I agree that math is taught shockingly badly at the early elementary level. We could do as other countries do, and hire subject matter experts to teach at more than the high school level, but that would cost more, since you'd have to have a teacher for every subject, rather than hire one per class.

To me, this is in large part, a cultural problem. We don't value our plumbers and mechanics and electricians and nurses, so the middle-class parents almost never want their kids to go to the Vo-Tech schools, so those schools are underfunded and undervalued. We all show up for football games, but there are no stadium events for academics. Etc. And, yes, poverty plays a role. I was in a small school this year that filled an entire classroom every weekend with food donated from the community for the children to take home on the weekend, so that they didn't go hungry. The food had be non-perishable, and able to be opened by a 6-year-old, and require no preparation. They show up hungry, because if parents don't meet welfare-to-work requirements, they don't get SNAP, and the shelves are bare. Our children show up to class cold--most schools keep a clothing closet nowadays, and I've had students told me that their favorite Christmas present was a second-hand, warm coat from the school. They show up in pain because their dental care is non-existent. They show up without glasses, because theirs are broken and Medicaid will only buy one pair a year, so they can't see the whiteboards or read their textbooks. They show up without pencils or paper. They show up tired, because they don't have a bedroom, and they can't go to sleep on the sofa until Mom or Dad or Mom's boyfriend or girlfriend or both turns off the TV at 10pm. They show up over-medicated to the point of stupor, because it's easier to medicate than to parent. Often, they just don't show up, because mom or dad didn't want to get up in the morning and put them on the bus--and schools generally accept all notes from parents that say the kids were sick, because how are you going to challenge that in truancy court? Then, we try to teach these tired, cold, hungry, over-medicated, in-pain, unable-to-see students. We look the other way when they nap at breakfast because of their medication and late nights, and we sneak them double portions in the lunch line, and we send home food, and we send home clothes, and we seat them next to the board and let them get close enough to see, and we call CPS about missed doctors visits when we find out, and we hope the school nurse is in that one day of the week that she's allotted so she can refer them to a dentist. We take our paychecks and buy pencils and paper and snacks and classroom manipulatives and little Christmas presents.

LOL! Wouldn't it be a classical education? :laugh:

Technically, they don't "lose" funding. They just lose the ability to direct where it would go, and be required to purchase high-priced consultants to tell them how to teach, and pay private, for-profit tutoring firms in mandatory after school tutoring, and to spend more money on transportation. "It means that local districts will have less flexibility to use about $38 million a year in federal Title I funds. They will likely be required to spend millions of that funding on private tutoring services for at-risk students. Another $19 million in Title I money may be reallocated for professional development and teacher training. The state will also have to notify parents in low-performing schools that they have the right to transfer their children to stronger schools. The state will have to provide transportation for those children, paying for it out of federal funds. Washington also will have less flexibility to direct funding to schools that the state thinks need it most. Instead, it will have to follow federal guidelines for which schools merit priority status. Perhaps most troubling for the state, the waiver revocation means nearly every school in Washington will labeled as failing under NCLB. Under the law, every child was supposed to be doing math and reading at grade level by this school year — a nearly impossible task. The waivers the department has extended exempted states from meeting that 100 percent proficiency goal. Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2014/04/washington-state-nclb-waiver-arne-duncan-105997.html#ixzz325zEuyHv"

Y'all are AWESOME! Thanks! :hurray:

Technically, you are correct. This started with NCLB. However, since it has come to the forefront of national attention at the same time as Common Core, and is imposed in the same paragraph of the RTTT funding as the national standards, most people use Common Core as a shortcut to refer to the four part system of: creating a system of high-stakes testing to link teacher hire/fire decisions and public school existence to student test scores requiring states to use national standards linking funding (including student loans) for education colleges to the test scores of the students that their graduates teach instituting a de facto national student data system which includes data on homeschool students

