ReadingBear.org is now adding a set of phonics videos, based on the presentations. Here's the YouTube playlist: Many more should be posted in the coming weeks. Try them out on your kids and tell me what you think!

Nice to learn that others are using this method! We just have a few dozen questions from Chapters 31-33 of Vol. 2. I'd be happy to share those, but I gather that it's rather hard to export from Supermemo to Anki (I tried, once, actually--but I'm sure there's a way to do it). We've got the same issue: we want to reuse the cards with our younger son. We're going through so many books with Supermemo that I'm not sure we could easily locate the cards with Anki that we'll need when our younger son is starting on the same material. There is probably some way to do it with tagging, but you'd have to remember abbreviations, or keep a list, or something. The great thing about Supermemo is that it allows you to arrange cards into a hierarchical outline, which makes it easy to find things.

T'smom, FWIW, Supermemo claims that those using its algorithm will achieve 95% recall of the items put into their database. There seems to be evidence of this as well.

This is all extremely interesting, and will take some time to absorb and respond to. To those who gave me unsolicited advice based on my son's age, are you interested in discussing this deeply and philosophically, or did you just want to offer your opinion? I'd love the former, but thanks for the latter if that's it. Without addressing this to anyone in particular, I thought I'd take the opportunity to explain my thoughts a little more. The philosophically disinclined will no doubt find this boring and should probably skip it. First, I've given some thought to and done some reading about the philosophy of education. (Mrs. Twain might find that I'm sounding a lot like E.D. Hirsch.) I am a strong believer in the liberal arts, as I guess most people following something like WTM are. What do I think this means? I believe that minds are liberated by deep understanding of important texts and of the universe, both natural and human. A person who can write thoughtful, original essays, without too much difficulty, about a wide variety of subjects, and also not just do calculations but understand what they mean, probably has a good grounding in the liberal arts. I think a person who has a solid grounding in the liberal arts is solidly prepared, mentally at least, for anything he or she might want to do. The question is how to get a child to that point. The most important focus is reading and really studying classics (in the broad sense), as well as getting lots of exposure to and practice in the sciences. Writing is especially important but of course a liberal education is necessarily broad. The sort of education I'm describing requires not just a good vocabulary, but enough comfort with that vocabulary that one does not have to look up many words as one reads great literature and source documents. It also requires a massive amount of facts under one's belt--the more confidently and easily recalled, the better. As E.D. Hirsch (again) points out, reading is not just a matter of decoding and getting meaning from individual vocabulary items; it requires understanding a lot of background knowledge. This is important not just for understanding but also for really appreciating the classics. Similar remarks can be made about science; to get the most out of the study of science, you have to be not just passingly but thoroughly familiar with whatever concepts are being built on. So I agree with both Hirsch and the Bauers when they emphasize the importance of a lot of memorization of facts in the early years of schooling. But I don't mean just recognition memory, which is certainly better than nothing, but declarative memory; the more explicitly that something is remembered, the more meaningful and important everything will be. I find my five-year-old loves memorizing things, as long as he understands and cares about the material. He has repeatedly thanked me, unsolicited, for starting us out on this "spaced repetition" program (Supermemo, for now), and before that a regular review of recorded summaries (my own narratives, so to speak). He was so excited about the idea of being able to remember things so well that he asked to study stuff about Central America and the Caribbean (the next geography topic we're tackling after we finish our 6-9 month study of South America). His attitude is delightful but not especially surprising. Many people have observed that young children enjoy memorizing things--if, of course, their teachers take the right sort of approach. We have really studied South America, and gone over the same material in multiple sources. The more we read from other sources, the more he understands, and the more interesting it is. He could, as a result, read a book like this, that a lot of kids don't enjoy simply because they can't relate and understand well enough what's going on in a very foreign sort of world. The more that a young reader is familiar with Inca history and the geography of the Andes, the more likely it is he'll appreciate that book. It's that way throughout a child's education. The better a student remembers and understands what is needed to tackle some subject, the more he'll get out of it. I think this flashcard program might very well stuff his head full of tens of thousands of facts. I know this is what ed schools tell teachers not to do. If we were doing a lot of real drudgework, so that he really did learn to dislike learning, then of course this would be a mistake. But it doesn't really seem like drudgework. Again, my son actually enjoys it, and so do I, actually. Besides, this memory work is actually a supplement, and doesn't take that much time out of the day. I get the notion, of course, that as one returns at a higher level to material learned earlier, even if one remembers very little, one appreciates it more. That's roughly what I thought we'd do, until not very long ago. But what if it is possible through a little daily work to remember all the main points that one studies from age 6 to 10? Then on the second pass through, one will be able to appreciate and learn from the second pass through all that much better. Makes sense to me.

Bump. Any responses? Does anyone else other than me regard this think this is an interesting nut to crack? Suppose your student could spend 30-45 minutes a day reviewing information according to some method or other, and as a result managed to remember tens of thousands of facts of the sort that most of us ordinarily forget after a while. Would you assign/encourage/require that? I do...using Supermemo, although I'm thinking of switching to Anki.

