Myrtle
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Posts posted by Myrtle
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DD flew through 100EZ, doesn't really like Phonics Pathways, but is a great reader - comprehension and retention are just as good or better than her decoding. I am thinking of ordering some ETC workbooks for DD to use over the summer. She's already reading about 2.5-3 grade level (according to the AR Books reading levels). However, I think she needs some more drill, as she relies a lot on her sight vocabulary.
How many pages are these books (20?, 50?, 100?, more?)
Are the teacher's manuals necessary, or do the workbooks speak for themselves (for review/drill)?
I hear some people say their kids burn out after about book 4 or 5. For those who have experienced this, did you use all the exercises in each book?
Any other suggestions for me?
TIA!
About two pages per lesson has been about right. As the level increases so does the amount of work per page so it always is about two pages. There are about 180 worksheets in the books.
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I am still working out what to do with my ds this year. He is five and has completed up to about a third grade level all around the board with reading at a MUCH higher level. The question I have been pondering is not so much of what can he do as that answer would be A LOT and then some but what would be an appropriate course of studies for such a young child? How much school should I expect, how many and what subjects are appropriate? I have just simply read so many boards about parents pushing and then I have to wonder that even though I know ds might be capable of such and such and such what is actually appropriate for the age range in terms of length of school day, how many subjects, and what is and might not be appropriate subjects for him to study. I have to admit that even though i don't think I push him it is always good to check up and make sure I am not expecting anything unreasonable.
I would continue to encourage him to make progress in those areas in which he is advanced. However, I would also encourage him following interests which might divert his efforts away from his strong areas. For example, I have a child that is advanced in math. It seems well worth it for me to let him read World War II history books for days on end rather than continue making the same progress in math. He's already ahead so it's not like he is really going to "fall behind" because he's absorbed with something else and there is a lot to gain by having him read and learn topics that are his choice.
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I'm looking for a good book that will have brief descriptions of religions for younger children. I'm looking for something that will have plenty of pictures and will include basic information beyond "holy days and food."
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Anyone have any rave reviews of this? Is it worth the money?
Thanks!
Flashmaster has two features that I really like:
You can enter up to 15 of your own problems.
You can change where the "?" appears in the problem.
2 + 3 = ?
2 + ? = 5
5 - ? = 3
? - 2 = 3
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Anyone have any rave reviews of this? Is it worth the money?
Thanks!
Flashmaster has two features that I really like:
You can enter up to 15 of your own problems.
You can change where the "?" appears in the problem.
2 + 3 = ?
2 + ? = 5
5 - ? = 3
? - 2 = 3
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I would by another Flashmaster if ours broke. There's really nothing that can do better for learning math facts easily for both child and mom. DS knows his math facts down REALLY well. He has almost instant recall on all the facts he should know and this is only doing it for 6 minutes a day. I give "prizes" out for getting a certain amount right. Tickles, arm chills, etc. All free and non-sugary!
Beth
Mine did break and I didn't have to buy another one.
I had my credit card in hand to order another one over the phone and they said that my old one was still under warranty and sent me a new one out in the mail at no cost that day. Super service!
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My 6th grade dd is finishing up Singapore 6A and will get through a good chunk of 6B by the end of the year. Instead of moving into algebra for 7th grade, I'd like to give her a year of pre-algebra to cement all the concepts she's learned up to this point. (Side note: we tried algebra with her very mature older sister halfway through 7th grade and then tried again in 8th. I couldn't believe how much more quickly she grasped the concepts being several months older. I'd like to give my youngest dd that same opportunity for success.)
So...
What options do I have for pre-algebra? I'm looking for a curricula that explains the "why" behind the algorithm.
I've actually got Lial's BCM, but I'd like something that's geared more to my dd's age. I know Teaching Textbooks has a pre-algebra program, but we've used TT before, and I don't find it rigorous enough.
What else have you used for pre-algebra? What its strengths and weaknesses?
The first few chapters of NEM 1 are a continuation of arithmetic and she would learn negative numbers, order of operations, operations on hairy gigantic hairy fractions, LCM, GCM before algebra.
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my automatic response is to examine the statement from all sides and give any other possible interpretations that I have heard. This gets me the accusation of "trying to be right all the time." ?
My response to the person would be, "Don't you care about being right?"
Maybe they don't. Maybe they are bringing up the topic as an excuse to socialize, something like small talk, but they don't really care about being right about the issue.
Sometimes people blather on about some political or social issue to apply a subtle form of social dominance (you have no choice but nod your head and agree or it will create a scene)
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(disclaimer: this is coming from someone who is not well-versed in all the ins and outs of this 'stuff'.)
