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Megicce

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Everything posted by Megicce

  1. Ohhhh, these look lovely.... These would definitely speak to my artist daughter. The material might be simple/boring, but I'm really just looking for it to SINK IN as it hasn't before. What is the daily flow like with these curricula? Do they write in the student book, or on a separate piece of paper? How long is a typical lesson (ballpark)? Is there a lot of teacher involvement, or is it more student-directed? I'm just trying to make sure that whatever we land on fits into the flow of our days this coming year. And can I ask those same questions for the vocabulary and poetics books? I love the look of those, too. 🙂 Thank you very much!
  2. I need some ideas for grammar for this next year. We've been using FLL all the way through (DS levels 1-3; DD levels 1-4 and then Rod and Staff this year), and I'm having to acknowledge to myself that I just don't think it's working. Both kids can rattle off definitions and lists like nobody's business, but ask them to actually identify parts of speech in a sentence when we HAVEN'T just spent five minutes talking about that part of speech, and they look at me like deer in headlights. My son can easily tell you that "A sentence is a group of words that expresses a complete thought" and "All sentences begin with a capital letter and end with a punctuation mark" - and yet he routinely begins his sentences with lowercase letters. 🙄 The memorization just isn't making its way into practical use. I'm looking for something that, ideally, would cover grammar in a thorough but incremental manner, in about 15 minutes a day, with CLEAR explanations, plenty of practice, and in a format/presentation that's attractive and interesting to my kids. DD11 is an artistic, dreamy soul who'd love to spend her whole day drawing and listening to audiobooks; DS9 is a budding engineer who's preoccupied with Legos, pistons, gears, and the like. They both blanch at the sight of densely-packed or tiny text on a page, and each has a tendency to get lost in their own thoughts if something doesn't hold their attention. I don't even know where to begin looking. We've never used (nor really looked at) anything but FLL, and I've kind of been waiting to see if all the memorization would begin to pay off in practical application...but I'm just not seeing it, and I think I'm facing the fact that we need to try something else. Thank you so much for your help!!!
  3. I need some ideas for grammar for this next year. We've been using FLL all the way through (DS levels 1-3; DD levels 1-4 and then Rod and Staff this year), and I'm having to acknowledge to myself that I just don't think it's working. Both kids can rattle off definitions and lists like nobody's business, but ask them to actually identify parts of speech in a sentence when we HAVEN'T just spent five minutes talking about that part of speech, and they look at me like deer in headlights. My son can easily tell you that "A sentence is a group of words that expresses a complete thought" and "All sentences begin with a capital letter and end with a punctuation mark" - and yet he routinely begins his sentences with lowercase letters. 🙄 The memorization just isn't making its way into practical use. I'm looking for something that, ideally, would cover grammar in a thorough but incremental manner, in about 15 minutes a day, with CLEAR explanations, plenty of practice, and in a format/presentation that's attractive and interesting to my kids. DD11 is an artistic, dreamy soul who'd love to spend her whole day drawing and listening to audiobooks; DS9 is a budding engineer who's preoccupied with Legos, pistons, gears, and the like. I don't even know where to begin looking. We've never used (nor really looked at) anything but FLL, and I've kind of been waiting to see if all the memorization would begin to pay off in practical application...but I'm just not seeing it, and I think I'm facing the fact that we need to try something else. Thank you so much for your help!!! Eta: I realized I accidentally posted this in the wrong topic...and as I can't find a way to delete it, please pardon me! 😳 I'll go post in the K-8 curriculum board where it was meant to be.
  4. I'm looking for Christmas gifts for my littles, and I have a bright 7-year-old boy who's reading at about a fifth grade level and fascinated by space. I'd love to find a meaty space encyclopedia with plenty of material for engrossing reading, appropriate for that reading level. Special challenges: We are neither young-earth creationists nor secular, and those seem to be the two versions of such books out there that I'm finding. I'd love to find something that really sticks to the facts of what we know about space, without editorializing on purpose/design/lack of design, and particularly without speculative flights of fancy about alien races and terraforming Mars. (Seriously? It would cost billions upon billions of dollars to terraform Mars, and even then it would only last one generation.) I don't know that there's anything out there that's explicitly old-earth creationist/intelligent design focused (that's our bent), so I'm looking for something I guess that stays silent on controversial points, so that we can teach all the different sides of those debates as we get further on in science. Any recommendations? I'd love to hear ideas from the hive mind. :) Thanks in advance!