After your student reads a book, or is otherwise exposed to some new information, you'd like him or her to remember it for more than a few weeks. Is there anything in particular that you encourage or require your student to do, to encourage such remembering? The main options on this question, as I understand them, are in the poll. What do you prefer?

A homeschooling case study of Supermemo use! http://www.supermemo.com/articles/users/homeschool.htm Memory storage technique? I don't understand :confused:

Hoppy, very interesting! Good to know someone else is using this for homeschooling. You're not the first person to recommend Anki. I went with Supermemo just because it seemed like a more powerful and popular system, but I'll have another look at Anki. The idea that the iPad version syncs up with the desktop version is a huge plus.

All, my son is almost six and we've been doing homeschooling-type stuff for a long time now. (I'm his main teacher; I work at home.) But recently I concluded we should be doing more to ensure that he remembers what he learns. There are several ways to do this, I think: (1) Simply review the information, preferably from many complementary sources, over and over. (We've been doing quite a bit of this.) (2) Testing. (We haven't done this at all, except for some SOTW tests which I give him very casually and informally over the meal table.) (3) Record summaries of information (typically, contents of books read) and review the recordings according to a schedule. This is what I've been doing with my son, although we're gradually switching methods... (4) Review of flashcard or other similarly small chunks of info according to "spaced repetition," which I will describe below, and which is what we're switching to, for now anyway. There must be other methods as well. Since I am a complete beginner to spaced repetition, I'll just point you to what appears to be a definitive article, here, for a definitive account. In what follows I'll only describe what we've been doing, what our plans are, and what I think it will accomplish. I'd love to hear from anyone who has tried this with their kids. Anywhere from 3-5 times per day I read something to my son (usually nonfiction) that I want him to retain, as well as he can. Until recently I've been simply summarizing what we read in 1-3 minute recordings, and then we review these recordings 1 day, 1 week, 1 month, etc., later. After 2.5 months our review sessions occupy 20-30 minutes per day. It isn't too bad, because it's interesting to review things one has learned, but I'm not sure either of us can stick with that program. So after some advice here and there I decided to switch to recording questions, and then typing them into a flashcard program, called Supermemo (only a geek could love this--there are user-friendlier ones available). Supermemo then displays the flashcards according to a "spaced repetition" algorithm. This involves showing the cards according to how well you declare you did in answering them, and generally shows them less and less often as time goes on, as long as you continue to answer them well. Research, purportedly, demonstrates that this can result in excellent memory. A lot of geeks swear by this, and frankly, when a lot of geeks swear by something like how well a computer program can cause a person to remember something, I tend to believe them. Just to give you an example, here are the first eight questions I put into this flashcard software (from SOTW 2): What was Christopher Columbus trying to find when he sailed due west across the Atlantic Ocean from Spain? What was the name of the Portuguese explorer who rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1487, but turned back because his crew was afraid of what might lie ahead? What was the name of the Portuguese explorer who finally did manage to sail around Africa and reach India? What country did Columbus go to first, to ask for money for his trip across the Atlantic? And what did that king's scientists say about his proposal? Who funded Columbus' first trip across the Atlantic, and why did they do so? When did Columbus first set sail across the Atlantic, and what were the names of his three ships? When Columbus' desperate, scurvy men threatened to mutiny, what deal did Columbus make with them? Where did Columbus land, and what did he call the people that he found there? I also inputted the (brief) answers. So the idea is that you'll try to answer these soon after you input them. If you don't get the answers right, the program will soon (sooner than 24 hours later, if you open it again) show you the questions again. Depending on how well you report yourself as having done with the questions, the program will show the question again a few days, or a week, later. If you get it perfectly that time around, the program will show it to you again but even farther down the road. If you find you have forgotten it, the question will be re-inserted into your need-to-learn stack and you'll be drilled until it is down pat again. Well, I've put in questions and answers for the last three days and so far, it's going extremely well. My son (H.) just loves the Q&A. Today he got to a certain point and the program said, "Nothing more to learn." (!) Well, he got an enormous kick out of that. Just loved reading that he had nothing more to learn. He has repeatedly thanked me for starting with "the questions." My son likes it quite a bit more than passively listening to recorded summaries. Personally, I like it because we have a much better idea of whether he is actually remembering the material he's read about. I also, as I said, find it very plausible that after six months, he might actually be able to answers like the above with a high accuracy rate (I think I read it was 95% over the long haul--obviously this makes some assumptions about diligent use of the program). The geeks who wrote the program say that one can keep that level of memory up tens of thousands of questions at once. I wonder if it is possible that H. might return to the same material in three or four years (we're following a WTM-type program), and being able to tackle more advanced stuff because he doesn't have to review nearly as much. Thoughts? I hope people won't bore me too much with their notions of the pointlessness of rote memorization? :tongue_smilie: I really would love to hear from anyone who uses some sort of flashcard or spaced repetition technique with their children.

