We bought MWB geometry and the Chakerian book for this year. I'm sorry to say that we are underwhelmed. The book is so-so for my math-liking, good-attitude kid. The MWB component we dropped very fast. His intros to the chapters are nearly nonexistent, his additions on Geogebra and the "extensions" make the course take too long for one school year, and a lot of the answers in the book and on his pdfs are useless. (A common "answer" for a construction is, "Do it," for example.). A short way in, we realized a tutor was necessary....someone who can correct proofs. The book makes huge logical jumps. In the chapter she was doing last week, she was taught to find the area of a triangle (uhhhhh....she did that in 4th grade), and then the review section of this crazy easy chapter hurled all these gnarly proofs at her that required 1 1/2 hr of teaching from her tutor. And through it all, the MWB materials were useless. The only helpful thing is he gives answers to the reviews, which aren't in the book, but he gives them only in video, where you have to watch him work the whole thing to find out if you even got it wrong. PDF, please?! I also feel like the computational, non-proof side is neglected. I would like to see the book give her more complex volume/area/surface area kinds of problems. Wish I could give a better review, but that's our experiece. We don't much like Chakerian, and MWB is nearly useless. Next year we plan to use Foerster for Alg 2, and we will not be buying MWB.

Thank you, thank you, everyone! This is such a relief. It sounds like for certain kids, this can be a good option, at least for next year, as long as I watch for areas that may need supplemental explanations. Yet again the lesson is repeated: no curriculum is perfect for all kids, and many are good for some kids.

In the recent thread "Which Calculus books have good explanations?", two people had significant criticism of Foerster's post-Algebra 1 math books. I find this devastating: my daughter had the best year ever using Foerster's Alg 1 text, so I had assumed we would just cruise through the rest of them until she graduates. (This year, 9th grade, she's taking a break to do geometry.) I was starting to think about getting a jump on ordering his Alg 2/trig so I could start refreshing myself. Now I am wondering if I should throw our plans up in the air again. Can anyone else weigh in with what you thought of any of his post-Alg 1 texts? And, I suppose I should ask at the same time, what other texts have worked well for you post-Alg 1? This is for a kid who is not afraid of math and does fine with it (though it's not a passion or anything), and who prefers to self-study from a text, not video.

I can't wait to come back and read this thread when I have time, but for now I just want to say, CA, that yours might be my all-time favorite subject line that I've seen for any thread on any of the WTM forums, ever! :001_smile:

Sounds great! Thanks. I will get this from our library.

Thanks! I'm going to look up Mother Tongue. Spaghetti is delightful!

I would like to do a shortish unit with my 9th-grader this year on literary nonfiction--writing about a particular work (both by the same author, or each by different authors...doesn't matter), or writing about writing. The three on my list so far are: 1. “The Philosophy of Compostion,†by Edgar Allen Poe, on his writing of the poem The Raven 2. “Politics and the English Language,†by George Orwell on effective (and ineffective) ways to use our language 3. Tolkien's "On Fairy-Stories" (she is reading and loving LotR now, so she'll have that as context) I'm looking for more along these lines, and also would love some suggestions on good "lit-crit" essays that analyze/contextualize some piece of literature, or that discuss a certain period or trend, or..... I know there's such a wealth of knowledge out there on these boards, and I bet some of you know some essays that would be just the thing for us!

llewelma, you probably already know about this resource, but have you considered using the poetry section of Perrine's Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense? I can't wait to use this book with my kids! The poetry section is 250 pgs or so, which may be way more than you are looking for, but maybe you could pick and choose sections. I also find it pretty skimmable if you want a quick pass over the concepts. This book looks so cool to me in so many ways, though I don't yet speak from any experience beyond reading some sections on my own. Maybe it could help your son do what he needs to with poetry. If you are not familiar with it, I'd be happy to list the poetry-related TOC if that would help.

Some great resources listed here! I'm going to look into them myself. I don't think it's quite what you're looking for, but with a group of my kids' friends we read Made You Look: How Advertising Works and Why You Should Know, by Shari Graydon, and then watched exerpts from Still Killing Us Softly. The book isn't super sophisticated, but it's okay as far as it goes. Warning: I personally am not super squeamish about loving, functional sexy-stuff being seen/read by my kids, but there are a few seriously R-rated ads (for both sex and violence, or should I say, for sex-AND-violence, don't you know) shown in the later sections of Still Killing Us Softly....worth a preview before showing it to a kid (even a high-school kid) so the parent can make their own decisions about it. I chose not to show some of these worst ads. But the movie in general spurred some great analytical discussion in our group and moved the kids toward more sophisticated media literacy.

https://archive.org/details/schoolcompositi00johngoog It's very dated, but imo truly an oldie-goodie. Public domain, so you can download for free at this web site or buy a reprinted copy if you decide you want it in paper. We used it on the ipad for a few weeks and then ordered a much nicer hard copy when we liked it so well. You'll find a few discussions of this book and his Writing in English if you search the forums.

