Shelsi
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Posts posted by Shelsi
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One of the reasons we started using WWE1 for my 3rd grade ds is because he had huge problems forming complete sentences in any of his writing. He's an avid reader and reads well above his level so I thought (wrongly) that he would have a good idea of what a sentence needs to be a complete sentence. It's not that we haven't worked on it in other ways. Last year he did k12 language arts independently and that worked on his writing along with proper grammar. None of it stuck though. He'd still hand me a "sentence" that was barely even a predicate let alone having a subject. The sentence wouldn't begin with a capital letter & there was seldom punctuation at the end.
Anyways for those reasons I absolutely request complete sentences in his answers to me. Since he is in 3rd grade and doing WWE1 we're doing 2 days of work each day. We're on week 7 in the workbook and I've already noticed a big change in his ability to form a sentence on paper for his other subjects. So for us, the "answer in a complete sentence" idea has been extremely beneficial.
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Until this post it never occurred to me that there weren't any tests. We don't do tests though for anything so that would probably be why. We're using BA as a supplement right now and MUS is our main math curriculum in which I always have ds do the review pages so he's constantly being reminded of things he's done in the past.
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This is an area where I wish SWB had done a video of her teaching narration from the younger years...
My kids are still young, but this is how I do narration with my kids:
Phase 1) I ask questions and then say, "In a complete sentence, tell me one thing you remember about this passage." I don't worry if it's not a major point; I just want a good response. My youngest is still here. Once I can get a response without feeling like I'm pulling teeth, I move onto to the next phase.
Phase 2) I ask the questions and then say, "In a complete sentence, what do you think was the most important thing that happened?" If I don't think the answer is sufficient, I ask leading questions. I'll ask about a few other events I think are more important, discussing and comparing why it's more important. I try to guide my child to the main point of the passage without saying, "Here it is!" Once the child can generally state the main idea, I move onto...
Phase 3) I ask questions and then I give a specific narration request. For example, "Name the three significant events in this passage and how they changed people's lives." In the beginning, it's a guided exercise. The child lists the three events; I write it down on a whiteboard. I ask, "For Event 1, what happened afterwards? Can't remember? Let's go to that part of the passage." The child reads the excerpt and then gives an answer in a complete sentence. Again, I ask, "What was the major change caused by Event 2? Read it again." Another complete sentence answer. And so on until the writing is done.
Phase 4) I ask for a summary without a specific prompt. I encourage the child to write down specific phrases or passages to help remember (i.e. take notes). Depending on the subject matter, I may help guide the response. My eldest can do this on occasion, but still drops back a level if the information is difficult to process. He is really resistant to taking notes. preferring to use his memory, which makes for a slow writing day.
When my eldest was 8, I wouldn't wait to ask the questions at the end. I would ask whenever I came to the point in the passage where the question could be answered, expecting a complete answer.
Can you just come over to my house and do writing with my ds? You sound like you have it so much more together than I do! Thanks! lol
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Yes, I constantly find myself doing this as an adult. I had never reaized until this post that its likely a result of all the bullying and excluding I had to deal with. If they really didn't like me, my friends wouldn't do this or that. I'm at the stage where I had good friends in my moms group but my kids are older, other kids are off to school and it's time I start devoting my energy into knowing the homeschooling community here as opposed to moms of toddlers. I find myself saying, well if they are really my friends then we will still get together but if we don't, do they not like me/my kids as much as they used to or is life just making everyone too busy?
Yes, I do this too. All the time. So many years of being excluded, of being barked at whenever I walked out of my house (my worst bullies unfortunately lived right across the street from me) or as I walked down the school halls. And worst of all, all the times someone would "befriend" me for a week or two and I would be the happiest most excited person ever just to find out that it had all been a joke and they were just extracting information from me to use against me later. Dh and I have been married 10 yrs - a very happy 10 yrs - and sometimes I still second-guess myself and wonder if he really likes me.
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We're going through WWE 1 with my 8 yr old as well but his issues are related to writing.
What do you do when he doesn't remember? Perhaps you could tell him what the questions are going to be and then read the passage? Some people have a really hard time internalizing something being read to them. That's actually how I am. If I read something I can tell you every single detail word for word right down to the page number it can be found on. Read that same thing to me out loud while I listen and I'll barely be able to tell you what it's about. However knowing what to listen for helps me focus.