  5. We're taking a year off SOTW next year (what would have been SOTW 4) to do a year on American history, and I'm kind of leaning toward using Simply Charlotte Mason's guides. We'd combine the Early Modern and Modern guides and just do the American history portions and North American geography. Thoughts on this curriculum? I know it seems a little lighter, but honestly...I might want to try that for a year. I think it would give us more scope to go off on rabbit trails and linger on things without me worrying that we won't finish. I do plan to "bulk it up" a little by omitting the study of Billy Graham at the end and pulling in a lapbooking unit on US Government. So yes...thoughts? Is it just TOO light? Thoughts on book choices? Scope? Combining the two years - would it work? Thank you for any thoughts you have! :D PS - I'll have a 2nd grader and a 4th grader next year. :)
  6. We have definitely experienced some of this with SOTW3 as well. Thanks for sharing your experience and ideas!
  7. This is exactly what I haven't loved about SOTW3, which is probably also part of my reason for seeking out something more fun and engaging for next year. I'd like to find something that lights my kids up and gets them intrigued and passionate about history, as opposed to leaving them bewildered by a litany of historical events that they (especially the littler one) don't really have the ability to absorb yet. I like your idea about 20th Century heroes and will consider that as an option! Thank you! :)
  8. I'm LOVING all of these ideas; thank you so much, everyone! I am leaning toward taking a year of American history, and I'll check into the resources mentioned. Any other recommendations for good, engaging, one-year American history resources for this age?
  9. Thank you. I appreciate your perspective and experience. I'd still be open to hearing alternative recommendations - I'm not going to shelter them forever, but I'm also weighing maturity and ability to process what we're learning about (mostly for my 7-year-old) and wanting to consider my options. Thanks!
  10. We have been using SOTW and have been largely pleased with it (though tbh SOTW 3 has been more dry), but I'm looking for something different for next year. My primary reason is the content warning on SOTW 4 that it contains material that's difficult (understandably so) and that you may not want to use it with kids younger than 4th grade. We do history with both of my kiddos together, and next year I will have a 4th grader and a sensitive 2nd grader. My idea is to skip SOTW 4 and then jump back into our history rotation with Ancients the following year. I'd be interested in finding either an alternate resource for modern history that's...more gentle? (Does/can such a thing exist??) Or, alternately, I'd be open to finding a yearlong curriculum of American history or even a completely different focus that would fit in nicely. I'm really not sure where to start because I'm not sure what I'm looking for. Something along the lines of SOTW would be nice, or I'd also be open to a unit-study style curriculum. I'd love to hear your recommendations! Thank you!! PS - Both my kids are reading ahead of grade level, so something designed for a little bit older ages could be okay. :)
  11. This is beautiful. This is how I am learning to survive, too. When my littles were preschoolers, I was so excited about homeschooling and so full of beautiful visions of our idyllic days curled up together with books. Then the rubber met the road. XD This has been the year of me and DH (an ENTP) realizing what a much better mother, homeschooler, and sane human being I am when I get alone time. It has been life-changing to stop fighting how I'm made or wishing I didn't need a break from mothering (like all my ISFJ friends who seem so happy to just hang with the kids all day and bake and take care of the house, without needing to disappear for hours to read and write and think) and begin embracing it. It enables me to be fully present and available for my family when I'm with them. 💜
  12. That's so interesting! You know, I do find that I have to find curricula that teach something in the way I understand it and what works for the kids, and I have a penchant for splicing programs together or designing things myself when I can't find what I want. So in that sense, I can totally relate. Now, I feel like we've found what actually works for us for where we're at. Maybe as I continue to homeschool and get less fearful about improvising and "missing something," we'll find ourselves putting things together more as you did. :)
  13. She's in WWE3 at the moment (we had a move this fall, so she's only about five weeks in atm), but that helps. Asking the leading questions does really seem to help her put it together with WWE. Idk why I didn't think of that with this also. I guess it just seems in the SOTW workbook that kids should be able to pull the salient points out of the air. XD Thank you for that!! Still would love to hear other thoughts and suggestions, especially thoughts about realistic expectations at this age. I tend to be a perfectionist and have to reel in my expectations from time to time.
