Wait, is the Creative Writing workbook part of WWS? Or a separate buy? I couldn't tell from the sample . . .

This is all such great advice - THANK YOU!!!! I tossed and turned last night, and had a couple of Hive-led epiphanies: first, the one who most needs to de-school is ME! I know that bringing her home was the right thing to do, and it is wonderful, truly, but the responsibility for her education (always mine, I know, but now mine alone) is weighing. I worry that she will be "behind" - but then realize, wait a minute, behind what? I'm not planning on her going back to ps. The whole point of bringing her home was so that she could learn at her own pace, untrammelled by the institution. I guess, at the back of my mind, I just assumed that her pace would always be faster, in everything ;) This is my issue, not hers! So, yes: I will slow down, back off, back up, and work with her till she gets used to MM's system. I will be open to trying other things, but not neurotic. I will :chillpill:! I will break up the session, I will do buddy math. We will read LOF together and giggle, and play some games, and I will back off. I will :chillpill::chillpill::chillpill::chillpill::chillpill:. I will repeat this to myself every day!!!! Thanks again, all. You are lifesavers. -Rose

Hi Hive, There have been a couple of great threads this week on 4th graders and math, which I've read avidly and found helpful. But, I could use some words of wisdom from you guys on my DD9's weird math behaviors . . . She was in ps through the 1st quarter of 4th grade - which means we have been homeschooling for 2 weeks. She has always gotten 4s & 5s (As & Bs) on her report cards, and she scored Advanced on all the math sections of the CA STAR test at the end of 2nd & 3rd grades. So, she must have been learning all she should, right???!!! 4th grade was a bad fit for her for a number of reasons - math included. She's very bright, very verbal, id'd as gifted, but young for her grade (just turned 9) and socially & emotionally somewhat immature. By this I mean she has very little ability to inhibit/filter - she sings, hums, wiggles, squirms, gets distracted, etc. very easily. This disconnect between her intellectual abilities and her self control/behavior abilities made the classroom a challenge for her (and her teacher;)) because she grasped the material quickly, then got bored and distracted and distracting too. She also missed a couple of weeks of school for health reasons, got very far behind in math, and was very very stressed about the quantity of work she needed to do to cach up. For this and other reasons, I decided to start homeschooling her now (I had been planning to start next year). So, what to do for math? I lurked here and learned about different curricula, I checked out TT and had her do the placement - she scored 97% on the Math 4 placement, and 87% on the Math 5 placement, which according to their rubric meant she should start with Math 6 - though I knew she wasn't ready for that, as she hadn't learned multiplying with 2 digits yet, nor done much with decimals. This all seemed too good to be true - but I wanted more info, and had read good things about MM, so I had her do the MM placement. Ugh. She scored only 68% on the 3rd grade end-of-year test. And what I realized in looking at the results is that while she can perform all the basic operations on numbers, she has *no clue* about what is going on conceptually!! Throw her a word problem out of context, she's lost. She can't do elapsed time, measurements, money, or anything practical with numbers. This was discouraging, and made me wonder what the heck all these assessments are assessing, anyway??? (not the MM ones, the PS ones). So, I figured I'd better do MM with her, to help her back up and get a grasp of what math is all about - conceptually. I realized that she is bright enough that she has basically been faking understanding it for all her years in PS. That ends now. We will understand math, or die trying!!! For the first couple of weeks we did worksheets from the 3rd grade level of MM on the things she tested weak on. Then, yesterday, we started MM 4A. She can do it, but it is *such* a struggle!! I have to sit with her the whole time, even on problems she knows how to do - she gets discouraged and gives up, or gets sloppy and doesn't read the directions. It took us an hour today to do 1 1/2 pages!!!This is *way* more hand-holding than I had anticipated, and I am having such a hard time not getting frustrated and impatient with her (well, ok, I am f&i, but I'm trying not to show it ;) Geez, if anyone is still with me after all that, what do you think? Persist with MM? Sit with her as long as it takes? Do 2 pages a day, or do however much she can before she gets frustrated and loses it? Work for an hour and settle for how much ever we get done? Slit my wrists??? I know some of it is just that MM is new, and it's forcing her to *think* for a change, not just spew back operations. I am willing to baby her through this at the beginning, but I don't want to become a crutch - at some point she is going to need to be able to do the work she already knows how to do independently of me sitting with her. And how to deal with the lack of focus? The distractability, bouncing, singing, goofiness? Any suggestions or words of wisdom would be soooo welcome!! FWIW, other subjects are going very well, though I deal with the distractibility in those often, too. Thank you already!!!!

