Sounds like one of the Bravewriter subscription programs maybe. The Arrow is the elementary age program. The lessons are based on copywork/dictation of a passage from a classic book, while studying some grammar or stylisctic aspect of the paragraph. The online sample for the Arrow doesn't use Little House on the Prairie, though, so that's probably not the one you saw. But if you are interested, here is a link to the Arrow.

Did he perhaps make the problem more complicated than it needed to be? Perhaps I'm misunderstanding the problem, but from your description it appears to me the simplest way to solve the problem would be to expand the factored terms and then match up the coefficients with a, b, and c. No polynomial division or simultaneous equations needed. Again, perhaps I'm misunderstanding the problem. I mention the possibility because when I was teaching math I sometimes found that students would solve a problem using a far more circuitous path than necessary. The additional steps did often introduce more opportunities for error, unfortunately. But I did not adjust my grading scheme to account for a student's choice to solve it a "hard" way. Is that maybe what happened here?

Hey, thanks! Especially for the link, as my Amazon searches didn't seem to be coming up with much. It made me realize, though, that the information I gave you may not be correct. You are using Conceptual Physical Science and I'm using Conceptual Physics, so my comments may not apply to your program. Best wishes in your science plans!

Wow, where did you find the instructor guide for $2? I've had a hard time finding it at all, let alone for a good price. I've search I got the practice book, which was easy to find cheaply. The practice pages have a friendly "cartoon" look to them, which my ds finds sort of fun, but the problems are very much the same as the simplest of the textbook exercises. So it's certainly not necessary for the practice pages themselves. It does have, at the back, answers to the odd textbook exercises. So for me it's very helpful, as I don't have an instructor guide.

I was thinking of Destination Imagination too, although in a different way. My ds was on a DI team last year, and we were rather taken aback at some of the plans the kids were coming up with at the beginning of the project. We're talking huge, outlandish efforts that we knew would never, ever, ever come to fruition. Then the coach explained to us how DI works. The kids come up with the ideas, and the kids execute them. Period. There is no adult input allowed. Not even, "Are you sure that's a good idea, honey?" or raised eyebrows. She explained that what happened every single year is that the kids would come up with these 1000% ideas and then over time they would substitute and modify and chop and cut and finally come up with something a final product that was only a tiny fraction of their original idea but still truly would blow us away. And that's exactly what happened. Somehow they weren't at all disappointed or discouraged. It's almost like they didn't even notice that their final product was NOTHING like what they had originally talked about. But it was real and finished and something to be incredibly proud of. It was a real learning experience for him and for me. So, with that experience behind me, what I would do in this situation is a lot of, "That sounds really interesting. How are you going to do that?"

Check out Rob Ives website, especially the mechanisms section, linked below. I haven't actually bought anything from his site, but I have been tempted to get a membership. And there is some free stuff available. http://robives.com/mechs

That is a lovely way to be, bolt. I hope that I would be as gracious as you. (Not sure how to handle the skirt tucked into pantyhose situation as nicely, though.)

My ds is older than that, but when he was in 3rd, we did about 15 minutes together and then (at another time) he did about 15 minutes of independent work. By 5th grade it had increased to about 20 minutes together and 20-30 minutes of independent work. So about 30 minutes in 3rd and 40-50 in 5th.

It does not bother me to hear someone humming or whistling happily while doing a solitary task like washing dishes or something. I prefer to hear singing, but the humming is okay. It does bother me when it prevents conversation. I know a person who hums frequently. This is tuneless humming and comes in the middle of conversation. It feels to me as if it puts a stop to conversation because to speak feels like interrupting the hummer, and yet the humming is not a social activity. This is not a person I can correct, so I grin and bear it. My ds occasionally likes to make nonsense noise, and I DO correct him. I tell him that it is rude to "fill up the air" and leave no room for social interaction when in community with others.

I find the Instructor Text necessary. You may find this thread helpful -- If You're Buying WWS, Are You Getting the IG

That's what I do too. When I had a dish rack, it was out all the time. That sometimes happens with the dish towel too, but most of the time we get the things put away and then whoosh away the towel.

I would do something like this. The real caps on the 13yo above look great, but in our house Halloween costumes are all about improvisation. (ETA: That makes it sound like I'm criticizing the costume. I'm not -- it's fantastic! But we don't have any caps like that so we would have to improvise.) I think what I would do is cut circles from corrugated cardboard and then cut fabric a couple of inches wides than the cardboard. I would fold the fabric over the cardboard and staple down the edges (playing around to make it look like a cap). Then I would hot glue all of them together. Perhaps one real cap on top for authenticity.

A google search on "Lukas" gets 118,000,000 hits. A google search on "Lucas" gets 503,000,000 hits. For whatever that's worth. I don't recall ever meeting a Lukas myself.