  14. After doing a lot of the negative process of making choices that Mrs. Tharp mentioned above ("Okay, this sounded good, but REALLY doesn't work"), we've hit on some things that are working for us. I am an INFJ (absolutely no question, by cognitive functions as well as the tests that look only at the four dichotomies) and an adult education professional. I LOVE teaching in classrooms, but I find that with my kids, I do better with a mixture of subjects where I'm teaching hands-on and subjects where they do independent work and I come in as a resource person to support and guide them. I need breathing space in my day, because I'm strongly on the introvert side of that I/E split. XD We're currently using a LOT of Susan Wise Bauer's resources. I like them because they're well-organized and easy to implement and the daily/weekly structure makes sense to me. So we've used OPGTR for reading, FLL for grammar (plus, for my 3rd grader, a daily grammar practice workbook from Evan Moor), WWE, SOTW for history, and a science program called Elemental Science that basically fleshed out SWB's recommendations into a planned-out curriculum. It includes experiments (or demonstrations really, at this age), but they're usually pretty simple and require mostly items we have around the house. We started with Right Start Math, and I'm glad we did, because I love the conceptual understanding it put into place for my kids, but I found that it lost them and me somewhere in the middle of level B. When I started hitting occasional lessons that required 45 min of hands-on teaching for one subject for one kid, I couldn't do it. I needed something more predictable and less intense for me. We've switched both kiddos over to Math Mammoth now and they're loving it. Lots of conceptual stuff still but in a worktext format, where I can be a resource person instead of doing all the teaching. Our trade-off was to switch to All About Spelling this year, which requires more hands-on time from me but is working like a DREAM for both my kids. I LOVE how organized, logical, and fun this approach is, how much sense it makes, and how it's really clicking for them. My eldest is starting Rosetta Stone for French and we outsource piano lessons. We also attend a co-op where I teach (classroom, yay!) PE and art classes, so they get those things there. Big messy projects don't often happen for us except at co-op. I have tried, but I tend to burn out on them after the first month of school. I've always found that having a predictable rhythm and structure is really important to me to be able to get everything done. I used to hate that about myself, but I've learned to accept it. I may not bake and build enormous awesome things with my kids, but we have a really good connection and talk about a lot of things that matter, and they can get the big messy projects at co-op. ;) FWIW, my two kiddos are very different; one is a feeler and one is a thinker. I'm guessing they will turn out to be INFJ or ENFJ and INTP as they grow. I feel like I've rambled on forever, but those are all my thoughts. XD
  15. We are using SOTW 3 for history this year, and my elder kiddo (3rd Grade) is just not a master of short, succinct narrations that hit all the major points. (Shocking, right?) She can retell me almost the entire chapter in detail if prompted, but when I ask her to summarize, she doesn't know how to pull out the most important parts and will often give me either a string of random unrelated facts about the chapter or seventeen sentences of summary with way too much detail. I'm not sure how to teach her, at this age, how to pull out the most pertinent facts for a narration. This is something that comes naturally to me, but doesn't seem to at all for her. We are both frustrated and it's getting to the point where she hates doing narrations because she feels like she's always doing it "wrong." I know we'll be outlining in later grades, and that's supposed to help, but it seems by the examples in the SOTW workbook that I should be expecting her to be able to pull out the most pertinent facts already. Any tips for this age? Both for realistic expectations on my part (like, maybe her narrations aren't always going to look like the ones in the SOTW workbook?) and/or for ways to help her learn this? Thank you!!
  16. Kat, do you find the material in Easy Grammar corresponds well to FLL by grade level?
  17. I have been using FLL with my eldest for first and second grade, and while she does brilliantly with the memory work and parts of speech, she's really had a hard time retaining capitalization rules. We tested this year (our state requires it) and she bombed the grammar section, which was all about identifying capitalization and punctuation mistakes within a paragraph and correcting them. She does very well with worksheet-style learning, as well as oral/interactive, and I think she just needs some practice implementing these concepts in a more visual, concrete way (and with more repetition) than what FLL offers. But I'm not sure what resources to pull from for supplementation, where I can just pull out a page every time she needs a little more practice in some concept. The capitalization worksheets I have found online don't seem to be quite rigorous enough. (When the same mistake is made in every sentence on a page, the child isn't actually looking at the sentences critically any more, kwim?) Suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
  18. Hi there! I have a 2nd grader (reading probably on a 4th-5th grade level? she's very comfortable whipping through Little House, Charlotte's Web, etc.) with a sensitive disposition and an obsession with fairy tales. She'd love more of them to read, and I'd love to steer her away from Disney adaptations and toward something more classic. Unfortunately, I don't know of any good collections apart from the Andrew Lang books (Blue Fairy Book, etc), and from what I have heard ​(I have not read them personally) they can tend toward the grisly/gruesome, which I don't think would be a good fit for her at this stage of the game. Are any of the Andrew Lang books milder than others, in that respect? Or do you have any recommendations for nice collections of perhaps slightly gentled fairy tales that are still truer to the classic versions? We've done very well listening to Jim Weiss's versions (Fairytale Favorites in Story and Song, etc), and something like that would be lovely - toned down a little but more faithful. Thank you!
