Thanks for the recommendations. I have wondered if it is a developmental thing but my ds before her never had any issues with this fundamental stuff. Ds takes to math so well I don't have much practice explaining things. We have tried rightstart but it really frustrates her. She likes doing things she can do well. She has memorized most of her addition facts and can recite them easily. If you ask more questions like what comes before or after a number or what does the number fifty three look like then she gets lost.

I was wondering if anyone could give me some ideas of things to do with my daughter to solidify some concepts from math. She is finishing up K math and still has trouble with number sense type questions. For example, she can't answer questions like, "What is the number before 23?" If she counts dimes she asks how to write 50 or 30. She still has trouble writing the teens (11,1,13,14, etc.). I was thinking of buying some base 10 blocks to build numbers with. Any other ideas? Thanks,

I have a son like this. We used Megawords but I think it helped reading more than spelling. I will say that I have seen dramatic results with Spelling Through Morphographs. It is transferring to his writing. We tried Calvert, AAS, Megawords, and Spelling Power. I must work on it with him every day but it is usually between 20 and 30 minutes of word work a day. HTH Flaura

Thanks! We are heading over the R&S 5 this year and I would love to add in some poetry memorization, etc. We used FLL 1&2, and FLL 3 before R&S and I liked the memorization. Flaura

Thanks!

Well, I don't have any real advice but I can tell you about our experience. I used Singapore with my eldest after Saxon K and he had a blast. He gets it quickly and the word problems make him think. He has a very intuitive feel for math and requires very little explanation. He can solve problems quickly and is comfortable solving problems many different ways. My daughter I started out in Rightstart A and she hated it and would cry. We switched to Saxon 1 for kindergarten and she loves it. She enjoys writing and there is lots of it in Saxon. She enjoys coloring the workpages with color pencil. I notice that there is good info in Saxon. She really understood place value when we started talking about dimes and pennies for tens and ones. She has her addition facts down cold which is something her elder brother never managed in K. Saxon really emphasizes the facts practice which I have found valuable. Also, I have noticed on her math facts sheets as she is filling them out she will notice all the different ways to make a number. She noticed that you can make 5 with 5+0,4+1, and 3+2. She really got that concept from Saxon and it is one that Singapore teaches with number bonds. I do read over the lessons and compress them if it feels too easy but she loves the work and feels very confident with math. That is something I am happy with. I also like that Saxon incorporates calendar work because it reminds me to do it with my younger son who is 3. He gets a little school in along with the elders.;) My experience is that both programs will get you where you want to be. Once you finish Saxon 3 you could switch to Singapore than instead of continuing to Saxon 5/4 or you could stay with Saxon if you loved it. FWIW, I am an engineer and very comfortable with math. I taught quite a bit of math in grad school up through calculus. I do think Challenging Word Problems are a helpful add in if you would like. Hope this helps.

Thanks for that idea, Daisy. It is sort of like a commonplace book. My daughter would love this and I might convince my son as well.

Thanks for the update! It looks like these books are longer than the original CWP and it seems to cover more topics. CWP original ran about 140 pages for CWP1 and CWP2 and the first two new ones are right around 200 pages. Also, there are problems in the new one that aren't word problems. The original CWP that I have ( 1 and 2 ) only contain word problems. I noticed the new ones have some mental math problems like add 154 and 36 mentally. Interesting.

:lurk5:

I think it sounds like she will have a great year. I really love the journal idea as well. Have fun!

I think you get 5 downloads. At least that was what I had for the mp3 writing lectures. HTH,

:lurk5:

We do k12 as independents. We pick the classes we want and they send us the materials and access to the OLS (on line school). Most of the work is done offline for LA and Math. I understand that all the reading is done online for history and science but I am not 100% on this. You can ask for a demo account to see what the OLS looks like and through the demo account you can see what the content of the classes is like. With K12 independent you are the teacher and the students do not interact with any other students or teachers. HTH Let me know if you have more questions.

