2_girls_mommy
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Posts posted by 2_girls_mommy
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The title says it all. We are doing chp. 12 SOTW vol. 2 this morning, and I was planning on having dd do the advanced map work. But I am confused. It has her color the buildings, and then the instructions say to find the cities on the map and glue the buildings on. But the map only has a very small country of Spain w/no cities marked on it. Did anybody else run into this? How did you resolve it? I am wondering if I should find a blackline map of Spain somewhere else for her, but maybe I am missing something?
Help! (If you think this is just a mistake in the book, do you have a quick link to a map of Spain for me??) Thanks!
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I have a 7 yr old that is very good at drawing (in my very biased opinion as her mommy:)) and it is nothing like that. I think those are amazing!
I would enroll him in the classes if it is within your means.
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I just looked at it to try to help w/the brand name, but it is from the Dollar tree. It doesn't have one!! It just says TIMER on it.
It has a a clip w/a magnet on the back, and on the front it has only 3 buttons: Min, Sec, and Start/stop. Under the Min and Sec buttons it says RESET, and under the Start/Stop button it says MEMORY. This one has a black oval around the timer display and the word, TIMER. My other one has a red oval, but it is otherwise exactly the same. HTH!
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I bought mine at the Dollar Tree, so I don't know if it qualifies as good, but it is the same one I started w/3 yrs ago, and it has been dropped many times, and still works. It also doubles as the "time out" timer, so it has had plenty of use over the years :0 I have a second one on hand in case one breaks, so that I don't ever go w/out one, but so far, so good. You can't beat the price either.
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I have a Ker and a 2nd grader here too. We started SOTW 1 last year w/both of them in the Ancients (ages 6 and 4 at the time) and have moved into vol. 2 Middle ages this year with both of them.
For Science we do it the WTM way also. Basically, we do school at the 2nd grader's level, and the younger follows along at her level.
I do not require narrations from the youner until 1st grade, so she listens in, colors pictures, does experiments with us, and answers comprehension questions orally. I don't require narrations, but occasionally I will take one from her. She dictates it to me, I write it down.
I also pick up books at a lower level on the subjects to read to her, more basic ones at a K level. I also have basic K workbooks on hand (from Rod and Staff, and just a Walmart one) that cover K level S.S. topics that we do pages from during her written work time too.
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yes, I would. My kids only take 1 hr of directed P.E. a week. The rest is playtime and activities like you are describing. A healthy lifestyle is the goal IMO, and a daily walk is a good habit to have.
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Well Trained Mind, the book, is my favorite:001_smile: But for individual subjects, we have loved just about everything from Rod and Staff. We have used from the ABC preschool workbooks up to the phonics 1&2nd grades, the English 2nd grade, and 1st-3rd in the maths so far. We also use their music and I have supplemented w/chapters from the 2nd grade Science. I also did the 1st grade reading w/my Odd, and we enjoyed that time together. I felt the Old Testament stories fit right into our year in the ancients w/SOTW.
Also Story of the World vols. 1& 2 so far. So for us, Rod and Staff and Story of the World are the core of our curriculum (besides the Well Trained Mind book...)
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I research for the next year ongoing. That way I can have a list of what I am wanting to use, and I constantly watch for sales or used books whenever possible. Buying something here or there, $20 or $30 dollars at a time (or even $2-$6 at a time) makes it just come out of our monthly spending/grocery/house budget money. If I spend $30 one mo. then I will just have $30 less in gas $. (Sometimes this is pushing it, but in the long run it works out.)
Then twice a year, I sell outgrown clothes, books, toys, etc. in a consignment sale. I use the checks to buy whatever new itmes the girls need like roller skates or Easter dresses or whatever, and the rest goes to school supplies/books.
Usually, the one big chunk comes out of our tax refund for whatever I haven't been able to gather throughout the previos year, then the consignment sale $ helps for last minute or smaller purchases.
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We move into R&S 1st grade math for K here. My current 5 yr old is actually still working on the ABC workbooks alongside the 1st grade math, but she finished the counting one last year during preK. We just use the R&S math a year ahead.
I did it this way for my ODD, who is now 7, in 2nd grade, and she uses the 3rd grade math. She should be able to continue just fine. If at some point, my current child gets hung up, or it moves too fast, we can slow down w/the math to try something else if need be.
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We do 4 day weeks (Friday is co-op, so it technically counts, but 4 days of my curric..)
We start our years the first week of August, and we go until the end of May. We do not take many breaks throughout this time though. We may take a day or two off here or there, but we do not take any week breaks for fall or spring or winter. We usually take a couple days off getting ready for Christmas. Then we start back up a day or two after, depending on which day it falls on. We work on New Year's Day even as dh is at work, so it is a normal day for us. Working during the winter break like that actually helps us get a lot done, because all of our activities are on break at that time. During the rest of the year, we take a day here or there, if something comes up, but not often. Doing school this way, means we get a long summer break.. this past summer we had 8 weeks. This is important to my dd, who likes to have the summer off because her friends from church and the neighborhood do.
