patchfire
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Posts posted by patchfire
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Great idea! I posted ours--Memory Work Monday. It's been a little while since I've assessed our memory work this year, so this was a great opportunity!
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In Greenville, the guide had the dates for next year's convention. I was bummed to see that it's essentially a week "later" in March, because that means the dates now encompass DS's birthday. As much as he loved meeting Jim Weiss, I know he won't want to spend his birthday at a homeschool convention. :lol: Even though Memphis is a further drive, we do have family in the area, so I thought about tentatively placing it on the calendar. Can someone tell me what dates are projected? I can't find a mention on the website.
TIA!
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We've previously used MCT's Building Words & Caesar's English I & II. Dd has finished CE II for the year and is currently just reviewing. From here, she's going to use Sadlier-Oxford's Vocabulary Workshop (a series of which I have my own memories from school!). I like the exercises and I also like that it has online audio support, a huge plus for my auditory learner. When I was ordered her books, I took a look at the elementary series (colors) as well, and decided to order the first book (Purple) for ds. I'm really impressed with it as well. It has similar online supports, too.
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Our favorite series for living books for history has been the "You Wouldn't Want to Be..." series. They are jam-packed with information. The layout is much more "busy" than I personally prefer, but ds loves them, and older dd asks to read them to him, too. We've also enjoyed the books by Demi that fit into the time period under study, as well as biographies by Diane Stanley.
We talk about national holidays as a family rather than as part of school. For instance, for MLK, we read two picture books as a family and discussed MLK over dinner. For Presidents' Day, I did have ds read two DK readers (one on Washington, one on Lincoln), and we read two other books as a family. We continued right on with our regularly-scheduled history (ancients), as well.
For science, we've enjoyed both the Let's Read and Find Out series and the Rookie Read-About series. Of course, Magic School Bus books are also a big hit!
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Susan,
I doubt I would be homeschooling without your book. I read the first edition of WTM when my youngest was under a year old. Over the years, I've found that when I start doubting a particular course or agonizing over a decision, I can usually find the answer, staring me in the face, in WTM. Thank you for all that you have done and continue to do for the homeschooling community.
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I think I have DS mostly sorted. He's done a lot of "first grade level" work this year for K, so our plans reflect that.
Spelling: Spelling Workout B & into C, probably
Grammar: FLL 2; maybe into FLL 3.
Vocabulary: really not sure when we're start this, but I have Vocabulary Workshop Purple, and really like it; probably the latter half or even last third of the year.
Penmanship: SmithHand Manuscript Method
Composition: Writing With Ease 2
Literature: readers on whatever level he's at, "good books" as read-alouds, and history-related literature selections. Maybe the W&M literature unit for grades 1-2.
Mathematics: Right Start C, Miquon Red and probably into Blue
German: Saturday School plus Rosetta Stone (maybe)
History: Story of the World 2 + AG & Audio, supplemental biographies and nonfiction
Science: Biology a la WTM (Incredible Plants, DK First Animal Encyclopedia, and Kingfisher First Human Body as spines; Magic School Bus, Rookie Read-About, and Let's Read and Find Out to flesh it out; Thames & Kosmos Little Labs & Magic School Bus kits for projects/experiments)
Art: Skills/projects are outsources; appreciation through sporadic lessons from Art in Story & trips to the museums.
Music: Piano at home with Music for Little Mozarts; Classics for Kids podcasts, Classical Kids CDs, Venezia biographies, et cetera for appreciation.
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Good news, thanks! That's the talk I *really* want to attend and they've scheduled the MCT talk I really want to attend at the same time (the Poetics talk) Did he use a lot of visuals or will the recording work?
He has a slideshow but the bulk of it was him just talking, plus he has a website to download his slides. :)
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Do you know if his sessions were recorded?
AFAIK, all of the sessions are being recorded.
Which topic was that? I hope he'll be speaking on a few topics at the Northeast convention in June.Nurturing A Mathematical Gift Into A Passion
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Peter Enns was a really engaging speaker, IMO. His session last night was sparsely attended but I got a lot out of it.