Not sure this specific enough to help, but after burning through far too many books, curricula, and approaches, I have been using Maxwell's School Composition with my 7th grader, a reluctant though decent writer. After about a month with SC, I can say it is a huge success here. She is finally writing and not hating it, and her fluency and voice are really developing. The models are beautiful, the lessons are short, sweet, and to the point, and the exercises are relevant, specific, easy to understand, with enough freedom to allow the writer to shine through but enough direction to make her feel she has something she wants to...and can...say.

I used to let my older play sitting ON TOP OF the dining room table with her friends. She loved it because it felt kind of taboo; it gave her a baby-free space; and it kept the baby safe.

The workbooks don't have explanations like the textbooks do. They also have a wider range of problems, grouped into basic practice, further practice, challenging practice, and enrichment. The basic and further practice sections seem a lot like the textbook problems, and the textbook will also sometimes have a few problems thrown in near the end that seem like some of the challenging practice problems. But we find that generally, the challenging practice and enrichment problems take things to a whole new level. My daughter lives for these, though some kids (uh, like my older daughter) might be annoyed by the huge mental leaps and the synthesis of a wide range of unmentioned skills needed to solve them. I agree about it being unfortunate that DM doesn't go all the way through high school. If you have levels 3 and 4 (of Discovering--these would have been levels 9 and 10 if Dimensions had continued), though, it will take you a long way. (I bought them all up in a frenzy when I heard they were going to stop selling.) I plan to bring in Foerster (probably) to finish things out when she gets to that point, as she once tried AoPS and strongly rejected it. I would not be surprised if people will start selling their levels 3 and 4 as they finish with them, so they might be gettable, though I realize this is not at all ideal. I feel like we don't have a choice, as nothing lights up my younger's world like DM! Oh, and btw, there are indeed solutions manuals for everything in the Discovering/Dimensions Mathematics series. They certainly add up $$, but they're available. No way could I do this w/o them! [edited to clarify about levels in paragraph 2]

My 12yo uses DM. She just started 8A. For her, it is the most perfect curriculum in the world. (My older uses other math, as DM is a poor match. Yes, this gets $$$!) I suppose it's kind of prealg/alg, though it is SO integrated that it kind of defies categorization....there's also geometry, statistics, data management, map skills, etc. etc. scattered throughout. It is so cool that every time it circles back to a topic, it does so at a higher level, using skills learned since the last time the topic was taught. But I guess if you had to make it fit standard American math "boxes," you could say prealg/alg. BTW, we found 7A and the first half or so of 7B went painfully slowly, and I was worried about finishing the series in good time. Later in 7B and now 8A, it is going much faster. Not sure if that jives with others' experiences, but it sure would have eased my mind to hear this when we were slogging through 7A. As for other resources, she does selected problems from the workbook. Not necessary, I'd say, but they are really cool problems that both solidify and extend her learning. And I love having the solutions manuals to the texts and workbooks. That's all she uses for math. Good luck!

Seconding Luckymama's suggestion. We are using it this year in conjunction with going back to the beginning in world history. My older is using it with Spielvogle, and my younger is using it with Human Odyssey. I am listening, too, and I think he's a good lecturer. All three of us are find it more than worthwhile.

Can't recommend highly enough Stanford History Education Group's free history lessons, Reading Like a Historian, http://sheg.stanford.edu/rlh. Primary documents, compelling questions (that don't have simple answers) to ponder, everything all chosen and ready for you to use. We have liked the American History lessons better than the World History ones so far--the world history documents are harder to read, and the issues are more removed from the kids' lives. But everything there is top-notch and is great for going into depth on specific historical issues with a group. I've written about it in some other thread somewhere here....