And that's a problem, because that remedial community college coursework is going away: "IHEs will ultimately use the data from PARCC assessments to exempt from remedial courses and place into first-year, credit-bearing college courses in English and mathematics any student who meets the consortium-adopted achievement standard for college-readiness." http://www2.ed.gov/programs/racetothetop-assessment/reports/parcc-year-2.pdf AKA, as a condition of getting money from the feds for public K-12 schools, states had to require their public, 4-year degree-granting institutions would admit the high school graduates straight to "regular" classes, no matter their test scores. The logic underlying this thought is that because the Common Core standards are so awesome, students who successfully graduate from high school are no longer in need of remediation. Those public universities no longer get to set their own admission standards--they will all now have "open" admission. I suspect that this will mean that those freshman 101 courses will be watered down even more than they already are. Of course, those PARCC assessments? They cost the school districts money to use, FYI.

I think it's more that teachers aren't allowed to talk about it. If you notice, I've been careful about making statements of my own opinion or experiences, and instead, have been mostly referring you to outside resources or quoting said resources. That NDA is nationwide. I don't know anyone who would like to be required to teach according to a script, and not able to answer a perfectly valid question from a student because they have to stay on-script. Remember, their job depends on compliance with that standard. A lot of it depends on how the teachers are told implement it. My kindie daughter's private school insisted that she be able to write to 100 as proof that she knew how to count to 100. Without prompting. In D'Nealian script. Without reversals. If she didn't master all that, she "failed." To me, that's more about writing than counting--and developmentally inappropriate in more than one way. Symmetry is a learned skill, which is why reversals are normal until 2nd grade or so. When she couldn't hit all those required points, she internalized the message that she was bad at math. I figured that out the other day when she said "I'm bad at math." It's certainly nothing I've ever told her! Another stressor was that despite having her for 7 hours a day, most of the practice was to be done at home, and frankly, I only saw her for 3 or 4 hours a day--between dinner, bath, and bed, very little of that was available for practice time.

The standards are also developmentally inappropriate: " There is no convincing research, for example, showing that certain skills or bits of knowledge (such as counting to 100 or being able to read a certain number of words) if mastered in kindergarten will lead to later success in school. Two recent studies show that direct instruction can actually limit young children’s learning. At best, the standards reflect guesswork, not cognitive or developmental science." TheJoint Statement of Early Childhood Health and Education Professionals on the Common Core Standards Initiative was signed by educators, pediatricians, developmental psychologists, and researchers, including many of the most prominent members of those fields. Their statement reads in part: We have grave concerns about the core standards for young children…. The proposed standards conflict with compelling new research in cognitive science, neuroscience, child development, and early childhood education about how young children learn, what they need to learn, and how best to teach them in kindergarten and the early grades…. The statement’s four main arguments, below, are grounded in what we know about child development—facts that all education policymakers need to be aware of: 1. The K-3 standards will lead to long hours of direct instruction in literacy and math. This kind of “drill and grill†teaching has already pushed active, play-based learning out of many kindergartens. 2. The standards will intensify the push for more standardized testing, which is highly unreliable for children under age eight. 3. Didactic instruction and testing will crowd out other crucial areas of young children’s learning: active, hands-on exploration, and developing social, emotional, problem-solving, and self-regulation skills—all of which are difficult to standardize or measure but are the essential building blocks for academic and social accomplishment and responsible citizenship. 4. There is little evidence that standards for young children lead to later success. The research is inconclusive; many countries with top-performing high-school students provide rich play-based, nonacademic experiences—not standardized instruction—until age six or seven. The National Association for the Education of Young Children is the foremost professional organization for early education in the U.S. Yet it had no role in the creation of the K-3 Core Standards. The Joint Statement opposing the standards was signed by three past presidents of the NAEYC—David Elkind, Ellen Galinsky, and Lilian Katz—and by Marcy Guddemi, the executive director of the Gesell Institute of Human Development; Dr. Alvin Rosenfeld of Harvard Medical School; Dorothy and Jerome Singer of the Yale University Child Study Center; Dr. Marilyn Benoit, past president of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry; Professor Howard Gardner of the Harvard Graduate School of Education; and many others.

