I didn't expect that one could gain proficiency and literacy in a language with RS alone. It would surprise me if we could. But I don't think it follows that RS is "quite useless." It takes most people a long time to gain "proficiency and literacy" in a foreign language, and RS seems to be an unusually efficient and enjoyable way to get a solid basis of vocabulary and pronunciation, as well as some experience and feel for the grammar.

I appreciate all the feedback--it's just what I hoped for. I'm privately reviewing all of our methods. Inspired by a remark by Wendy here and another similar remark on BrillKids.com (or was it my blog?), I've mapped out a writing program. Basically, it goes like this. We pick a writing "type." This is something more narrowly-defined than rhetorical modes, and might include, for example, narration, character description, place description, mental (emotional/cognitive) description, dialogue, phenomenal description (e.g., of the surface of the Moon or of how the Moon changes), scientific explanation, list, and argument. Today we picked "historical narration" (this is my name for what my son asked for). So the first step is to read several texts of that type; then copy several examples over as many days (preceding each day's copying session by more readings of the type). I found four different passages, 1-3 paragraphs long, from Gombrich's excellent A Little History of the World, and let him pick one to copy. While reading the passages, I did my best to give a meta-explanation of what the text was accomplishing, as accessible as possible to my son. (BTW, my son declares that he is the best writer in Ohio. After finishing his assignment he asked me for a blank "book," i.e., printer paper folded over and stapled along the fold like a book, and he proceeded to write "A History of the World." The grammar and spelling of this was quite good, but it didn't hang together at all. Also, it lacked detail. :-) But I kept most of my criticism to myself and heartily encouraged it and he was proud of himself.) Anyway, after a few days of what my fellow homeschoolers call "copywork," I'm going to ask him to reproduce a "historical narrative" that I read to him, probably repeatedly and with various interspersed remarks about it, by memory. I figure we'll do some of those for a couple days. Finally, I'll have him pick a particular historical story from a few that I know he's very familiar with, and have him retell it without a particular source. Then the idea is that we go through a bunch of different narrowly-construed "writing types" and eventually, after a lot of practice, put them together into longer stories, essays, reports, and whatnot. How's that sound for a plan? P.E. daily--check. We used to do physical/sports play more regularly. I think we'll get back into that, you're absolutely right that that's necessary. Give my child more free time? Well, believe it or not, he gets quite a bit of free time. An hour before breakfast (but 15 minutes of that should be Latin), a couple more in late morning, 3-4 hours in the afternoon, and an hour or two after dinner. Basically, study time = mealtimes plus an hour or a little more in the morning, plus a little over an hour after lunch, plus another hour or so before bed. I don't think it's too excessive.

Thanks for the mention, Tracy. I'm the guy behind Reading Bear. So...not only is it a 100% free, non-profit, and charitable educational project, the project manager is a homeschooling dad (me!). So you can feel free to report bugs (you won't find many!), make small change requests, or even make big feature requests. I can't make guarantees, but we aims to please!

Well put! My son isn't an atlas/globe junkie the way your boys and I are, but I'm working on him. I agree 100% about finding good books on countries...thus the question here, and my blog post (which is far from being a definitive resource on the subject...I just haven't been able to find anything comparable by a real "expert" like a geography teacher).

Looks nice, but so expensive! And not on Netflix, apparently... :sad:

Wow, what a great bibliography! I'm all over that! You're surely right re what works with different kids...

They look nice! Thanks!

Your love of living books makes sense to me, and you're inspiring me to do some more reading of stories sourced from the places we read about. Don't get me wrong, I think it's a good idea to read engaging storybooks, fiction or nonfiction, that teach you about a place. After all, one can't go long without reading a wide variety of storybooks without noticing this. Also, I think you're probably right that she might not remember that parts of the world do not see the sun for a few months at a time, if she had read it in just one book, and the fact that she got it right away from reading just one book is perhaps an advantage. (It's not hard to admit that the project method has a similar advantage--you do a project that drills home some particular fact, and you're sure to remember it.) But non-fiction non-narrative books can contain more information, and especially if they are good books, and read along with other books on the same subject (as I explained in my last post), you're sure learn, understand, and retain more, period. Gee, do I have a "new" homeschooling method here--the "read lots of good books" method? :D