So what we've done so far is to snuggle up on the sofa together and read aloud/discuss the examples in the first chapter, where there are several different kinds of writing written both without a thesis and with one. It was a lot of fun. The examples really make the point that it makes sense to think about nearly any kind of writing as having a thesis, not just academic kinds of writing. They're approachable and fun. Then I asked her to do the same thing: write about something with and without a thesis. So she went and thought up a mundane thing to write about. As we were brainstorming what she might write about, we came up with: feeding her pet, cooking something very simple, telling about her (unremarkable) day, walking to the neighborhood park, and a number of other ideas. We wanted them to be kind of boring. Then she wrote a dry, boring piece of writing about what she chose. I encouraged her to keep it short, like the examples. Next, she rewrote it with a thesis. We were both surprised by how many good theses we could easily think up for her subject, and how each one would cause her to rewrite in a different way....which of course is an important lesson: a thesis not only improves your writing, but if it's well implemented it will control what details you add and how you write about them. She had a lot of fun with this, and suddenly had a far stronger idea of the role a good thesis can play in writing. I should say that we did not sit and read through the first chapter. I did, but she didn't. Just looking at and discussing the examples was perfect for her at this point, and really made most of the points that the chapter makes. The next chapter of the book is on narrative. We read the student essay, and then I chose another essay from a different essay collection to read together, snuggled on the sofa, out loud. (She reads well independently, but writing is a touchy area right now and she likes this. If she wanted to read the essays independently I'd have no problem with that.) I chose from another collection because she hates doing personal writing, and it's hard to find narrative that is not intensely personal. I found an essay that was mostly about someone else, to demonstrate that she doesn't have to do personal writing in practicing narrative writing. (Personally, I don't think the kind of highly personal, confessional writing that is popular in schools lately is ever necessary for her to do--it's easily avoided in college and work, and if she can do other kinds of writing, of course she can always use those skills to do personal writing if she wants.) After we read and discussed the student essay and the other one, we brainstormed what kind of narrative essay she might write and how she will have a guiding thesis (again, whether or not she actually states it). Now she is working on that essay. I expect we will continue to go through the book, using its structure and some of its ideas and essays, and also drawing from other essay collections. (My favorites for her right now besides WWaT are Short Takes and Brief Bedord Reader). It's hard for me to say exactly why WWaT got us over this big hump and ST or BBR or Common Threads didn't. It's something about how he presents the idea and role of the thesis--it's so simple, so common-sense, so everyday-usable, and in its very simplicity so profound. Somehow having someone say that the thesis is everything, in nearly any kind of writing, actually demystified it and made it suddenly obvious and accesisble to her. His point is so portable and usable. It can go anywhere you write. And his examples--comparing with and without a thesis--are so helpful. Suddenly a thesis isn't some big scary abstract thing you have to somehow wrangle out of your subject; it's a fun, useful, everyday concept. I don't know if I'm saying that all very well, and I think I'm repeating myself. Sorry if that's not clear....I'm not sure how else to say it. It may have been more of an inexplicable "lightbulb moment" than something I can put into reasonable words. HTH!

Read How To Read Literature Like a Professor, or HTRLLAP for Kids, with her. It's an amazing springboard for learning how to go into more depth with lit analysis. We jumped off from it over a year ago and are still flying, with great pleasure!

I want to thank all of you for all of these great suggestions! Wow. Between the suggestions here and those on the x-posted thread, I have so many good ideas to follow up on. I think some of these are going to be just what we're looking for! :laugh:

Oooh, wow. Many thanks to all of you!! What a bunch of resources to look into. I am going to check into all of them. Farrar, I agree, it would seem they would know about the water cycle somehow, but they don't. Then there was the day it became clear they had absolutely no idea what the kidney is (besides a bean), and I realized they had both washed out of early life science before we got to the human body, and...well, maybe it's just a homeschool-insecurity moment, but I thought, okay, at their ages they really should have a basic idea what the kidney is! :huh:But thank you for the wise reminder that some imbalance is fine and maybe even a sign of good things! Kareni, wow, what a great list. We have actually had Short History out from the library and they've paged through and enjoyed them. Maybe if we do a slow, systematic read-aloud through it. I think that's a brilliant idea. And now I'm off to research all of these great ideas...science encyclopedia, DK Eyewitness, Bill Nye, Crash Course, Science Fact Book, Tiner, Cartoon Guide, Big Book of Knowledge, Horrible Science, Nebels, Brown Paper School, Macaulay, Blood and Guts....I think this could actually be a lot of fun for me and the kids. Thanks again to everyone!

:hurray:

Another huge thumbs-up for Writing Wirth a Thesis. This little book is rocking my and my daughter's world right now. We've got some great synergy going between Common Threads (thanks to llewelma for the word on this useful text), a few essay collections (esp. Short Takes and Brief Bedford Reader), and WWaT. But it's really WWaT that somehow spoke to me in just the right way, and I feel like we have a new sense of clarity in how to approach writing with my 7th grader....the girl who wants writing instruction broken down into comprehensible, work-on-able skills but who doesn't want to lose sight of the big picture either and hates personal writing and hates being told what/how to write. Sigh. She is suddenly writing with tons of enthusiam and success, after more dead ends than I can remember. WWaT gives a very powerful overarching concept about thesis statements, very simply (but not simplistically) stated, has some sample essays including student essays (yay!), and then has lots of great suggestions for practice. This book, or at least the basic concepts in it, could be uses to great effect for middle school through college-level writers. My very favorite part? You gotta love a book that demonstrates irrefutably that written driving instructions and a babysitter's bulletin-board ad become notably stronger when they have a thesis, either stated or implied. Huh?! Cool! Even an elementary-aged kid can see and appreciate that. And we loved the way he takes on the deadly "summer vacation" idea. My only regret is that I didn't know about this book years ago. Thank you, I-don't-remember-who-on-WTM, for turning me on to this little gem.