Ed Zaccaro's session was also good; he's not as engaging as a speaker but I still enjoyed it.
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For my oldest, she's been alternating days of review of algebra w/ AoPS and working through Real World Algebra. She just started an online AoPS class (Counting & Prob) so we'll see how that works in with her workload. Generally I look at what's ahead in math each week and try to plan a good week based on that, based on the difficulty level, number of problems, et cetera.
Ds does 4-7 pages of Miquon a week (I typically assign 4 or 5, one most days; sometimes he keeps going) and 4-5 lessons of Right Start. Sometimes we end up going slow than I plan, sometimes faster.
Games like Sum Swamp, Equate, Flip 4, etc., are not part of school, they're just games that are sometimes played.
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We've had a great K year. The best advice I can give is to start with a limited number of subjects and then slowly add the others. For us, the big three that we started at the beginning were phonics, math, and history, in addition to lots of read-alouds. As the year went on, we've gradually added more and more. Even though we're technically nearly done, we're about to add in one more formal subject next week--science, which we've been doing informally. This has worked sooo much better than how I did it with my oldest, jumping into everything at once, lol.
What we've actually used:
Language Arts: OPGTR, supplemented with McGuffey's and ETC; First Language Lessons Level 1; Writing With Ease Level 1; Handwriting Without Tears; phonogram cards from dd's AAS; Spelling Workout A
Mathematics: Right Start A, then moved into B; Miquon Orange (after a couple of months); Calculadder drills (in the last month)
History: SOTW 1 & AG
Fine Arts: Classics for Kids podcast, outside classes
Memory Work: IEW's poetry memorization + selections from Living Memory
Science: Let's Read and Find Out books, Magic School Bus books, Nat'l Geographic videos, Thames & Kosmos Little Labs, all informally; we're about to do botany with Incredible Plants, the Plants Little Lab, and more Let's Read & Find Out books plus some of the Rookie Read-About books
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We use dd's grade based on her chronological age & the local school birthday cut-offs. She's an August baby, so she's already on the 'young' side for her grade.
I agree. However, an extremely accelerated child will often be able to handle a class that is ahead of his chronological age. Problems can often arise from keeping a child with his peers. The child will often learn to hide his talents and shut down rather than become engaged in activities. It is a fine balancing act to find just the right place for the child who is working 3+ years ahead of his peers.As someone else mentioned, it's really difficult to place your child appropriately when the puberty dividing line is between your child and your child's level. Dd is taking a course where she's the youngest by two years, and several others are even older. It's not really even all that challenging for her (we're just using it for enrichment), but she has essentially nothing in common with the others in that class. Of course, we've also never had the problem of dd trying to hide that she could do something. :D
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We were listening to the radio a week or two ago when a song from Grease came on. My oldest asked where it was from. I replied Grease, she nodded, and we went on... I thought. After about 20 seconds, ds piped up, "It's been translated, of course!" Because, clearly, if it was from *Greece*, it should've been in Greek! :lol:
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My son scored the lowest in punctuation, again! He has always done R&S and he is one grade ahead in it. So he is 1/2 way through the 6th grade book, in 5th grade. He almost always gets a perfect score, so I am not sure how he scores so low. :confused:
Now, see, I was trying to figure out how dd got such *high* scores in punctuation, when we haven't really covered it much at all this year. There must be something strange with the test, lol.
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I will be there! We're taking advantage of the free grandparent thing and taking my parents as well as all five of us. :)
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January--sorry, I forgot there were two administrations!
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For anyone else waiting--we got dd's EXPLORE scores today (she took through Duke TIP)!
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Miquon, perhaps? We're combining the two programs with my guy, and I personally like that he can go deeper/faster/both with Miquon at his rate, but I know he's going to get a nice solid foundation with the RS.
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We always keep going with math.