I don't doubt your sincerity, but if I believed that "projects" and "experiences" would cause retention of much important information about a subject, as opposed to memory of the project or experience, then I would be more excited about the project method. But I'm afraid I don't believe it, and you'd have to say more to persuade me, or point me to comparative research. We've done some projects (experiments, etc.), as has seemed appropriate to me, and I don't at all regret it. But I myself was subjected to endless projects in the 1970s and 80s when I was in school. One of the reasons I am not nearly as keen on the method as others are is that I remember thinking what a terrible waste of time it all was. I started homeschooling partly because I wanted to make sure my son wasn't subjected to what I regarded as pointless busywork. It might sound strange to hear projects called that, but really, that's how it seemed to me, as a child--so much so that I still remember my frustration. I remember spending hours making a replica of a chair in King Tut's tomb, to take just one example. I know that my son knows more about King Tut now, many months after we read quite a bit about ancient Egypt, than I ever did in the fifth grade. After another year, he'll forget more than I ever knew then, and still know a lot more than I learned. My son's understanding of certain topics is advanced for his age, for example in ancient history, transportation, and chemistry. This is mostly because we've read for hours and hours about each topic. We've done a number of chemistry experiments, but even in that case I'm not sure how much he's learned from them. Maybe more helpful in improving his understanding than the experiments have been the particularly clear explanations of abstract concepts that we've found in various books (and other nonfiction media--good videos and powerpoints can be really effective too). I think it's very important to use good books--so many of the books you'll find at the library are just plain badly designed and written. Reading only one or two books on a subject tends to be unproductive, I find. You really have to stick with it and read more widely, and then connections start falling into place and the reading becomes easier and more enjoyable. After we had read a half-dozen books about South America, my son picked out a book about the Incas, a topic we hadn't studied at all (because we weren't up to that point in history), from the library. He brought it home and read most of the book to himself during our reading time. Now we're continuing to read books about South America and we both seem to enjoy it, most days anyway. He's all on board. If I didn't think he would retain the information gleaned this way from in-depth reading about geography (and history and other subjects), then, well--we wouldn't be doing it. As it is, I'm sure he can tell you plenty about South America, not just locations and capitals of countries, but things like the largest city of Ecuador (not Quito), the Quechua language, the three main regions of the west coast countries like Ecuador and Peru, the "Altiplano" of Bolivia, Lake Titicaca and who lives there, the three species of animals related to the camel that live in the Andes, what Machu Picchu was for, etc. He couldn't have learned all this stuff from projects, only by spending hours reading (or having read to him) a bunch of books and getting sincerely interested in the subject. Sorry, I don't mean this as an attack, you just happened to pick on something that I've thought a lot about. :001_smile: Totally--we have an 18" floor globe and many atlases. We just bought the Times Comprehensive Atlas, reportedly the best and most expensive on the market... Finding the country we're studying is easy. He is very familiar with country locations already. He has been able to identify lots and lots of countries, like India, Iceland, and Venezuela, when he was two (I've got him on video!), because we have been looking at maps since he was one. His papa likes geography. :tongue_smilie:

What's to dislike about Rosetta Stone? My son is learning more Latin than I would possibly expect him to learn in any other program...and he's having more fun and experiencing less resistance. For the record, I too completely agree about remaining flexible. I give him lots of choices and constantly monitor what we're doing so that he's as happy as possible. He resists some things, some days, but not too much. He's enjoying a one-week break this week and he told me before bed today that (more or less) he thinks he'll come back to studying on Monday with enthusiasm. As long as I don't push it...which I rarely do, I hope...he enjoys pretty much everything.

Barbara, thanks for what sounds like good advice. I'm not really in the local homeschooling community yet...I haven't felt like I've had enough time...

He's no doubt ready for some sort of grammar, but...why? Won't he learn more if he spends his "language arts" time writing and being corrected by me? :bigear:

There's a thread going about this and here is my reply in it: http://www.welltrainedmind.com/forums/showpost.php?p=3353898&postcount=7 Basically, we love Rosetta Stone. I've studied five foreign languages and tried to learn in almost every way you can imagine (including total face-to-face immersion). I don't think RS will make you anything like fluent, and it won't teach you the mechanics of grammar, but it will give you an enjoyable introduction to the language. That's been my/our experience using both RS Russian and Latin. We plan to pick up a more traditional text after a year or two using RS. I expect my son will be more mature (he's only 5 now) and primed to understand and tolerate the other sort of approach then, and he'll benefit by already knowing a lot of the language. We're not speaking much Latin around the house, but we do a little. That's as much "living language" we're used to. We have enough of a second language in our bilingual household as it is--adding too much of a third would seem like overkill.