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Thanks everyone for the thoughts & replies! I know I won't stop school completely because I know if we're not doing school than my kids will probably be in a hotel room with nothing to do and watching TV. We know the area somewhat, we were there for several weeks this past summer, so mostly our time initially will be spent trying to find a house and getting stuff moved in.
Anyone know if the Harry Potter audio books are any good? Ds and I have read the first two - maybe he and I could get the 3rd one as an audio CD to listen to in the car.
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It's funny, it never occurred to me until we were maybe a year or two into HSing but I have a feeling one of the reasons it was so easy for me to pull my oldest out of public school kindy was because of my own experiences with bullying.
It is one of my biggest fears that my children will be forced to endure the things I did. The viciousness of the kids in my class from 2nd grade all the way to my senior year of high school had a profound affect on who I turned out to be and not in a good way. To this day I still will get paranoid and wonder if perhaps my best friend of 15 years is just playing a cruel joke on me and isn't really my friend. I have a fear and distrust of people in general. I just could not stand if that happened to my kids.
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I'm basically going to throw our schedule out the window for a little while. We're moving in about 3 weeks. We've got 3 days of driving to get out there plus 2 days here when the movers will be here packing things up. So there's 5 days already where school will be mostly impossible. Then we'll be in temporary housing until we find a place which in theory won't take too long since we're going to rent instead of buy. Still I assume we'll have at least 2 weeks of upheaval. However during that time I'd still like to get some learning done.
Ideas? I'm wondering about things that ds and I can listen to in the car? In my car it's going to be me, ds (3rd grade, 8 yrs old), and our dog. My kindy 5 yr old dd will be with dh and I know dh won't be interested in listening to anything other than his own chosen music. I'm more concerned about keeping my 8 yr old "schooled" anyways.
I'm thinking once we arrive but have not yet settled I can have him do math (easy for him), his daily reading, WWE, and handwriting. I'd like to keep up with history but we follow BCP for history and always use library books for the topics and we won't be able to get a library card immediately upon arrival.
Any ideas or random thoughts would be much appreciated. We've made several large moves but the last one was 3 yrs ago just a few weeks before my oldest started kindy so schooling was not an issue yet at the time.
Oh and thoughts on what to do with my kindergartner? She does NOT deal well with change so part of me wants to just let school slide with her and we'll pick it up once we're settled but the other part feels like some structure and familiarity of her school-work might actually be beneficial for her.
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Just another "success" story: I had just turned 22 when dh and I met. 6 weeks later we were married & in February we'll have our 10 yr anniversary. Best 10 yrs of my life & best decision I ever made.
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Do cats leave a worse smell than dogs?
In my experience of going to friends' houses I would say that generally speaking, yes, cats smell worse. Most of the time I can tell right away that someone owns a cat however I'm often surprised when I'm at a friend's house and a dog comes running out. That being said I also have a friend who's dogs smell terrible even though I'm pretty sure she bathes them regularly. I don't know what it is but I can actually smell them when I'm still a few feet from the front door.
We have a dog...no one has ever told me my house smells like dog but then again I would never tell the friend mentioned above that her house smells like dog... We did not get any negative feedback about the smell of the house from showings though. Generally I'm baking & cooking every day though so I think overall my house smells like cookies & pie most of the time. I was really careful never to fry anything or cook fish indoors the entire time our house was on the market because that smell can really linger.
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I just thought of something and it's a bit strange but I've heard of it happening to others. I went GF because dd was still nursing when she was diagnosed with celiacs. The first few weeks I was miserable because I had typical celiac/gluten intolerance symptoms. I have no idea why esp when I hadn't had those issues previously. We were already on a really limited diet so I didn't really replace the gluten with anything except perhaps more fruit & veggies but nothing over the top. We were already corn and the top 8 free. Anyways it was pretty bad those first few weeks and then it tapered off.
Oh and gluten and dairy always make me bloated. I don't have celiacs but I am gluten intolerant. It gives me psoriasis so I stay 100% GF with dd and dh however when I do get glutened I also get bloated. We're not dairy free anymore but we used to be and I keep my dairy consumption really low because I noticed how bloated and icky feeling it makes me.
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What does a typical day look like for you in terms of foods you eat? I actually used to only have about 14 foods total I could eat for a few years and while I was bored, I was not hungry but I made sure to be really careful about a balance of protein and carbs so I think that's what made the difference.