I just posted this on K-8, but realized it might go better here, where there are probably more parents of older kids who have been there, done that with regard to my question. I hope a cross-post is okay: We have tried several times to study all three of these subjects. The problem is that both of my kids (7th and 9th grade) have always preferred to jump right to in-depth, detailed study of chemistry, physics, and biology. When they grab books far above their supposed level (Zumdahl's Introductory Chemistry, for example, or Hewitt's Conceptual Physics, or even Campbell and Reece's Biology) and start working very hard with joy and excitement, I'm just not going to pull them back and insist that they slog through more general science texts for younger kids. However, what this means is that both of them lack a basic "cultural literacy" level of understanding about some things: the digestive system, the way muscles work, the ways life is classified by modern scientists, the general differences between the planets, what an amphibian is versus a reptile, the ways we talk about the far reaches of space, the differences between a meteor, a meteorite, and an asteroid, what an aquifer is, how the water cycle functions, the three main kinds of rock....I'm not talking about detailed information, but rather stuff that most people will recognize as familiar ("Uh, yeah, I think Neptune might have rings like Saturn, or is it Uranus, or both?" or, "The kidneys, huh? I think they have something to do with purifying the blood," or even, "The kidneys? Oh, darn. I know I learned about that, but I always get its function mixed up with the liver..." or, "Yeah, I remember something about the Hawaiian Islands being formed by volcaniic activity") Right now, they're both like, "Kidneys? Huh? What do you mean, small and large intestine? Seriously, other planets have rings, too?! And what's this about Hawaii?") So, while they are busy joyfully balancing chemical equations and getting all psyched about deriving the forumula for acceleration of a falling object and learning what happens on a chemical and molecular level with photosynthesis, there's this whole other, more general level of knowledge they lack in a big way. Maybe I'm asking for the impossible, but is there anything, aimed at any age, that might plug either or both of these gaps in their knowledge (astronomy? Movies, books, whatever? (Computer games probably not so good.) Even resources for much younger kids would probably do the trick. We don't need to go deep--in fact, we need to stay broad, and make it a quick, get-it-done thing. Many thanks for any ideas!

Oh, absolutely. I wouldn't want my comment to be taken to mean there's something wrong with you if you don't like it. My goodness, there are a lot of things people here love that would never work for us! I hope you find something that works well for you. I'm sure you will.

We have tried several times to study all three of these subjects. The problem is that both of my kids (7th and 9th grade) have always preferred to jump right to in-depth, detailed study of chemistry, physics, and biology. When they grab books far above their supposed level (Zumdahl's Introductory Chemistry, for example, or Hewitt's Conceptual Physics, or even Campbell and Reece's Biology) and start working very hard with joy and excitement, I'm just not going to pull them back and insist that they slog through more general science texts for younger kids. However, what this means is that both of them lack a basic "cultural literacy" level of understanding about some things: the digestive system, the way muscles work, the ways life is classified by modern scientists, the general differences between the planets, what an amphibian is versus a reptile, the ways we talk about the far reaches of space, the differences between a meteor, a meteorite, and an asteroid, what an aquifer is, how the water cycle functions, the three main kinds of rock....I'm not talking about detailed information, but rather stuff that most people will recognize as familiar ("Uh, yeah, I think Neptune might have rings like Saturn, or is it Uranus, or both?" or, "The kidneys, huh? I think they have something to do with purifying the blood," or even, "The kidneys? Oh, darn. I know I learned about that, but I always get its function mixed up with the liver..." or, "Yeah, I remember something about the Hawaiian Islands being formed by volcaniic activity") Right now, they're both like, "Kidneys? Huh? What do you mean, small and large intestine? Seriously, other planets have rings, too?! And what's this about Hawaii?") So, while they are busy joyfully balancing chemical equations and getting all psyched about deriving the forumula for acceleration of a falling object and learning what happens on a chemical and molecular level with photosynthesis, there's this whole other, more general level of knowledge they lack in a big way. Maybe I'm asking for the impossible, but is there anything, aimed at any age, that might plug either or both of these gaps in their knowledge (astronomy? Movies, books, whatever? (Computer games probably not so good.) Even resources for much younger kids would probably do the trick. We don't need to go deep--in fact, we need to stay broad, and make it a quick, get-it-done thing. Many thanks for any ideas!