Kelli, when I think about these things with food, I really don't get too panicked. There is a whole lot of rural farmland out there sitting idle. Farmer's children have been parceling off and selling pieces of the land for decades now because there just wasn't the need for so many farms. The farming techniques had increased production so fewer farms were needed.
So, I see that there's a lot of room for us to bounce back. It might be a rocky few years (might!) but during that time, entrepenurial-minded Americans will be starting up farms and the supply will increase again.
That's just my big picture view.
Just think of entrepreneurial potential of this for homeschooling moms.
I can plow up my suburban backyard and plant corn and beans.
My grandmother had a large garden and it yielded a suprising amount of food, I remember spending forever shucking corn and beans when we harvested it and she needed a giant deep freeze to store it all. Something like that would really help keep the food budget to something reasonable.
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I messaged you. :-)
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Let's say you read on about a fifth grade level (the best you can tell anyway). What would you do to improve this? Is there a particular curriculum you would buy or a plan you would follow?
You might want to learn some history and science while you are doing this too or maybe it would be better to leave those as separate subjects. What do you think? Being you and all.
As an adult:
I would find a book with a topic that fascinates me. I would NOT choose one because I think I'm supposed to read it to be educated, say like Homer, but something that really would fire me up. I remember in the sixth grade reading Stoker's Dracula veeery sloowwly because of all the big words, as a teenager I was fascinated with the biographies of Helen Keller and Corrie Ten Boom. Later my passion was for theology, and now it's adventure, so I'd get a good book and a dictionary and I'd slowly make my way through the book.
If there is word that I had a problem pronouncing I'd use an online dictionary that has an audio opton.
When I taught myself Spanish, I did it with a dictionary and a copy of Puig's Kiss of the Spider Woman. In the beginning I understood almost nothing, but several months later I was understanding a whole lot. So I really think it can be done by being motivated by a good topic/story and having a dictionary on hand.
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Is anyone buying up some flour, cooking oil and rice now while it's still available? Or do you think this is not really a concern?
http://nysun.com/news/food-rationing-confronts-breadbasket-world
I haven't noticed any shortages at all here in Houston.
However, I will say that there is always panic grocery shopping whenever anyone suspects a hurricane is headed our way and while the shelves are empty of products for a few days afterward, the following days after that there more than enough food since all those folks that would normally buying groceries are still eating their stored food.
I guess if the prices go up too high and the shortage is real I'll turn my suburban back yard into a veggie garden and go into business.
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So, today I decide to give potty training a try with my almost 2 year old ds. He is running around the house peeing on everything except the potty chair!:glare::lol: Part of me knows this is funny, but the other part of me is already tired of following him around with a mop!
So do any of you any tricks to get a little one to actually try sitting on the potty chair? So far I have tired...
reading him a book,
sitting with him,
bribing him with chocolate,
showing him how his doll pees in the potty
Both his brother and sister learned how to use the potty about this age and he sems ready. My big problem right now is he is having way to much fun entertaining his big brother and sister by running around the room peeing in each corner! We have no rugs, just hardwood floors, but help!
any suggestions? TIA
Jenn
So he's standing and peeing, but you want him to sit and pee (in a potty chair)? If this is what it comes down to, I'd get a step stool and let him stand on that so he can pee in the big toilet.
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Normally I would wait, but some of dd's friends are getting together to do this class (DVD & book) and have invited her to join. They'll be in 7th & she'll be in 6th (about 11.5 yo), and they plan to spread the class over the school year, mixing in Know Why You Believe by Paul Little. She's smart, but isn't "logic-readiness" more of a developmental thing?
What do you think? :confused:
I did some mathematical logic with my fifth grader last year. I think he was ready for it because we used logic as a tool long before he formally studied it. I used Singapore bar diagrams as our problems, I tried to make it a point to use the language of logic when discussing the solutions.
Did the logic stick? He has spontaneously recalled that if he wants to prove a theorem he can use a proof by contradiction or prove the contrapositive and has demonstrated his skill in this, so I think he's making a lot of progress. He certainly didn't have any difficulty with the actual logic lessons that I wasn't able to overcome by simply moving slower and giving more examples than what would be required of a 14 year old.
I don't know how mature he is. He has a tested IQ of average and still plays with bionicles ;-)
I have looked at some of the informal logic books, there's not a lot of them, and whenever I thought that one was not "doable" it wasn't so much that the logic itself was too abstract, but that the problems were about more adult issues that my son doesn't appreciate at his age. And while I appreciate the fact that logic doesn't in theory depend on the actual propositional content, younger kids are bound to find it difficult to concentrate when the topic isn't something they are interested in.