Tracy--well, for us, it's so far, so good on the non-fiction geography books. We don't read very much per day (4 pages, sometimes more), but we try to read every day. A good non-fiction book can be "living," can't it? I'm somewhat familiar with the term, so I don't know how it is used. Suffice it to say that the National Geo and True Books are often very engaging and well-written. We've read a number of books that take place in foreign settings, and which introduce those settings. No offense, but I just don't see how those, in any combination, could substitute for a few good non-fiction books.

My five-year-old and I are halfway through Latin Level 1. It's pretty gentle and engaging. I really like Rosetta Stone. It's improved considerably since I bought RS Russian back in something like 2005 (?). I doubt there is any other way that I could be introducing Latin, at least not as effectively and given my time constraints. I think we'll get all the way through, but we're taking it easy and I don't absolutely insist on it every day--trying to keep it as fun as possible. RS doesn't teach grammar very well, certainly not for languages like Russian and Latin, but they introduce a lot and I expect they'll make it a lot easier to learn the languages more systematically later on.

quark, thanks for your kind words. Just make sure to keep your son away from all the porn on Wikipedia...unfortunately, I'm not kidding. It's always great to meet people who aren't freaked out by early reading. :-) Thanks for the tip re livingmath.net. Checking it out!

Fantastic! I just ordered eight, for $33 with shipping. Beats Amazon!

All, I'm new to this forum and semi-new to homeschooling. I've been teaching my son since before he was 1, and he's now 5, and we're "officially" homeschooling now, I figure, since most kids born when he was are in kindergarten. I've read a number of homeschooling books and thought and written (mostly for myself, but also on my blog) about education goals and methods. But I know I don't have all the answers and I thought it'd be fun to seek out your input on what we're doing! I think we're taking a roughly classical education approach. I guess I'm more in line with The Well-Trained Mind than any other of the books I've read, with a healthy dose of "real books"--we have five bookcases full of children's books, and I've read about 80-90% of these to my son over the last five years. I work at home and homeschooling I view as a (very intense) hobby, so I can actually be the main homeschooling parent. My wife helps, of course, and she is home as well. An ideal (if not typical) homeschooling day would involve my son doing Rosetta Stone Latin for 10-15 minutes before breakfast, then I read to him from a rotating stock of 6-7 books during breakfast. After breakfast I give him a "micro-lesson" on piano and then we spend anywhere from 15 to 45 minutes on math, and anywhere from 15 to 45 minutes on writing. After that, we often stop with the planned-out homeschooling and I go up to work, but sometimes he goes on to do drawing or typing. Lunch has more reading, another micro-lesson on piano, then something like 2-6 pages of geography reading, then he reads by himself for an hour, though sometimes this stretches into more than that. (I started teaching him to read when he was 22 months and is now reading at a very advanced level.) Dinnertime is more reading, another piano micro-lesson. Then before bed we read 2-4 pages of history (using SOTW as a background--we're now on volume 2) and then, usually, a chapter book for about 30 minutes. At the YMCA we do a sports class and an art class, and we also do a chess class. Here's how we approach the main subjects. Math: we're almost done with Singapore Math 1A. At the same time, we're mostly done with Two Plus Two Is Not Five (highly recommended), and every other week we do some of Life of Fred: Apples (not so excited about this--it's fine). We switch back and forth, day by day, between Singapore Math and 2+2=/=5. He likes math pretty well (didn't used to, but he does now), and has mastered most addition and subtraction facts. There are some things in SM 1A that are outside his comfort zone, but I'm trying to give him mastery and not just "get through the books." This is why we're doing 2+2=/=5. There's no race, the main thing is that I want him to have the stuff down cold, ultimately being able to do mental arithmetic and having a very solid foundation for higher math. Reading: well, we don't practice reading per se, because he is decoding words at a very advanced level and comprehending books somewhere around the 6-7th grade level. To give you an example, lately he read Henry and Ribsy (grade level equiv = 5.1) to himself, which was fun and not very challenging. He also read Harry Potter #2, which was a little more so. He re-reads SOTW and other history books during his hour of reading time. I give him comprehension questions (orally) and he usually gets them quite well--on factual material he often surprises me with what he remembers and understands. Beyond that, however, we don't do any special "reading comprehension" stuff, and I frankly I am wondering if that sort of Language Arts exercise isn't basically a waste of time if a child is reading a lot. We also aren't doing any significant amount of grammar, although we read a Basher book about punctuation which he greatly enjoyed and sometimes browses, and we'll read the one about grammar pretty soon here. Basically, I'm in the camp which believes that grammar is a subject that you can study once or twice in your academic career, but when you do you use a real grammar book and take a hard-nosed approach to it. Otherwise, you learn your grammar through daily writing and critique thereof, as well as copious reading of good models of writing. Writing: he's writing upper- and lowercase pretty well now. I assign him three sentences (minimum) a day, sometimes I say five or more. Sometimes I say "about anything," sometimes we "negotiate" a topic. Sometimes I hover over him and correct him as he writes, but more often lately he writes by himself, he shows me, I give him things to correct, and he erases and rewrites bits. I'm interested in looking into a writing program, but frankly I don't think either he or I have the patience or discipline to stick to somebody else's idea of good writing exercises. Sometimes he wants to write a "book": this involves me taking 2-3 pages of printer paper, folding them over, and stapling them across the "spine." He then gives it a title and writes something (1-2 sentences) on some of the pages, and also illustrates it. Sometimes he retells a story we've read. Sometimes I give him a rough outline to follow. Basically, this is the part of homeschooling that feels most "by the seat of our pants," but I do think we're making good progress. His spelling is excellent and effortless, I'm happy to say--not to say he doesn't make quite a few mistakes, but I never had to teach him any basics, because he has seen so much written language. He gets enough spelling practice from the words he picks himself in his compositions (that's what we call them) that I don't yet see a need to teach him spelling as a separate subject. History: we're reading four books concurrently: SOTW, which we love; Usborne's history encyclopedia; Gombrich, A Little History of the World; and The Kingfisher Atlas of World History. We also read a lot of other, shorter history books (during mealtime, mostly) and complementary literature selections. We've gone through ancient history in this fashion and started medieval history a couple months ago. We don't do any worksheets or history projects, which seem like a total waste of time to me (sorry! I gotta be me!), although we did go through the SOTW quizbook orally "for fun" during mealtimes. He has really liked history, although literally in just the last three days he's been suddenly cool on the before-bed history, so maybe we'll take a break. We do that a lot...take breaks when he's getting tired of something...but he always comes back with renewed motivation. Geography: see my post on this. Science: we used to do a lot more experiments, and I guess we still do at least a couple a month, on average--I believe we'll get more into that, soonish. We've read hundreds of science picture books and a few dozen longer ones. In the last year have gotten into some more advanced stuff, beyond the "Let's Read and Find Out" level (though we really loved those books). We read the Basher book about the Periodic Table, for example, and are now going through Physics--he likes these. I might do as much explanation of concepts as actual reading. We've also read a couple "100 Facts On" books, which is a nice series actually. Frankly I have no idea how much he's absorbing, and at this point, I don't really care if he can't articulate what's he's learning so much. I do sometimes ask him comprehension questions as we read, and I'm satisfied that he's absorbing a significant amount, enough to make it worth our while. Basically, I view the reading we're doing now as getting some basic and I hope reasonably interesting exposure to concepts, so that when he's older, he can really sink his teeth into more systematic, less childish introductions to the subjects. I'm comfortable with our exploring science topics more or less at random. Latin: we're going through Rosetta Stone Latin. He's halfway through Level 1. I could go on but this is already too long. I'd love input or suggestions on any of the above!