We actually continue working through the summer just on different stuff. This past summer, each child got to pick a "fun" workbook from the bookstore and that was their work a couple of days a week. For reading over the summer, we do library summer reading programs. We also continued a science unit and Story of the World one day a week over the summer too. But we finish our math workbooks and regular L.A. stuff in the Aug. through end of May/beginning of June, so that my dd feels like she has a school year like everyone else. :)
Technically, if you count our school days, we go way beyond the 180 days in our year, but I want to finish our curric too. So this works for dd's and my needs. Since we take field trips and play dates often (and still manage to do schoolwork most of those days) we do not feel "burned out."
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I didn't answer because we have just started it. But my dds are doing Kinderbach in their co-op. I can't say how far the lessons go, or how much they will learn, because I have never even seen the program, besides sitting in on the lessons in the class w/them.
But, for a 5 yr old I think it is complete and fine. It does the lessons completely on the DVD. I can follow and help the teacher fine, and I have never even seen the teacher's manual (if there is one??) That is my only experience, and we are on about lesson 4 now I think. So it is not much. :) But my girls like it so far.
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My dd the Greek News too. I would definitely say a good book of Roman myths and Aesop's fables. I also 2nd the Librarian that Measured the Earth. It is fascinating. Another good one was The Ancient Israelites and their Neighbors. It had a lot of good activities.
There was a good series of readers of biographies of famous ancient people too. I can't remember the names, but some were listed in the A.G. for SOTW 1. There was one for Alexander the Great, one for Cleopatra and others that my dd read. They gave more info than the chapters in SOTW which she liked.
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We liked the From Seed to Pumpkin books. There is also From Seed to Sunflower, Apple Tree and maybe more if I remember correctly.
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This one is not hilarious, but something funny my dd7 said the other day went like this:
We were on a field trip to a local history museum. They were having a "homeschool day," so everyone there that day was a homeschool family. They handed out a scavenger hunt to each family to answer questions from the musuem.
One room of the museum was set up as a one room school house, complete with old fashioned desks. The question for the room said, "How are these desks different from the school desks you use?" My dd answered, "Well, it is a desk, not a kitchen table."
Cracked me up!!
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Yes, that is what I was trying to say, but didn't type well. I meant it is probably ok to put off the print, and go with cursive. I was thinking of the way that my grandfather learned to print.. when he needed to, on the job. If you didn't want to just put it off indefinitely, you could go w/cursive for now, and pick printing back up at some later time.
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I am probably no help, but your post reminded me of something my grandfather told me. He said that he didn't learn to print until he was an adult at work. Before that, in school, he was taught cursive from the beginning. Maybe it is ok to put if off for a while if he is having problems.
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I know what you mean about the handwriting. Truly. I always look at other kids' whenever I get the chance to compare:001_smile: I have a very bright 7 yr old who never cared too much about her handwriting. She was an early reader/writer, and I never used a program to teach her, because she was writing well before school age. When I began to see issues with a particular letter, I had her practice it. I gave copywork or the occasional store workbook for practice writing daily, and would point out the issue. Eventually she would begin to improve the problem.
I never see a big jump in improvement until for some reason something meaningful to her occurs. I bought her first handwriting program this year, to get her ready for cursive. She had a lesson in it one day to correct the mistakes on the page they had written. She loved it!! She now double checks her work, and also loves to look at my papers to correct issues with spacing or letter formation that I have! Her writing is just gorgeous all of a sudden.
I would have never known this is what would motivate her. So the only thing you can do is keep at it!
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Rod and Staff. We have always used them for English and math and love it. I do not use the spelling. She does a spelling list of words that she misspells and of vocabulary words. Their 2nd grade list was too easy and the 3rd was in cursive, which she doesn't read yet. We don't use their "reading" either. We follow WTM for reading (lists from SOTW and narration.) We did use their reading for 1st grade and liked it though.
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Yes, the notebooks are binders. I do them pretty much as laid out in WTM, w/the exception that I do a history notebook a year instead of a giant one for 4 years. Last year for first grade history (ancients) I used a 1 in. and it was not big enough. I think a 1.5 would be perfect. For science 1 in. is fine too. L.A. w/all of it's tabs should probably be 1.5 or 2in. also, depending on how much work is going to stay in your workbooks, and how much is on paper to be filed in your notebook.. Last year dd worked in all workbooks, and had little to file for L.A., so 1 in. was fine. We used it for her spelling tests, examples of extra writing, and a reading list. This year she is using Rod and Staff English, and writes to a separate paper every day, so the book is filling up quickly.