  19. Hi there! I am deliberating between TOG Yr 2 and SOTW Vol 2 next year for my upcoming 2nd grader and kindergartener. We have used TOG Year 1 this year, but with SOTW Vol 1 as the spine. The kids have really enjoyed and retained a lot from the hands-on projects, but of all the reading we've done, SOTW has definitely been the most enjoyable. I already have TOG Year 2, and I'm looking through it and noticing both that SOTW 2 doesn't seem to be scheduled much (which is disappointing) but also noticing that the 2nd-year scope of the curricula seem very different. I'm trying to decide which to use for next year - TOG year 2 or SOTW Vol 2? Here are some considerations.... 1. I definitely want to use TOG at the higher grades, and planned to use it for this first cycle so I myself could get used to the planning. However... 2. SOTW is simpler, and my kids have definitely liked it. Simpler is starting to sound more appealing, at this stage where I have one barely independent reader and most subjects are still being done orally with both kids, which is a lot of hands-on investment of my time with each kid each day. (We're also using RightStart math, which I LOVE, but which is time-intensive.) More planning might be easier when we've hit the point where I can hand off assignments and check in, instead of hovering over shoulders all day. (Is it real that there will be a day when I can hand off assignments and check in? That seems like a fairy tale. But I digress.) With SOTW, I can incorporate some hands-on projects from the activity guide, and bam - history's done, versus more planning and more book juggling with TOG. For 2nd grade, it might just be easier to do what's...easy. 3. Can anyone speak to the differing scopes of the two curricula? TOG 2 seems like it's a lot of Church history, and it ZIPS through the Middle Ages awfully fast. It goes all the way from the fall of Rome to the Constitution, and to me, that seems like a lot to cover in one year. It almost seems like, at my kids' ages, more time on the Middle Ages and Renaissance might be preferable to a lot of Church history, which they might not really appreciate until they're a bit older? Or am I wrong about the TOG scope? Have you who've used it found that TOG Year 2 works well for the younger ages? Will we be missing something if we go with SOTW? 4. Finally, because of the difference in scope, it seems that whatever I use this year, I'll need to use next year as well. So the decision feels big...although I'm starting to learn the homeschooling lesson that consistency means more than having the "perfect" curriculum. Sorry for all of my rambling, and thank you very much for your thoughts! :)
  20. We have been using a curriculum aptly named Cursive First. It is designed to be integrated with a related phonics program (Spell to Read and Write), but since we use OPGTR for phonics, we just use what we need. It is intended to be a first handwriting program for kids who are learning cursive before manuscript. (That's what you are looking for, right?) I like how it describes the different strokes and integrates some tactile learning techniques (like writing in the air, in salt, etc before doing the practice sheets). It has been working really well for DD5. Here it is at Rainbow Resource Center: http://www.rainbowresource.com/product/Cursive+First/048762/b8bd986bab91d31248f6a04f?subject=5&category=809 Hope that helps! :)
  21. Well, so far it seems unanimous! Ok, so reassure me...nothing bad is going to happen if we skip spelling in 1st? DD6 is a prolific book-maker who uses exceptionally...err...creative spelling at the moment, based on the phonics rules she has learned so far and "educated guessing". We are currently learning alternate spellings for the long vowel sounds in OPGTR, so I guess she's a bit ahead by public school standards, but we're not finishing the book before September or anything. It's just, you know, TWTM says to start spelling in 1st, so I'm nervous. (Can you tell she is my oldest? Haha! I'm sure I'll become more relaxed as I HS more....) Thanks!
  22. Hi there! I've been looking into spelling curricula for first grade in the fall and, like others who've posted before me, been trying to find the sweet spot between systematic rule-teaching and minimal teacher time. I have enough hands-on time in other subjects that I need to make spelling as easy as it can be (while still being effective) for the sake of my own sanity! :) So, I think we've settled on Rod & Staff as a program that looks like it will work for us long-term, but it doesn't start until Grade 2! Ack! I looked at the samples, and it does seem like it would be too much for us to just jump in to in 1st grade. If you've used it, would you concur? Any recommendations as to what to use for first grade if we're ultimately probably going to switch? You saw my list of preferences above. Bonus if it is visually appealing...DD likes pretty things, and thst would probably make spelling less of a battle. Thanks in advance!
  23. I love that we're hearing from people with British and Aussie accents, too! Thanks, all of you...my first response was just to explain that sometimes it's yoo and sometimes it's oo and just figure it out - kind of like with the two sounds of th. I appreciate your input!
  24. We've just hit long u (with silent e) in The Ordinary Parent's Guide. The book recommends to teach it as the name of the letter ("yoo"), and to pronounce the words accordingly (like "tyoob" for tube). Trouble is, we don't pronounce things that way. In our family's idiolect, a lot of the long-u words are just "oo" - like "toob" for tube, "joon" for June. My dd is really confused, and I feel like I'm not quite sure how to explain it to her. She'll sound out the word, but then not know what it means, because that's not how we say it. Anybody else deal with this issue, and how did you manage it? Do I just kind of go with it and let her figure it out as we go? Or is there some way to explain it that could help her out? Thanks!
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