Hello all--I'm new to this forum. My older son is 5 and I've been teaching him since before he was one (reading to him). I think I'll talk more about what we're doing in a separate post. But I wanted to pick your brains about something recently interesting to me... My son and I have started the ambitious aim of reading at least one book about each of the 100 most populous or important countries in the world. (The more important ones, we'll read two or more books about.) So far we've read books about Peru, Columbia, Bolivia, and (almost finished) Ecuador. We've read quite a few more geography books than these, but these are the first in our big reading project. If you're interested, I wrote a blog post reviewing various geography book series. So I guess I have a couple of questions: first, what's your favorite geography book series? I'm partial to True Books and the National Geographic "Countries of the World." Second, has anyone done the sort of thing we're doing, reading a bunch of books about a bunch of different countries? Any tips? Now I'm going to say a little something provocative in order to spark a discussion. :rolleyes: I am a bit of a book "snob," see. I know that people like to learn about geography by doing projects, worksheets, filling in maps, and stuff like that, but honestly, I don't see how you can beat the sheer knowledgy goodness gained by studying in a whole book on a country--especially if it's not a short book (the True Books are a little on the short side, but we'll use longer ones for more important countries). Sure, we have done some maps (he's traced a South America map and a map of Columbia, for example), and that's useful. We've also looked at some videos and pix online, used Google Earth, and some other tools. But 80% of our daily geography time (average, about 15-20 minutes) is spent on reading these books. I think this is a great way to learn geography. I'm open for debate! :D