I don't have any words of wisdom, but my DD9 does the *exact same thing* with math, particularly, but sometimes with other subjects too. It's not too hard, it's not too easy (I don't think), she just has a really hard time focusing sometimes. She can be really manic, jumpy, chatty, talking to herself, singing songs, dropping her pencil, whatever. It drives me nuts. Other times, she can focus for hours - reading, doing origami, etc. Anyway, FWIW, you are not the only one whose kid behaves this way when faced with math!!!

DD (just turned 9) has been loving the Jacqueline Morley books (You Wouldn't Want to . . . ) - there are a bunch of them that are relevant to the Medieval period. She likes the Bruce Coville adaptations of Shakespeare stories, too.

I'm doing WWE3 with my DD9. This is the kind of convoluted thing I've come up with for the narration/writing on Day 1 & Day 3: I have her read the story aloud. If it's a pretty straightforward "action" passage, I just ask her to summarize it in ~3 sentences. If it's one of the really detail-heavy passages, I do the questions in the workbook first, then ask for the summary, as this seems to help her organize her thoughts and do better at summarizing. *For the narration* - I use a voice recorder to record her ~3 sentence summary, and then play it back to choose & jot down the sentence(s) I'm going to give her for dictation. I can't remember all 3 sentences word for word, pick out one or two of them, and then say them back to her twice for dictation without hopelessly muddying them :tongue_smilie:which is not fair to her. But I definitely have her do all the writing on both days - I don't really get the benefit of having her see me write her sentences (at least at this age). This all takes only 10 minutes or so, so I have her do the dictation sentences (Day 2 & 4) also. So we get through 1 week's worth of lessons in two days. First day : WWE Day 1&2, Second day: WWE Day 3&4. On the other 2-3 days of the week, I have her do a WS exercise, which she can do on her own and enjoys. This works for both of us, because she's a good writer and likes to do more unstructured/creative writing, which she gets from WS, and I get to make sure she's getting the structured lessons and the narration/dictation practice from WWE. Best of both worlds, I think. -Rose

. . . related- for those of you who said math could range from 30 min - 1 1/2 hours: Is this because you assign a set number of pages to do in a day, and sometimes they dawdle and don't get it done? Or because some topics take longer for you to teach than others? I'm still working out how to do this - I've been shooting for 45 min (an hour better) of math, honest effort, and not worrying too much about quantity. I'm finding that if I make her sit longer, the quantity & quality of work per unit of time goes way down, and the attitude suffers too. I'm better off moving on to a new subject and coming back to math the next morning . . . Just wondering how others handle this. -Rose

It's so nice to hear that others of you have "spacey" math student! We shoot for 45 min/day. Some days that is all worksheet/workbooks, some days it's 15-20 min of Khan Academy videos & exercises and then deskwork (when I can tell she really needs a change of scene to focus). We do math first thing in the morning - later she would not be able to focus for that long on anything besides reading . . . -Rose

Well, I should say right off that I'm a new homeschooler, so take my suggestions with a grain of salt!:D But I've been considering the same thing - whether to start using A History of Us when we get to that stage (DD 9 is a very verbal 4th grader, and we're finishing up SOTW 2 and will be ready to supplement SOTW 3 with some American history later this year or early "5th" grade). I read on the boards about the Collier & Collier series, The Drama of American History, so I got the two series from the library and looked at them side-by-side. I decided that Collier would be better for us now - it is very well written, and it has less in it (but all the important stuff), so I think will be less distracting. I think we might come back around to Hakim later. I also decided to put aside the Story of Science for awhile. I'd been doing Aristotle as a read aloud, and while my dd enjoys listening, I don't feel like she's getting a whole lot out of it yet. I decided to hold off till we cycle back through Ancient History in 7th grade - by then she will have had both more history, and more science, under her belt and I think it will mean a lot more to her. For what it's worth . . . . -Rose DD9 - "Calpurnia" - MM5, BBLL, SW-E, Mind Benders, WWE3, WS3, FLL4, SOTW2, RS4K Chemistry DD5 - Loving K in public school!

Thanks for the feedback on CQ & ES. For those who have used CQ - is it Christian, or worldview neutral? I really like how both Elemental and RS4K are very clear on their website as to their worldview in the science lessons, as well as their own beliefs/background. I haven't seen anything like that for ClassiQuest - is it explicitly religious? Secular? Neutral?