Thanks! I'll look into it. We seem to be doing fine without it so far, but I always like extra resources.

Sorry to hijack your thread, but what is in the teacher's edition? I'm not sure what edition mine is, but I have a text, a lab manual, and a soft-cover book called Practicing Physics, which has worksheets and answers to the odd-numbered questions from the text. Are the extra features in the teacher's edition worth having?

How closely are you working with your son? I found it necessary when beginning WWS to check each step of his work very carefully along the way and sometimes even work right there beside him. It was very demoralizing for him one time when his rough draft did not fit the requirements at all, and he had to start over again. So we both agreed to be more careful so that that wouldn't happen again. That said, I don't think this is bad at all for a first draft. I find it helpful to look at each aspect of the writing separately. It's very easy for me to look at a piece of writing with many punctuation mistakes and conclude that it's a complete failure when really it just needs some proof-reading. I try to mentally evaluate each aspect on its own: content, organization, style, and conventions. With WWS the content is the most straight-forward because it's laid out for you right there in the book. "Organization" is where I consider the order in which the content is arranged and how well it is connected (time words, for example, in this piece). "Style" is subjective, of course, but I look at things like varied sentence structure and use of strong verbs. Finally, "conventions" covers all the rules: spelling, grammar, capitalization, etc. With my son I choose carefully what to work on in revision. Too much correction and he will become discouraged and not learn anything from it. I try to pick just a few items to focus on each time we revise. If this were my son's writing, here are some of the things I would think about addressing and probably not all in one day. Content: You mentioned inaccuracies in his writing. I looked over the notes from this lesson, and it all looks right to me except for this sentence: Edward decided to study medicine so he could help end smallpox. That isn't mentioned in the notes. I would ask where he found that information. Maybe he's read it elsewhere, in which case he can certainly include it in the paper. Also, the notes don't use the word "virus", which was unknown in Jenner's time (I think?). The other content is fine, in my opinion. The paper overall is a bit short, but I think that's from his style of writing rather than from lack of content. Organization: This proceeds in chronological order, so that's good. The paper requirements asked for a background paragraph separate from the narrative, so I would point that out. The narrative itself can be one or several paragraphs, so that part is fine. He did use some time words ("finally" and "one time"), but I find the narrative to be lacking in coherence. I might select one or two spots to work on making a smoother transition, such as this one: Edward decided to study medicine so he could help end smallpox. He noticed that fewer milkmaids got smallpox instead, they got cowpox. You could lead him to see that it's a very abrupt change from "deciding to study medicine" to "noticing milkmaids". A lot happened in between there, didn't it? I do this with some humor with my son. I'll read along and say, "Oh, so he's decided to study medicine. That's nice, I wonder what's going to happen next. Let's see, he noticed some milkmaids. Wait, what??" You can help him see that he needs to set the reader into a new time frame by saying something like, "In later life, he was practicing medicine in his hometown when he noticed . . ." Style: I probably wouldn't work on this yet, but if I did I'd look at this sentence Edward studied the similarities of cowpox and smallpox, -found two types of cowpox, and discovered that one type could cure smallpox. I'd point out that this is the highlight of the story and that with so much packed into one sentence, the reader might miss how significant it is. You could play around with different ways to put these ideas into two or three sentences instead of just one. Conventions: You mentioned one thing already: he needs to use proper paragraph form by indenting at the beginning of each paragraph. The use of the name "Edward" I would also consider a conventions issue. It's easy to fix and my ds seems to enjoy learning the rules for grown-up writing. On the other hand, it will come up in the future so it's a correction you can easily save for another paper if you're approaching the "too many corrections" line. Personally, I would spend a little time looking at this sentence: He noticed that fewer milkmaids got smallpox instead, they got cowpox. It has a run-on error that could be fixed a number of different ways. Maybe a semi-colon would be fun to talk about here? Finally the government accepted to the vaccine I don't like the "accepted to" in this sentence. Different verb, maybe? Finally, there's a typo in the last sentence (nuber). I would either point it out or ask him to hunt for it, depending on frustration level.

EG has a lot of repetition. I haven't done that level, but I'm guessing it's the same. What if you gave him half the page (all the odds, for example) and told him that if he got them all correct he didn't have to do the rest. But if he makes careless errors, then he has to correct them PLUS do an extra exercise for each error. That would cut down on busy work and hopefully encourage him to be more careful in his work.

Yeah, I thought people with many children were sure to have a different approach. :) I actually do have all my lessons planned (scheduled). I have a syllabus written for the entire semester. But what I find is that I need time to prepare to teach the lessons. I haven't been very successful at doing prep far ahead of time. I guess my memory isn't good enough! I read several chapters of the physics book over the summer, for example, but I found I still needed to review them before teaching my ds. I couldn't remember what was in each chapter, so I ended up needing to spend the weekly time anyway. So I'm back to just doing it week by week. And I definitely need to have the literature fresh in my mind for discussion. Looks interesting. Thank you!