This is all very interesting and even inspirational. I appreciate all the stories. :lurk5:

I merely asked whether children who were homeschooled in part because their parents wanted them protected (sheltered, etc.) from bad influences to some extent, more than public-educated children--and that includes many if not most homeschoolers, according to surveys I've seen--had seen their wishes borne out in their adult children. I didn't ask only about "heavily sheltered/secluded" children, whatever that might mean. Why assume I was asking about people who live in rural places completely cut off from civilization? Just to take one example, if you kept your children from seeing network and cable TV, the way I keep my children from seeing it, do you see specific advantages that came out of that in your adult children? I can imagine one kind of negative answer: "Yes, I tried to shelter my children from drugs, sex, and disrespectful attitudes that pop culture is full of, but they ended up discovering those things a little later (on sports teams, clubs, YMCA, church friends, etc.) and it really didn't make any difference. They ended up being just as sex- and drug-addled and just as disrespectful as any ordinary teen."

Thank you. No, you didn't offend, you merely stated the obvious. :D

Let me revise my question by prepending this: for those homeschoolers who are homeschooling in part because they wish to shelter their children (or protect them from harmful influences, or however you wish to describe it), ... Of course there are progressive homeschoolers like Aelwydd who pride themselves on not protecting their children so much. I didn't mean to deny that. And you might want to check your own assumptions--I think of myself as protecting my children (we don't watch network or cable TV, for example) and yet we are agnostic and not especially conservative. I really am interested in hearing from parents who have made an effort to protect their children from what they regard as being bad influences--and whether they felt that their adult children bore the fruit they hoped for. Maybe this is a personal question but it is highly interesting to me!

Could the caffeine in the tea be causing it? I drink decaf because caffeine generally upsets my stomach...

One of the main advantages people see in homeschooling is that children are sheltered from the many ridiculously bad influences on them at school: bad behavior from both fellow students and the occasional bad teacher; second-hand immersion in pop culture via peers, which would include competition for stuff they don't need and the cult of "cool"; poor models for speech, including cursing; later on, drugs and premature sex; etc. Of course, some progressives are capable of arguing that homeschoolers are at a disadvantage precisely because they aren't exposed to these things, while they will be exposed to them in the adult world and/or they'll have to interact with people who grew up with that stuff. So I have a question for people whose homeschooled children have already grown up: can you testify that specifically the sheltering aspects of homeschooling have made your children better people? In what ways? Did it have unintended side-effects?

http//www.readingbear.org is about halfway there and should be finished this summer. By the way, Reading Bear is one of the resources Don Potter links to (or he told me was going to, anyway--haven't checked). It is based on the Rudolph Flesch word lists that Potter advocates using.

We used the (free) flashcards and method explained here and which we are in the middle of digitizing here (also 100% free). He was reading well before his third birthday.

This is just silly. I'm an agnostic and support gay rights generally, but I also support the BSA. Radical progressives are wrong to attack a very positive influence in the lives of boys. I mean, it's your right to criticize it on political grounds, by all means, but you earn my contempt by doing so. Neither I nor many others here are going to feel bad about supporting scouting. Sorry to keep the discussion off point, but I didn't want that going unanswered.

So a truism has been misused. Shame on those who did so. That doesn't make it any less a truism. I'm going to keep using it.

Why not? They will. They won't be girls and you shouldn't make them be like girls. By no means am I defending the bad behavior of those misbehaving scouts, who I would insist be punished. But this is a good time to remind folks that boys have particular requirements and have to be understood on their own terms. See this book if you have a boy--great book. Also this.

Oh, Portland. Lovely city. I went to Reed.

And that is how to handle it--set rules, punish violators. Not constant, smothering supervision. Some cursing and off-color jokes will still occur, but not as much, because the kids will know the rule is hanging over their head, and they'll fear being overheard or being tattled on.

So, you think it can be prevented, and that it can be prevented by always supervising teenagers. Good luck with that. I'm pretty sure nobody said that hate talk is acceptable. That's a different issue. Of course it's not acceptable. The way the term is usually used, "hate talk" is unacceptable by definition.

If you're referring to the "joke" mentioned in the OP, I think you mean "people." Whether that "can be really good" is, let's just say, a matter of debate (speculation, really, for me and probably everyone here).

Perhaps you could use a male perspective, eh? There is this sort of talk among unsupervised 13-year-olds, and probably has been from time immemorial. Not all 13-year-old boys curse behind their mothers' backs, but a lot of them do who would never let their mother catch them it using such language. Also, the fact that a 13-year-old boy uses "faggot" does not mean he's going to grow up to be an intolerant jerk. It's not nice and should be strongly discouraged, but it sort of goes with the territory. And then there are always some kids who love the shock value of sex jokes...this does not harm 13-year-old boys. Ever heard of locker room humor? Ma'am, if you're married to a Marine, he knows. Still, that particular "joke," however, sounds pretty extreme for 13 years old. But of course times have changed...not in all ways for the better...since I was 13... Anyway, all that being said, a good Scout troop has lots of supervision and the sorts of behavior you describe was definitely not standard behavior when I was growing up. There are lots of troops out there, unless you live in a rural area. It's not a bad idea to look into moving to another troop--maybe just try one out to see if its a better fit. You might have to drive him (I was able to walk to my troop meetings), or drive a little farther, but it could be better.