I may postpone teaching informal logic until the 8th grade simply because of the nature of the topics in the books (I'm thinking specifically of Nance and not Traditional Logic, to be clear) more so than the abstractness of it, if that makes any sense. In other words, if someone published a book on informal logic in which the content was about Star Wars and bionicles rather than theology and political science I think he'd do just fine right now.
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Thanks Myrtle! :001_smile:I really appreciate your posts and the glimpses you share with us of your child's math schoolwork. It helps to keep us motivated.
:001_smile: Thanks. Without feedback it's never clear whether it's of interest or useful to anyone.
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No matter what they say at the local high school, it will NOT take her the 4-5 years of math leading up to calculus to learn how to use the calculator.
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Evidentally I have to spread some rep before I can rep you again.
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We didn't stick with NEM and went with an American math program. I have used bar diagrams to illustrate algebra word problems.
The bar diagrams allow the child to solve with arithmetic the kinds of problems that normally aren't solved until algebra. When my son hit algebra he already had three years of experience with setting up very multi-step word problems and it freed him up to focus on other things.
Just for fun, someone did a serious study which amounts to Your Brain On Bar Diagrams
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My son is just completing the 6th grade. He has been doing Saxon Algebra 1 this year. Neither of us are real thrilled with this program so I'm in need of a few good recommendations for next year. I need something that is strong in the math skills, but does not as my son puts it "Do the same problems every day with different numbers". Any suggestions would be welcome!!
Saxon has a peculiar and special approach to teaching math that no other program that I've seen has, which isn't to say that it's bad. Almost any other algebra program out there would teach it according to topic--NEM, Foerster, Dolciani, etc-- and your son would not be doing the same kind of problems every day.
If you are otherwise happy with Saxon but just want him to do something interesting and challenging you might try supplementing with Gelfand's Algebra.
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I want to try Earobics with my boys, who are ages 9 and almost 8. They are delayed academically, so I'm having a hard time deciding whether I should start with level 1 (ages 4-7) or level 2 (ages 7-10).
Ds 9 can read at a basic early kindergarten level. Ds7 is just beginning to remember sounds and letter names. I don't know if this has any bearing on the decision or not, but neither of them are super-savvy with the computer either.
Which level would you choose?
I have both levels and neither requires literacy.
I would choose the second version. There are a couple of activities in which lletters are presented the program teaches the letter sounds pretty much from the ground up and I think level 1 might be too easy.
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I picked up the book from the library and I like it a lot, however, I've been reading a lot of old posts about this book and the importance of choosing one from the 1960s or 1970s. This was during the time I went to school and it was my understanding that it was when "new math" came out that we starting having serious trouble with math in this country. I'm not trying to be confrontational here, just curious. Am I getting this all wrong? I was under the impression that we had much stronger math students coming out of the 50s and earlier than we did in the 70s and today.
I'd love feedback and discussion on this!
If you want references, they do exist, but it would take some effort on my part to go dig them back up. Basically what you would find was that there was a steady number of math majors in the US up until about 1974/76 and that since then the absolute number of math majors in the United States has not increased in the past 30 years. There is some speculation that number of foreign students studying math has increased from the 50's and 60s but the statistics don't distinguish between domestic and foreign degree earning students, from what I can find.
The fact that math majors have not increased at all while the student population has doubled is chilling.
New Math was started by a group of Ed Begel, who was a Yale mathematician. The group that he founded was receiving National Science Foundation funding in an effort for American math education to catch up to the Russians as a result of Sputnik. Despite the common assertions that there is some nostalgic golden age of math education, Ralph Raimi, a mathematician who is older than Methusula, lived through it all wrote a fair description of pre-1960s school math here. So, it seems that there was justification in wanting to make some improvements.
Begel's group was known as the SMSG and produced math texts that they put in the public domain. These were not made public until they had been thorougly tested with real classrooms by real teachers, were revised multiple times to reflect what was needed by the teachers, and everyone was super pleased with the result. Any textbook publishers could come in and "plagerize" as much SMSG material as they wished and it was hoped that this mannah from directly from mathematicians and making it easier on the publishers by donig their work for them would somehow straighten everyone out.
Instead, what happened was, textbook publishers wanted the appearance of New Math without being very careful to make sure the content was there. The textbooks were cheap knock offs. The people buying the textbooks for the schools didn't have the math background to know the difference, and while there were enough mathematicians to personally retrain high school teachers in special summer seminars, there weren't enough for the elementary school teachers. Later it was decided that the rigor (By that I mean mathematical rigor which is not the same thing as academic rigor) that was making the high school math wonderful was appropriate for children learning arithmetic as well. This is widely recognized as a mistake by everyone and we have Tom Lehrer to entertain us with his song commemorating this silliness. I will say that it's not completely clear if it's considered a mistake in theory or if in practice the teachers and publishers weren't emphasizing the right thing.