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I am loving that my now 2nd grader can do a few things independently. I start the day by looking over her phonics and English and handwriting w/her briefly. Then she sits to do those while I work w/her little sis for K. At this point, in 2nd, we can go over just about any lesson, and then I can turn her loose to finish it.
We may spend close to an hour going over SOTW together (book, questions, me writing down her narration, coloring sheet or map..) and then I can leave her to do the copying of her narration in her own writing while I do other things. It just seems this year, there has been a big jump to more independent work that is good work! I hope you experience the same as your youngers move up! In the meantime, it sounds like things are going fine.
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We are only in R&S 3, but this year for the first time, I am having dd only do odds or evens on the problems page, then she does all of them on the 2nd page which is money or word problems just because there are not many on that page. My dd does well on math though. If she were having a problem grasping something, we might do more problems.
We do not skip any lessons though. We do math on avg. 4 days a week. (Fridays this year are co-op days.) There are some weeks when we have a field trip one day, and we only end up doing 3 days, and then there are weeks with no co-op where we do 5 days. We just pick up with the next lesson the next day that we do school. Our school years are longer because we have always done school this way. We start the first week of Aug. and usually finish the last day of May with math. I will say I have found in the past 2 yrs of R&S math that the last 10 lessons are complete drill and review, so if we do not finish the book completely I am ok with that. (although we have only not done one or two lessons, never all 10..) just because we are ready for a summer break by then.
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No, I had had a rough day of school w/both one day. That night during bedtime reading, dd5 was having a good time w/the nursery rhymes. Something hit me that night that we needed a break, and I told her right then to pick one that she wanted to learn the next day. She chose the kittens. We have C.D.s of nursery rhymes, so we had one to listen to for fun. Then I taught her how to draw them using shapes. By her 3rd kitten she was pretty good! Then we cut little mittens out of construction paper and decorated them. I had her recite the poem to me and wrote it down on the sheet under her kittens and it made a nice notebook page. Right now, I have a fall craft on hold for the next time we need one!
BTW, my Ker can drag math out like that too! Sometimes we do half of the workbook page, put it up, and do the rest later.
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We did SOTW1 last year, and are doing 2 now. We did not try to do an activity w/each chapter by any means. I would just get too behind feeling if I did. I learned by the end of the year, to pick the easier ones, so that we could do one most weeks and to do one big one once in awhile that appealed to us. I also learned to feel no pressure to finish it in the week that we are working on that chapter. We may work on something big over a period of time (like for an hour every friday) and finish it 3 weeks later while we are on another chapter. But the relevance was still there, and we still discussed the topic as we worked and read other books to go with it.
So last year ones that we enjoyed: We started the year w/the family history book and the archeological dig in the sandbox. Huge hits!
We made Sumerian clay seals as our signatures. We did cuneiform in clay, and hieroglyphics on homemade scrolls. We made a ziggurat that we had displayed all year. It was very cool! We did lots of ones that were out of paper and therefore "easy" in my book: Things like a Roman crown of leaves, a book for the first library, paper dolls, etc. We made homemade Greek stickers using gelatin for the sticky stuff. We made a volcano and erupted it. Our last big project was the model of a Roman road showing the layers out of homemade sand cement. They were very proud of that!
This year in vol. 2 we have done the paper dolls, illuminations like monks in the middle ages (Using gold paint pens!), a mosaic, and the edible oasis. I am planning on making a loom to do weaving w/them. I like the fact that the projects are some of the things I remember doing in Art class as a kid, so I know we are covering tons of ground.
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Yes, you are doing the most important stuff. But the other stuff is important too, IMO. Here is my suggestion: Maybe take a day off from your regular L.A. work once in awhile to do a nursery rhyme and related craft or something. I do this once in awhile when we all need a break. Last month we learned the rhyme, "The Three Little Kittens" and learned how to draw kittens, and made mittens and glued them on the drawings. Its was a morning well spent for all of us.
Also, if you are wanting to add in science or S.S. stuff, you could do it later in the day. AFter a long period of school like that, I am sure the child feels done and needs a break. But maybe after lunch and playing, later in the afternoon he would be ready to hear a good book on a science topic, or to go on a nature walk, or to do an educational activity or an art project of some sort.
I work w/my Ker in the morning first, while my 2nd grader does independent work. Then Ker has lots of playtime while I work w/my 2nd grader. Then it is lunch time and they get a short time to play together. By then I do a project w/both of them in the afternoon (either history or science or art or whatever.) By then my Ker has had lots of free time and can participate and focus for a little bit again. Last night they did a reenactment of Sinbad as a puppet show for us at bedtime. It was tons of fun and part of our school, even if it was hours after we had finished all "schoolwork."
Need Help w/SOTW vol. 2 chp. 12 Map
in K-8 Curriculum Board
Posted
Nobody else had this problem???