There is a HUGE emotional and social connection to food. Once you go off a food there's almost something akin to a grieving process IMO. When my dh found out he had celiacs and had to be GF too (dd and I already were) he acted as if his best friend had just died. 3 years later and he still has random bouts of anger at not being able to buy the french bread from the bakery or get a McD's cheeseburger or eat grocery store cake. I'm a good cook/baker but he loved going out to eat - I always tell him I should just charge him $15 for a slice of cake and then he'd like it even more :D
ETA: dd, myself, and dh are all GF. My ds is the only gluten eater in the house but everything I cook/bake is GF so he's mostly GF as well and I don't get complaints of hunger except the usual kid growth spurts of course. Are you still eating some grains? Are you using a lot of the processed GF/DF foods to sub things?
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When we were looking to buy we immediately walked right back out of at least 10 houses that we could smell "cat" and 1 of them actually had their cat there following us around. Even if dh weren't insanely allergic it's a huge turn off for me. And if it matters, we were looking at upper-middle class houses that for the most part were all fairly clean and de-cluttered.
We just sold our house (today actually) and I cleaned like crazy before we put it on the market. We got a storage unit and put extra stuff there so all our shelves & rooms were de-cluttered. One of the kids' chores was to wipe down the base boards once a week & the inside of the windows which get really nasty around here with all the dust and wind. I washed windows a few times a week. We dusted everything from top to bottom. Scrubbed tubs, shower doors, washed the curtains, washed the windows screens (really made a big difference!), and generally just cleaned every single thing in the house that we could.
All that being said we had a terrible realtor. Really really awful and she would not less us out of our contract with her so we were stuck with her for 6 mos. There were 23 other houses up for sale on our street alone & it was insanely depressing to watch the endless parade of showings at the other houses that never came here. All those other houses sold under 100 days and most sold within 30-60 days. Once our contract was up with our realtor (6 mos) we switched to a new awesome one and she sold it on the first day - and she really did sell it as it was through her marketing that got us the showing. So long story short, in the end you can clean and stage and be so-called perfect but it doesn't matter at all if you have a terrible realtor. From my experience I can definitely say that having a great realtor is more important than anything else.
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Whenever we had a showing I would boil some water with cinnamon & nutmeg in it while I was going around straightening everything. Gave the house a nice scent, like I had just baked cinnamon rolls, without it smelling like I had tried to mask odors.
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We had 2 TVs but only 1 had cable. We could turn it on whenever we wanted however my dad could just sit down and change the channel to whatever he wanted and he did often.
My mom had the other TV in her bedroom and I remember we used to make nachos & cheese every Friday night and sit in her bed eating them and watching TGIF.
I think we watched a lot in the winter and not so much when the weather was nice. We had a lot of friends in the neighborhood and a ton of freedom. I remember riding my bike down the state highway at least once a week to the Dairy Queen at only 7-8 yrs old and my mom gave me the money for it. So we didn't really want to be inside watching TV. We were much happier exploring the woods, creek, riding our bikes to the gas station to buy soda, etc.
ETA: I'm in my early 30's. Our family right now only has 1 TV and we only watch about 1-2 hrs a day total. The kids usually watch about an hour and dh & I usually watch an hour in the evenings.
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Have you considered using coconut oil instead? That's what I use in my pie crusts. Personally I've never tasted a butter crust that I thought was good. Shortening and lard give the best most flaky crusts. I've actually used lard on occasion. I try to avoid shortening and do more "whole" food type things and usually don't have lard so I use the coconut oil and it comes out pretty good.
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For us, it turned out to just be "meh." In fact ds and I only did about a week of it and then switched to something else (and for anyone interested I think I still have it up for sale on the for sale board). Ds didn't like it and he already hates writing so much I had to find something else. We're actually doing WWE now (level 1, ds is in 3rd grade) and it's going much better for us.
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I'm a LOE beta kindy tester and she encourages non-writers to use magnetic letters to "write" words. It's very Spalding-like in that we're learning the phonograms and learning to spell all at the same time. My 5 yr old has above average fine motor skills so writing hasn't been an issue for her & the program is working really well however my 3rd grader definitely could not have done the writing at this age (or even in 1st or much of 2nd grade) and I'm confident the layout of LOE kindy would have worked really well for him except we would have used the magnetic letters to spell words.