Because, for the majority of students, the implementation is developmentally inappropriate. A tough critique of Common Core on early childhood education See also: Joint Statement of Early Childhood Health and Education Professionals on the Common Core Standards Initiative I can't tell you how many of my students cry. No, seriously, I can't, because I'd be fired. The state dept of ed tracks my social media use and private text messages to make sure I don't discuss it. Three teachers in my district last year were fired for violating testing protocol. I can't even say, "gosh, that writing prompt was tough today!" I cannot even read the questions on the test, much less read them to a student. AFT asks Pearson to stop ‘gag order’ barring educators from talking about tests (update) The problem with panicking over PISA scores: http://zhaolearning.com/2012/12/11/numbers-can-lie-what-timss-and-pisa-truly-tell-us-if-anything/ The problem with the way the PISA scores are calculated: http://www.epi.org/publication/us-student-performance-testing/ And why you can't compare PISA scores between countries: http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=6344672 Which is fine, except that NT kids seem to be getting rarer and rarer: Thousands of Toddlers Are Medicated for A.D.H.D., Report Finds, Raising Worries "The percentage of total public school enrollment that represents children served by federally supported special education programs increased from 8.3 percent to 13.8 percent between 1976–77 and 2004–05." http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=64 Yep, even kids without functioning brain stems are expected to take standardized tests and increase their proficiency from year to year. Standards Vs. Curriculum I agree. The problem is that teachers are hamstrung to individualize curricula to these students. I have been in classrooms where the teachers have to sign a legal affidavit every week saying that they conducted the class using the script in teacher's manual, covering X pages on Y days using Z vocabulary words--and that affidavit is used in the year-end hire/fire decisions. Students' test scores are required to be used to evaluate teachers if schools accept federal education funding (and pretty much all schools do). The problem with that is that since K-2 students aren't officially tested (though they are -- see also DIBELs and their ilk), those teachers are evaluated based upon the scores of older students in the school that they don't teach. Or, say, a music teacher, whose subject isn't tested, must be evaluated on language arts, math, social studies, and science standardized test scores--so he's fired based on test scores for subjects that he didn't teach. Or, say, a gifted teacher is going to be fired because his students score on the 99th percentile every year--which means their scores don't increase from year to year.

Off to look at DM....back. Apparently they don't get to proofs until "Additional Mathematics", which is supposed to be used after DM. Hmmm. I feel more comfortable with my traditional sequence: Alg I, Alg II, Geometry, Alg III/Trig/Pre-Calc, Calc. Which is probably just my comfort level, but still.

I think that they mean it's routine, highly structured, and not "exciting!" There seems to be something hands-on at least once a week. It's not a textbook, I'll give them that. You buy: Encyclopedias Animals Unit (Choose one age-appropriate option.) Kingfisher First Encyclopedia of Animals (best for K through 2nd grade) OR DK Encyclopedia of Animals (best for 2nd through 4th grade) Human Body Unit (Choose one age-appropriate option.) DK First Human Body Encyclopedia (best for 1st through 3rd grade) OR Kingfisher Science Encyclopedia (best for 4th through 6th grade) Plants Unit (Choose one age-appropriate option.) Plant Parts (Life of Plant Series) (best for 1st through 4th grade) OR Usborne Science Encyclopedia (best for 3rd through 5th grade) Scientific Demonstration Books You will need both of these books to complete the scientific demonstrations in this program. Janice VanCleave’s Biology for Every Kid AND Janice VanCleave’s Science Around the World They do say: "This method is loosely based on the ideas for classical science education that are laid out in The Well-trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home by Jessie Wise and Susan Wise Bauer." Here's the 2-day schedule (they have a 5-day schedule as well): Two Days a Week Schedule Day 1: Read about X Add information on X to the Narration Page Do the Scientific Demonstration: X activity Begin the Z Project Define X Work on memorizing the X poem Day 2: Read about X Add information to the weekly Narration Page Measure and record Y for the Z Project Take the X Week # quiz (optional)