Me too. Try these searches: Intermediate World History A Student Pages Intermediate World History A Teacher Pages Intermediate World History B Student Pages Intermediate World History B Teacher Pages They should come up. They are the books with blue and white on the cover.

How much time do you spend preparing to teach your middle-schooler? I'm finding I need to set aside a good chunk of time each week to get myself prepared for the week. In the past, when we did more things together, I could often just "open and go". But now, we have transitioned to more of a seminar model for many subjects. Ds reads the material on his own and we come together to discuss/review/practice/etc. So while our time together has reduced, my prep time has increased because I need to pre-read, digest the material, decide on the main points to highlight, etc. As I'm sitting here on a Sunday morning, I decided to write down a list of what I need to do instead of actually doing it. :lol: Here's roughly what I need to do each week: Math (Singapore NEM): Look over the upcoming sections and roughly plan what to teach on each day. I don't strictly have to do this, but math is my favorite subject so I do anyway. Also select problem solving problems to work on. Time = 1/2 hour Writing (WWS): Read the lesson for the week in the student pages. I mentally go through the outlining and composition process in my head to see what might give my ds trouble. Then I go back and read the teacher pages. I also consider whether ds will need additional background on the topic and look for resources. For example, this week he'll be writing about the life cycle of a star, so I'm going to look for a documentary on stars for us to watch tonight. Time = 1/2-1 hour Latin (LNM): Read the chapter and do all the translations myself mentally. LNM comes with an enormous teacher's manual filled with all sorts of extra enrichment activities and background information. I find it very busy visually, so as I preread the chapter, I mark with pencil the things I want to cover with ds during our Latin time. Time = 1/2-1 hour Science (Conceptual Physics): Read the chapter sections we'll be covering. I'm using this book to teach ds how to take notes from a textbook, so I have to think through that aspect of it. I also select exercises from the text for him to work. Time = 1 hour History (Human Odyssey plus misc. resources): I don't do much prep for history because we still do this together. It's mostly on the fly. I plan roughly what readings we will do, and I look through the HO student pages to see what activities they suggest and see if I want to use them. Time = 1/2 hour Literature: This is the biggie. Ds spends 45 minutes a day reading literature, and his reading speed is about the same as mine. I find it really hard to keep up with him. (Selfishly, I have my own books I want to read.) In fact, I fail miserably. What ends up happening is that I read only about half of the books that he does and we discuss those. The others I just ask him to tell me a little about it. Logic, French, Grammar: No prep. So that's maybe 4 hours of prep for the week, plus 3-4 hours of literature reading. I only have one child, so I can work on these things while he's doing independent work. I don't like to save it for Sunday, as I did this week! But most homeschoolers have more than one student. How do you fit in those hours of prep? Or do you not find you need that kind of time? What do you do to prep for teaching your middle school student(s)?

Oh my gosh. :lol: I'm sure this was frustrating at the time (for you and for her), but that's very funny. She makes very effective use of repetition and parallel structure, too. Save that one for when you cover rhetorical devices! Did she remember having done the first piece a year earlier? It just occurred to me that it would be interesting to choose a writing assignment and give it every year to see how a student's writing evolves.

My ds is in 7th grade. I assign literature by time (45 minutes a day), because the pace varies greatly with the book. A few weeks ago, ds was reading Gulliver's Travels, which is challenging language and small type. He was reading 25-40 pages a day. Then he read a young adult novel, and he read probably 60-80 pages in the same time. He also reads several pages of his science text each day. Probably 5-6 pages on average.

This is what ds wrote last year at age 11. He was a little in love with the thesaurus on this one. :) The castle surmounted the steep, forested hill. White, fluffy clouds impaled themselves on the castle's lofty towers. The castle's walls ascended to a peaked roof. The castle's windows were grouped in twos and threes in rows and columns on the large, grand sides of the castle. The tall castle overlooked beautiful countryside with a multitude of trees. Here are links to a couple of the posts Ruth is referring to. There may be more in that thread, but these are the ones I noticed. (I went looking to see if I had posted my son's over there.) http://forums.welltrainedmind.com/showpost.php?p=3340713&postcount=3 http://forums.welltrainedmind.com/showpost.php?p=3343214&postcount=8

Did you really mean first grade? :blink:

6 hours, as scheduled, including music practice. He often takes longer, though. Independent (4.25 hours per day): 45 minutes math independent work (once a week he does physics problems instead) 45 minutes writing (once a week he does grammar exercises instead) 30 minutes Latin 45 minutes music practice 45 minutes literature reading 45 minutes science reading Together with me (2 hours per day): logic, French, history, grammar teaching, math teaching, literature discussion, science activities, etc.