'm apparently curvier than most curvy cut jeans are designed for, because I've only found *one* brand that (mostly) doesn't gape - Levi 529 curvy.)

My kids have poor phonemic processing skills, and making the jump from blending CVC words to blending CCVC words was non-trivial. Just as it took a *lot* of work for them to be able to apply their phonics knowledge to blending CVC words (we worked through individual word families one by one, learning to blend each and every combination on its own, before going back and doing mixed practice), it was a lot of work for them to extend their CVC blending skill to CCVC words. We worked through one blend at a time, learning how to blend /s/ /p/ to get /sp/ and how to blend /s/ /t/ to get /st/ and so on and so forth. And after they could reliably blend each blend when taught in "blend families" (it did go faster about halfway through, as they got practiced at blending blends), we did a *lot* of mixed practice - that was tricky at first, but got easier with practice. It has paid off, though, because the move to ending blends (CVCC) was pretty easy, and the move to CCVCC words was trivial. We probably did just as much work learning to blend all the possible combinations as it would take to memorize the sound of each combination. I think we worked through about 460 words with two or three letter blends going through that section, spelling and reading 20 a day (with lots of repetition working through the beginning blends). But those 460 CCVC/CVCC/etc words were done in half the time it took to work through the 280-odd CVC words - I spent a solid year on learning to blend CVC words with each girl, and just six months on blends. And Dd7 hit the "shr-" blend today and nailed it without any trouble - all the work is paying off :). (In terms of number of blends, our program works through 28 beginning blends, organized by S-blends (eight), R-blends (seven), L-Blends (five), three-letter S-blends (just two, although there's six in English), digraph blends (five, but they are done after the "main" blends section) and one outlier (tw-); our program works through 18 ending blends, organized by N-blends (two), S-blends (three), L-blends (nine), and four miscellaneous blends. At least for me, that organization made the number of blends seem less overwhelming and less random. And I have all that info at my fingertips because I made a blends chart for the kids to refer to when doing spelling - blends are enough of a bugaboo for my oldest (she can't hear them well and will slap down who-knows-what when trying to spell them, although the remedial blending work I'm having her do as part of practicing cursive is helping) that I kind of *do* want her to memorize each one, just like memorizing phonograms.)

IDK if I'm incompetent at passing down our "family culture" or what, but I've found that my kids face "situations that aren't in line with our family culture" just in their interactions with each other. I just had a conversation dealing with "no means no" and "yes means yes" and "if someone doesn't respect your no, or is trying to pressure you into doing something wrong, get out of there and find someone you trust" - that stemmed from their interactions with each other. (And I extended it to apply to any adult who's trying to get you to do something you're uncomfortable with, and to later dating situations, with especial emphasis on *immediately* getting out of there and finding someone you trust, the minute someone doesn't respect your no.) There's an amazing amount of low-stakes "learn how to deal with others' different-but-not-wrong actions" and "learn how to deal with others' wrong actions" just from family interactions. There's an awful lot of *learning* and *practicing* how "family culture" deals with things - that's quite necessary in order to actually internalize that family culture, so it can be drawn upon in situations that occur outside the family. (Which our kids of course have - we don't lock them in the basement, you know ;).) There's a lot of chances for kids playing by themselves to choose their own way (even with adults nearby) - and honestly, our "family culture" ways of dealing with conflict tends to be loads better than the other ways the kids choose. Which is *why* I'm teaching it to them, after all - because it's the best way I know. I get the feeling that the author doesn't trust parents' "best way" to actually *be* a good way. That he assumes that kids can discover a better way of living on their own (or through being taught by the "experts" - teachers and schools and other social services) than if they adopted their parents' way of living. So that either parents *can't* effectively teach kids how to live, or that whatever parents *do* teach their kids about living is *wrong*. If he's working with troubled teens, he's mostly going to see what went wrong and not what went right, but that's not a great base to generalize from - to assume that the problem is "parents teaching their kids" instead of "parents teaching their kids *wrongly*".

It does say "th-ee" before a vowel (the apple, the elephant), and I just teach my beginning readers to read it "th--ee" everywhere. My oldest, once she became a fluent reader, had no trouble automatically reading it as "th-uh" when that's how she'd normally say it. There's been other words where vowels getting schwa'd has caused her trouble, but not "the". (Talking about how English sometimes mushes vowel sounds in non-accented syllables into a generic "uh" is how I'd explain teaching "the" as "th-uh".)

He is risen indeed! Alleluia!

|-4-|---|-...-|---|---| |----------96-------| This is how I've seen it done - with a break in the middle to show that you don't know how many groups of 4 there are.

We're Christian, and I emphasize a *lot* about how it's wrong to return evil for evil, and that instead we are to return good for evil. It's *never* right to try to make others hurt - no matter *what* they did to us.

My 7yo dd sounds similar to your dd - she's very imaginative and she feels things very strongly, and her current emotion determines how she understands reality - determines the stories she tells. She ends up "rewriting history" a lot, changing her story about what happened until she comes up with something that I will agree makes her current (over) reaction legitimate. Since her current reaction is a product of her overwhelming Big Feelings about the situation - and seems to her like the *only* possible way to feel about such a horrible reality - I think she's flexible about the words she uses to convey this reality because they are "less real" to her than the situation-and-her-feelings-about-the-situation (all one thing in her mind) itself. Whatever words convince me that the situation's as bad as she feels it is - those must be the right words. Which is to say, she doesn't see any meaningful difference between "what reality is" and "how I should feel about reality", and so she doesn't see a difference between "words can change how you *feel* about reality" and "words can change *reality*" - and reality is way more "real" to her than the words used to describe it. So she resists my attempts to help her see that reality's not as bad as she thinks - because she's 100% invested in feeling like it *is* - and what she wants isn't to "feel better", but for people to validate her "totally justified" feelings. (Which has been hard for me to grasp, because when I feel bad, I want to *quit* feeling bad.) So if she's so upset about something that she feels the only way to understand how others could persist in letting the situation go on is because they maliciously *want* her to feel this way (because how else could you look on such suffering and not be moved to intervene???) - she will resist any other story that doesn't do full justice to the depth of her feelings. My tendency is to try to make the situation seem "less bad" in order to help her feel "less badly" about it - and she will resist that with everything in her. It just reinforces her view that *only* malice aforethought is enough to explain the horrors she is experiencing. Instead, I have to both acknowledge the full depth of her feelings about the situation while helping her situate her pain within a wider *positive* understanding of others' behavior toward her. She's not able to accept the possibility of positive explanations until she's sure that I completely understand - and take seriously - the *depth* of the pain she's feeling. I have to be able to completely accept the reality of her Big Feelings before she'll trust that maybe I know what I'm talking about when I say the situation wasn't maliciously caused. I've had some success with comparing the pain she feels at not getting her turn with the pain her sibling would feel at not getting *their* turn - that they don't want to hurt her by taking their turn any more than *she* wants to hurt *them* by taking *her* turn. And it helps, in calm moments, to try to understand what about the situation hurts so much, and think of ways to help alleviate it. (In the chair situation, is it the warmth, or the view, or what? So that extra blankets or something might make the alternative less painful.)