I recently acquired a book authored by Ed Begle, the man himself, called "The Mathematics of Elementary School" which was intended for the training of elementary school teachers. I wasn't impressed and found nothing I could use. It has a chapter on sets, and a very odd chapter on how to make flow charts of all things, and the rest of the book simply looks like the kind of solid math discussion you'd see in Saxon Math. Perhaps in the preface when Begle said he had carefully selected topics because he predicted these would be the future of math education he was spot on (minus the flow charts)!
Here is a post from a math teacher from a recent thread on another forum who was taught New Math and is discussing how set theory doesn't get developed but existed in every book:
Just to be clear - this is what I am complaining about, not about set theory in general, which would be silly, or even about it being taught in school. The "set theory" I was taught went nowhere, yet was Chapter 1 of every textbook from something like 7th grade to 11th grade, with identical content (and not much more than learning some notation, really). OK, got that, let's either expand on it, make connections, or drop it, anything but repeat it ad nauseum. This isn't about the concepts of set theory, which I assume permeates much of mathematics, but rather the notation and vocabulary learned in Chapter 1 that was not necessary for understanding the later content, as evidenced by the fact that the notation and vocabulary was never, or at least almost never, used again in the book.And so that was the problem with many of those New Math books, they box checked topics without really developing them. And we have that going on today in many math books as well, hence the phrase that the American math curriculum is a mile wide and an inch deep.
So, the question is, does Doliciani do this? I have reason to believe that those textbooks don't. A recent commenter to my blog said that he had corresponded with Ralph Raimi (who was no friend of the math book that we are actually using :D) and said that Raimi recommended the older Dolicianis to him.
Of course, here is another issue.
How do you teach it?
If the teachers in the 60s had to be given crash math classes in order to teach, would a parent without a math background or teacher's manual be able to do it? I don't know. It's not that you wouldn't technically understand the algebra, maybe it's that you would likely not appreciate some of the more subtle ways that it's presented, the steps in solutions are slightly different, the vocabulary might seem unnecessarily technical and so you wouldn't incorporate that into your speech, you might not know which theorems are important and which are trivial. The book that I'm using (which is not a Doliciani but is from that era) just doesn't put out flashing lights and dancing girls whenever it does something important. Sometimes it's in the problem set and it turns out it's a very important problem in math and I very nearly skipped over it because we only do the odds...that kind of thing. So one would need to be careful.
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I recently took one of my kids in to see our pediatrician because of some LDs and anxiety issues. I was surprised that my pediatrician was concerned so much with our socialization. She asked questions like, "Do you get invited to birthday parties?" "Do your friends call you up to get together?"
Luckily for us he is invited to birthday parties and gets together often with friends. He's only 9 and so it is just recently that he's started to have a social life. I told her all the activities we have - we are way over busy for homeschoolers - I admit that. So we met her standard of "good homeschooler."
Here we are in 2008 and I know that many people still don't understand homeschooling but I though my pediatrician would get it. One of her colleagues' in-laws homeschool. In my area homeschoolers are everywhere.
Now I'm concerned that I will meet a bias with the really great child psychologist we are scheduled to see. When I talked to him on the phone he was reticent about homeschooling until I told him of my kid's activities. Then he cheered up about it. I'm kind of resentful that I have to defend and prove myself when it comes to homeschooling.
I am going to call and ask the psychologist about his views on homeschooling and if he feels he can support us without any biases. I plan on doing this professionally and tactfully but I kind of resent that I have to do this at all.
Is it more common for psychologists and doctors to have biases against homeschooling than not?
I asked this question in advance of a speech therapist and she said she was very supportive of homeschooling. We paid her a lot of money to do an evaluation of our son and she wrote in the evaluation as part of her professional opinion that he should enroll in public school! In the end, that is what she focused on. We had more information about her opinion of his social situation than on the actual diagnosis and prognosis.
I have had at least two other physicians tell me up front, after being asked, that they don't discriminate against homeschoolers in any way and by the end of the appointment they start in with the accusatory and prying questions that had nothing to do with getting antibiotics, eyes checked or vaccinations....a third if I include my personal physician who asked me, "So, what do you do?"
"I homeschool my kids."