This is so important to me. Our children will never be perfect. They will never be "even" in all areas. They will never even be "normal" in all areas. They will always have faults. I feel that my job as a parent is to help my child mitigate the faults to an acceptable level (she may never be the life of the party, but she'll enjoy going, etc.). But, that said, it's equally important to hone her strengths. Why focus on the bad when you can focus on the good? Kid is a perfectionist? Awesome!!! I know a supervisory chemist at a drug manufacturer who fired one of her team because the chemist made two (minor) mistakes in two months. Your child would be awesome at a job like that. Etc. Hone that perfectionism, as long as it doesn't make him miserable. Teach him to be super careful where it matters. Encourage them to think about ways that getting it right matters (balancing bank accounts. ;) ) Give praise for appropriate use of perfectionism. And so on. Something to think about: the concept of perfectly average. Maybe, just maybe, it's perfect to be average at something. :) Maybe, just maybe, you don't always want to be the best in the class at everything. Maybe, just maybe, you turn in average work on purpose.

I found this helpful: http://www.creatinclassicalchaos.com/2012/07/building-foundations-of-scientific.html She went through and made lesson plans, in the right order, with a supply list and book list http://fromtherootsup.blogspot.com/2011/10/bfsu-flowcharts.html

I'm doing elemental science. I have a 2-month-old, so I need something open & shut, and my rising 1st grader doesn't mind dry.

BBC Science

I discovered that Christian Book lets you see the table of contents for everything and a good preview of the insides as well. Here's the link for Singapore Math Essentials A.

Options: http://www.amazon.com/Elementary-Science-Education-Foundations-Understanding/dp/1432762362 http://www.hmhco.com/shop/education-curriculum/science/homeschool/sciencefusion-homeschool/features/elementary-level http://www.theyoungscientistsclub.com/TYSCsubscription/tysc-kittopics.html

http://www.creatinclassicalchaos.com/2012/07/building-foundations-of-scientific.html She went through and made lesson plans, in a good order, with a supply list and book list, as well as a possible time allotment. http://fromtherootsup.blogspot.com/2011/10/bfsu-flowcharts.html

Anna's Mom, it's a great book. Well worth picking up. :)

Here ya go: First Lessons in Geometry Also: Geometry without proofs exists?!! I didn't think I was that old, but now I feel positively ancient. How on Earth could you call it a geometry course without the proofs?!

I would do Phonics Pathways, one page per day, for no more than 5 minutes per day. But that's just me. I found an old edition for $4 on Amazon. ;)

I don't want to use Saxon, but I do want to keep doing the "meeting" stuff (my daughter who likes dry things actually likes it!) Suggestions?

I second (or third ;) ) the daily routine/weekly rhythm. We had a nice schedule when my daughter was that age: baby gym day at our local university's community PE program, baby swim day at same, story time at the local bookstore day, grocery store day, park day, library day, Kindermusik day, etc. It was more to get me out of the house and get her used to other human beings than for any "purpose," but it saved my sanity. ;) I'm not an "activity" person, either, but my husband and I love to cook, so she learned to chop fruit and vegetables with a plastic lettuce knife, to "cut' pasta with a butter knife, to mix a cake batter, to shape and decorate cookies, etc. She also helped sweep floors, fold laundry, and put things away. She took daily long (30 min) walks with my husband, at her pace--we live in the country, so it was like a nature study type thing. Plus they garden together. I'm very big on free art play, so she had/has a huge bin of paper, washable markers/pens/pencils/crayons, scissors galore, glues, tapes, pastels, etc. I also recommend creating a bookshelf just for her, so she can grab and "read" at any time. This is a great book, FWIW: Teaching Montessori in the Home: Pre-School Years

Some ideas: https://www.goodreads.com/shelf/show/4th-grade-reading-list http://www.educationworld.com/summer_reading/4th_grade.shtml http://www.brrsd.k12.nj.us/curriculum.cfm?subpage=1003 http://www.cfisd.net/dept2/library/reading4.pdf http://www.ala.org/alsc/sites/ala.org.alsc/files/content/SummerReadingList14_ALSC_3-5.pdf