Last year, I was afterschooling my dd in science, and I used Real Science for Kids Chemistry Level I. It was great - a fun an interesting text, okay experiments. My main criticism was that it didn't really go into the scientific method enough - the experiments illustrated the principles in the chapter, but didn't really teach the student to develop and test a hypothesis. Anyway, overall I liked it, and now that we are homeschooling full time, I assumed I'd be using RS4K Biology. BUT!!!! Now I've seen Elemental Science and ClassiQuest Science, and I am blown away! They make RS4K look so weak!! So I'm considering one of them instead. Has anyone used either of these in the Logic Stage (5th grade) for Biology? What did you like or dislike about them? I'm leaning toward Elemental, just based on the samples I've seen, but would love input. BTW - I'm looking for a secular or world-view neutral science program. Thanks! Rose

what a bad title - it looks like I am looking for feedback only from new homeschoolers, doesn't it? I'm a total board virgin, it is taking me awhile to get the hang of this! I'd love feedback from anyone!!

Hi all, I'm new to the boards, and new to homeschooling with DD 9 who just came home after 1 quarter of 4th grade. I picked up TWTM about 2 years ago, and loved it, and we've afterschooled in history, writing & science for the past year. I'd been fantasizing about homeschooling for awhile, planning to do it for sure for junior high, but after a really rough start to this year, we decided why wait? So here I am after one week and two days . . . with some questions for all of you amazing and more experienced people! Here's our basic day, 4 days a week - in the morning: Math - we're doing assessments & remedial stuff right now, trying to figure out where she's at & choose curriculum. I'm looking at MM, with LoF on the side, and TT. I'll probably post more questions on this separately . . . Spelling - Spelling Workout E. No problems, though she does not love spelling Grammar - FLL 4. She finds it easy so far, we usually do a couple of lessons a day Writing - We're continuing with WWE 3, because that's what we've been working with since last year. She finds it pretty easy, so I'm going to move through it quickly till we get to tougher material, and then either do WWE4 or jump into WWS. I think I read SWB saying that would be reasonable to do with a 5th grader. Thoughts? We're also doing WS3 exercises once a week - she likes to write, so having the descriptive & paragraph exercises is good for her, and breaks up the narration/dicatation thing. Latin - Big Book of Lively Latin (BBLL?) - we started this over the summer, it's very fun & gentle, we break up each lesson over several days. Okay, so this all takes about 2 1/2 hours, 3 if we're lagging. We finish it before lunch, and I feel good . . . then feel like maybe I should be doing more? But I'm trying *so hard* not to push too fast, but to keep it pleasant and fun and end things when she really gets wiggy and impatient. Afternoons - we do literature, working through the Medieval list from TWTM, and then: either History (we're about halfway through SOTW 2, having been gently afterschooling for the past couple of years). I have her answer questions, and do a verbal narration, no writing yet. I'm also having her do some extra readings, as suggeted in the Activity Book, and map work or Science - we're finishing up RS4K Chemistry and then will move into Bio. I'm a biologist, so Bio will be fun and we'll do lots of field trips, experiments, etc. This is another 1-2 hours of work, depending on the day, the energy level, etc. That's all so far - I'd like to fit in Logic (she likes Mind Benders) and somehow music/art, but I don't really know when & where. I feel good when we get through all this, then wonder is it enough? Should we do more writing? She does a formal writing lesson every day, and then at least once a week she writes for science, lit, or history, but not every day. She would really have a hard time if I made her write every afternoon. She is definitely lower energy & lower focus in the pm. Okay, I've written way too much! Though I feel like it's not really telling the whole story - why we brought her home, her strengths & weaknesses, etc. But if you are still with me so far, I guess I'm looking for either validation, or kind criticism, or suggestions? How does this sound to you if you have a kid around the same age? Or anything else you feel like offering? Thank in advance!! Rose

Or, if you really want an earfull (eyefull?), check out John Taylor Gatto's explanations of the development of compulsory schooling (Dumbing Us Down, A Different Kind of Teacher). Thought-provoking stuff.

Hi Everybody, This is my first time posting (on any forum, actually!) although I've been lurking for awhile and learned a lot from all of you. Still new to all the abbreviations, though. DD (9) is coming home from 4th grade, and starting the homeschool adventure on Monday! I'm sure I'll have a bunch of questions once we get started, but right now I have a question for all you latin-o-philes! We need to choose a name to register our ps (we are in CA) and we wanted to pick a cool Latin name to show our excitement about the Classical/WTM method we plan to use. We like the sound of "House of Learning" - and are thinking it translates as Eruditio Domus. Anyone? Anyone? Last thing I want to do is start off with a bad latin translation, and particularly not one that says something we don't intend to! Any help (or suggestions) would be most welcome! Thanks in advance. -Rose, mom to DD 9 - starting homeschool Monday! DD 5 - loving K in our local PS