"This is not always a good idea you know...blah blah"
My guess is that they are explicitly trained in medical school to be accepting of other people's cultures and religious beliefs and they try to pay lip service to this. (Just think about how stupid you'd feel over the phone telling a future patient "No, actually I don't like Mormons, homeschoolers, or vegans, I suspect they starve/beat/mistreat their children" Of course almost everyone says they are tolerant, accepting and open minded, but it's hard to maintain that when it counts the most...when it's no longer about food, clothes, and music and becomes about ideology that they may perceive as criticizing the institutions that made them wildly successful.
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My almost 7 year old had expressive language disorder and articulation problems as a toddler. Currently the only sound he can't say is /r/, however, he softens the /L/ quite a bit and in general sounds babyish. My neighbor jokes that he sounds British.
Academically he is above great level in all subjects, except spelling and writing. He reads fluently both silently and aloud and for fun. He comprehends well both when I read to him and when he reads by himself. He is pleasant and well behaved most of the time. He follows directions well and gets along with others.
He has no hearing loss and no fluid in his ears. We have done several rounds of TLP and we regularly do auditory processing excersises.
I'm trying to do spelling with him by dictating words from "Phonics pathway" and providing immediate feedback. I've noticed that he has a hard time distinguishing b/d, r/w, and -ng endings.
My questions:
1. This method of teaching spelling worked very well with my other children, but I don't see it working as well with this child. What other method/program should I consider?
2. Most importantly, is there anything else I should be doing to help him with "hearing" the sounds corectly?
3. Is Earobics something that might be helpful? From what I can tell from the website, it is a reading program. I think he is well above a 3rd grade reading level.
Thanks for your time and ideas.
"Earobics" is software designed by speech pathologists to remediate the problem that you seem to be describing.
For example, there is an activity in which a word is repeated over and over again, when there is a slight change made to the word, the child is to click (it's all done in the form of a game though) so for example...you hear a voice that said bed, bed, bed, bed, bed, dead (CLICK!)
Another activity separates the sounds in the words and the child has to mentally put them together. In the begining the voice says the entire word "bed" and then when the child successfully clicks on the corresponding picture the voice says the sounds with a slight pause between each one..."b..e..d" until finally the pause is very great.
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Just wondering if anyone here has . I've been pouring over what to use for my Kindergartener here . She is almost done with her Kumon books .
Can anyone tell me if this is a spiral math program , or mastery ? I need something that is spiral . Its between Horizons K or CLE 1 at the moment . But I like the price of the Christian Liberty math program too . Ugh . choices !
I recommend Christian Liberty K as a very good way to learn basic addition and subtraction facts within 10 but in my opinion this book didn't expose the child to any mathematical thinking. (I've used Christian Liberty K with two kids to supplement another program)
You really could accomplish nearly the same thing with a set of flash cards.
You may want to consider a program that teaches various ways of thinking about subtraction, such as subtraction as the inverse of addition, subtraction as a "partition", conparison of sets, and also different properties of equality, use of manipulatives (abacus, counting blocks, etc), terminology used in math, measurement, geometry.
Being familiar with different views or models of addition and subtraction is what makes it easier to interpret word problems later on.
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Obviously someone or a group of someones in a school district thought this sounded like a really good idea. I wonder what their thinking was?
My guess is that it might have gone something like, "Math is about real life problems, not drill sheets" or "Algorithms don't teach mathematical thinking, this program does something different, therefore this program teaches mathematical thinking" or maybe they even believed that the program was teaching math "conceptually."
So I guess my question is for those whose kids were in this program, what were you being told by the teachers and district?
are my kids behind in math?
in General Education Discussion Board
Posted
Is your child behind because he isn't taking algebra in the 7th grade? Maybe on paper it might look that way to you but the real question is what math class will your child be prepared to take in college and what are the average SAT scores of this school? If the school can't back up their program by demonstrating superior SAT scores, passes in AP calculus, dual enrollment in community college math classes, or statistics on number of students who place out of "college" algebra later, then as far as I'm concerned their 7th grade algebra is for show.
In other words, it doesn't matter if they push algebra down to the 3rd grade if the kid has to repeat it as a college freshman because he didn't learn enough to place out of it. In the United States at least 80% of students entering college are NOT ready for Calculus.
Calculus is a college course. Algebra is not, that is why you don't see "AP college algebra." Even more shocking is to hear about kids who took three years of high school math (algebra II) and still end up back in elementary algebra in college. What did these kids do for four years of high school to only end up right back where a well prepared 8th grader would end up? (someone with a solid 8th grade arithmetic education would place into college algebra as well)
I'd rather have my kid take a rigorous algebra class in the tenth and eleventh grades (in other words late) and place out of that in college than have them take a course labeled algebra in the 7th grade and then retake it again in college.