In general, we keep going with other skills subjects, but I sometimes try to vary the approach (e.g., my oldest has finished what I planned for the year for grammar and writing instruction, but she's doing a Killgallon book right now instead of going to the next level for grammar or writing).
With social sciences and science, I try to vary what we're doing. This year has been a strange one for both of those for my oldest, so she'll be doing something different than "planned" from now through to our next school year (which we typically start in late July or early August; we do a "May Term" and a lot of camps in June & early July).
Art and music appreciation: she's just finished both of those as I planned them out. I have two-three weeks' worth of books for her to read for music and one more weeks' worth of books about art. Then we stop until the next school year, at least in terms of formal study.
Clear as mud? :)
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Oh, this made me think of a related question. What about the 'What is your 3rd grader doing' threads. Do you post by the grade your kids are mostly working at, the grade they would be in school, or do you just avoid posting in those?
I post by the grade they would be in school. I go ahead and post because they don't say "what your x grader is doing [but only if s/he is working exactly at grade level]." I would post on them if my kid was working below grade level, too.
This question applies to both accelerated and special needs kids and those who are "twice exceptional". It makes taking part on some of the general threads very difficult because you don't know what "normal" is.:iagree: This is true, too, though. I really have no idea what is or is not normal. It took me until this year to realize that the disparity between dd's abilities in everything else vs. spelling was actually something, y'know, different. Sure, she's my oldest, but I just don't know what is normal. I often find myself sending dh, a couple of friends, and my mom links to curricula or books and saying "What level do *you* think this is?!?" There are a few parts of dd's school that I *know* are not normal (doing AoPS classes in 5th grade); the rest of it, and all of ds's school? Not. A. Clue. They may be atypical or boringly normal. No idea.
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Thirty Weeks Down (whoo-hoo!)
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Our sixth grade plans have been all over the place. I'm starting to feel a little more settled, but not entirely...
English: Vocabulary Workshop, All About Spelling, Exercises in English, Editor in Chief, Sentence Composing for Middle School, The Lively Art of Writing, The Paragraph Book 4, Advanced Academic Writing 1 [not all at once! parts of them all]
Literature: TIP unit, an online class, two of the W&M units (maybe), and a poetry study using A World of Poetry and other resources
Math: Art of Problem Solving courses; definitely geometry, the others remain TBD (and yeah, that's not normal for sixth grade)
Science: Spectrum Chemistry
Social Sciences: World Geography using Ellen McHenry's Mapping the World with Art as our base/spine. We are SUPER excited about this. We're adding some cultural geography to it.
German: Rosetta Stone plus Saturday School
Art Skills: integrated with geography (whoo-hoo!)
Art Appreciation: using Art as the spine, along with Venezia biographies and the Taschen Basic series.
Music Appreciation: world music, using the appropriate chapters of The Complete Idiot's Guide to Music History & its listening suggestions
Logic: The Snake and the Fox in the autumn and something for fallacies in the spring; I'm hoping to take a good look at The Art of Argument at the convention.
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I could have written this post, except we've done through Voyage level, and I just don't think we'll have the time for it, either of us. Dd enjoys MCT but her true love & gift is math, followed by science, so naturally that's what she wants to spend more time doing. And I can't devote so much of my face-to-face teaching time to grammar and vocabulary that, frankly, she can get through a workbook.
So, no, I don't think your homeschool world will implode... or if it does, mine will be imploding also!
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I've toyed with "Pannus Ardor Academy" and "Pannus Ardor Institute" because it's a play off the name I use online... that said, we don't have to have an official name and if we do one for the later years, it will be The Logan-Jefferson Home School/Academy/Institute. I haven't decided which I like best for the last word!
Has anyone actually called and dealt with RR??
in General Education Discussion Board
Posted
Yikes. I need to call them and I've been putting it off. I placed an order at the end of February and it's not yet shipped. I specifically ordered it rather than purchase at the SE convention because I needed some of the items sooner than that. Well, uh... oops. Now I'm waiting. :(