Hmm I don't know. When I did this with ds I just did the lesson and we went over the decoding. I told him to read it to himself for a minute and then I had him read it out loud for 1 minute. After that we graphed it and we talked about having the line on the graph go up. We didn't read the passage again we just went on to the next passage. I think there are only four passages total and they are at the very end. You could skip the fluency part altogether and it wouldn't take anything away from the decoding part of the program. Megawords is great and we use it now. The new 2nd edition is supposed to have some fluency passages but they aren't in the first edition which we are using now and we still get a lot out the program. IKWYM about the reading for pleasure thing. All this work on decoding/fluency sort of make ds want to take a reading break. Hank the Cowdog and The Lightning Thief have made a big difference to him. He will read those for fun. These kids can be tough sometimes... :grouphug: Take care and please ask if I can help any more.

There are 25 lessons. In lessons 16-20 they start reading practice sentences. In lessons 21-25 they start reading passages. The passages are read for accuracy initially utilizing the strategies REWARDS teaches them. Then the students whisper read the passage for one minute noting their end points. Then they read out loud for one minute with the goal of 120-150 correct words per minute for 4-5th grade and 150-189 CWPM for 6th grade. They can graph their times on an achievement graph provided in the book. HTH

REWARDS specifically works with multisyllabic words. We used it when my son was at a fourth grade level and followed it with megawords. It is only 25 or so lessons so that was all our LA except for copywork that month. If your dc is having a more general reading issue related to dyslexia then Barton or Wilson might be the way to go. Hth

*forgive typos am on an iPhone * It's not classical but k12 has an excellent literture class for elementary aged kids. It is expensive and when you buy language arts they bundle it with grammar, spelling, and composition as well. We have enjoyed k12 LA 4th grade this year. Ds has worked on summarizing stories and they cover four whole novels that you choose from a list. They also did abridged versions of Robinson crusoe and Pollyanna. I know opinions about abridged books vary. They had two units on nonfiction writing using articles from Cricket magazine. The one we just finished had them identifying the main idea of the articles and learning about unstated main ideas. The readers are interesting and try to contain stories they consider culturally relevent. For example they read Brer rabbit stories, anasi stories, Rikki Rikki tavi, little bios of famous people like Louis Pasteur etc. An example of a reading asignment would be reading the story, asking content questions to chEck comprehension ( can be done orally or written- sometimes they are included as computer based quizzes with the novels) and then doing some analysis based writing. Usually a vocabulary section with definitions is included. When they read Rikki tikki Tavi this year we went over making inferences. They talked about the author saying Rikki was a " true mongoose " and how that wasn't defined a d the reader had to infer the definition fromthe text. Then it had the student writing a paragraph on proving if Rikki was a tru mongoose or not based on the text of the story. I think the program is well done but expensive. If you listen to SWB's lectures you don't really need a lit program but my son has enjoyed it tremendously. YMMV

Congratulations to both you and Corbin. What a wonderful feeling of accomplishment you both must have! Way to go!

Wow, it's been years since I read those books. They were good! Thanks for the reminder, I will have to go get them from the library tomorrow! My kids and I really enjoyed Ox Cart Man recently. The illustrated Old Mother West Wind by Burgess was also well received. My boys love anything by Richard Scarry.

:bigear: I would love to hear about this as well. I split up my Kindergarten dd and my fourth grade ds this year and it doesn't seem to be going well. Everyone wants to listen/participate in all the sessions. I am going to have to try and get everyone together next year.

No problem. I know how frustrating it can be for you and the dc when you don't see progress. We are using drill sheets from an old Saxon 6/5 math program I was given. I have also made them up from an online math worksheet generator but I don't have a link cause I'm on my iPod right now. Hth

We do five minute drills every day. One hundred facts and the goal is to get every one right in five minutes or less. My ds was getting slower at first which confused us. What really helped was doing oral drill for about a week. For some reason saying it, writing it, and hearing it really cemented the facts for him. It is cheap so worth a try. HTH

You can do it. :grouphug: We made it through and the only major problem was keeping the baby from eating the pawns.

For k-4 I don't think a reading program is necessary and for some kids it can even be detrimental. If your kid really loves to read and has the phonics base to read anything they desire then you have accomplished your goals for elementary school. In the logic stage it might have some use but I am not there yet so I don't have anything concrete to base this on. I would think 7th/8th would be plenty of time to work on terminology etc. IMHO

We loved it here. It gave us a great foundation to try something new ( MCT ). The price is right as well and with other dc coming up I like the non consumable aspect. It reminds me of my old schoolbooks.