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It's so hard to judge on whether or not it will be helpful for someone. What I can say is that my dd just finished lesson 38 and today she wrote, "yes, bump, stump" for her spelling words and got them all right without any assistance from me other than reminding her to segment the words first. So she's doing CVC words and blending.
When we started she knew most of the first sounds of the alphabet and was not reading at all. She just turned 5 at the end of July so she's a young kindergartner.
My 3rd grader, who reads just slightly above his grade-level, actually loves dd's curriculum. I was surprised but he's learned a lot by joining in on the phonemic awareness activities and he's now finally able to say the 2 sounds of /th/ whereas before it always came out as an /f/ sound and would therefore mess up his spelling. I'm actually scraping together the money to buy Essentials for him because of how helpful Foundations has been.
Both my kids LOVE the games and honestly so do I. Dd easily learned all the first 26 phonograms just from using the games. I can incorporate writing fairly easy as well when I feel she needs some extra practice (for example, today when they were playing phonogram memory I made the rule that they had to say the sounds & write the phonogram before they could claim the match).
My 3rd grader is using the LOE cursive handwriting program and for the first time ever he doesn't sob/cry/weep/go into hysterics when asked to practice handwriting or write a few answers for something. Not only that he's actually proud of his handwriting.
Dd is doing the cursive handwriting instruction through the beta K Foundations program and her handwriting is coming along really nicely as well.
I really don't have any complaints about the program so far and I plan to use Essentials next year for 1st grade with dd. The only slight issue for dd is that every lesson is a little bit different with different activities. She has a hard time with change of any kind but generally I would say the different activities are a huge plus for most kids and would have been with my 3rd grader.
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Bill,
I don't do their name scheme. The onety two was too much for me.
My middle daughter catches on quickly and I'm afraid I'm guilty of expecting my youngest to do the same. Patience is the key I guess. :)
I wasn't a fan either and never did the onety-two type stuff with my ds. However he's very mathy and picked up on stuff super quick. My kindy dd is having a much harder time and I finally went to using "onety-one" and "fivety-three" type naming and the light bulb totally went on for her. So while it's irritating I have to admit it definitely helps some kids.
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I have to find a gluten free, low calorie food (preferably one with chocolately goodness) to eat on Tues & Thurs. when they come to pick up the baby. I want to eat through the stress and that is not good for my diet or my health. I am so stressed and tense at the moment...I know the baby is DD's but not having any control or say in the situation is eating me alive.
(There is a brand new jar of Nutella in the pantry. Nutella is a low-cal, gf healthfood, right?)
I don't have any good advice, but I do have a recipe for a low-calorie chocolate GF "stress food" http://glutenfree100.blogspot.com/2012/04/dark-chocolate-angel-food-cupcakes-with.html They're chocolate angel food cupcakes (or you could just bake it in a regular angel food cake pan) with salted caramel glaze. 157 calories each is what I figured.
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So is the beta version a reduced price of $50?
I'm sure $50 is much cheaper than the finished product will be. You'll need to print off a bunch of stuff for the beta version though - you don't get any hard-copy things so all the pages need to be printed. The early beta testers that started back in August will get a free hard copy of the TM if they send in a certain number of feedback forms. The new beta testers that she just opened it up to will not receive the hard copy.
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I'm "new" at using cursive first since dd is in kindy this year but I plan on introducing manuscript in late 1st or early 2nd grade.
However she uses cursive in her "off" time as well. If she were trying to write manuscript everywhere but school then I'd prob introduce it sooner so that she had instruction on how to form the letters.
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Thanks - I think I might possibly order the workbook along with the TM but possibly not use it. Dd is doing the LOE kindy Foundations program right now and I know I'll have her use Essentials next year so if the workbook isn't needed for my 3rd grader then dd can use it next year.
Math U See Unit tests
in K-8 Curriculum Board
Posted
We just started this year because dh is concerned that ds won't know how to take tests - personally I don't agree but it's easy enough to just throw in a unit test here or there as a compromise.
Anyways we just do it as part of our regular math. Ds is a math whiz so that means about 5-10 minutes total to do 2 MUS worksheets. It takes him only slightly longer for the unit tests because I make him check over his work before turning it in.
OP, are you giving the tests so that your dc learn to take tests or is it to judge how well they know the concepts? If it's to learn to take tests then I'd set a time limit. If it's to see how much they know then I'd let them take however long as they want.