Courtney_Ostaff
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Posts posted by Courtney_Ostaff
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Yes! We read:
But these look good too: -
So totally agree with this. I will never understand it. Ever, ever, ever! I will never understand how people who absolutely, positively know better will put a group of kids into a room, knowing that there will always be children who are incapable of meeting the too high standards that have been shoved down, knowing full well the ENORMOUS effects that will have on the self-esteem and future success of those students. What kills me the most about this is that of my three children, I have one who would have shot past the early standards in school, one who would have met them, and one who would have been made to feel like an idiot every day, yet they are (in my expert opinion as their mom), equally intelligent. Some just needed more time on the vine for the particular subjects that are shoved down the throats day in and day out for our nation's young children, regardless of their readiness and their teachers' knowledge of child development. I have nothing nice to say about this.
:iagree: :hurray:
Yep, that's all I've got. Drives me nuts. I hate the idea of teaching very young children to read. This is why. Oh, and I wrote this a while back, in response to something else, but it's still relevant. The quotes are from Reading in the Brain:
It took me a while because it's been a couple of years since I read it, but I did buy Dehaene on my Kindle, and spent a couple of hours going through the book for you. Correlation does not indicate causation, but there is a clear implication that forcing reading too early onto children could mis-wire the brain in such a way as to mimic the dyslexic brain—e.g., a wired, firm preference for less optimal “letterbox†locations within the brain because their brains simply aren’t mature enough to form the optimal “letterbox†locations. Because I can't copy and paste from my Kindle app, please attribute all spelling errors to me. Similarly, I have no page numbers for you, but you could search a Kindle edition of the book for key phrases. I have quoted below:Proposition 1) Reading rewires the brain:
“It is certainly no coincidence that we start to teach a child to read at a very early age when cortical plasticity is at a maximum. By immersing children in an artificial environment of letters and words, we probably reorient many of their inferior temporal neurons to the optimal coding of writing.â€â€œ...it is only because this preadaptation of the primate inferior temporal cortex exists that we can learn to read. We would not be able to read if our visual system did not spontaneously implement operations close to those indispensable for word recognition, and if it were not endowed with a small dose of plasticity that allows it to learn new shapes. During schooling, a part of this system rewires itself into a reasonably good device for invariant letter and word recognition.â€â€œ..each reading lesson leads to a neuronal reconversion: some visual neurons, previously concerned with object or face recognition, are committed to letters; others to frequent bigrams; yet others to prefixes, suffices, or recurring words.â€â€œThat both the dorsal and ventral pathways need to be trained for reading may explain the remarkable success of teaching methods that emphasize motor gestures†(see also, OT recommendations regarding reasonable expectations for pencil grips)Proposition 2) Mis-wiring is possible
“A narrow window of plasticity, which lasts a few weeks in cats, a few months in nonhuman primates, and a few years in humans, allows for fine adjustment of connections in the primary visual area. ... Children who squint during the critical period suffer from lifetime impairments of vision--they lose the ability to perceive depth by exploiting the small mismatch between the two images (stereovision). In this instance, nature leaves only a short window of time to nurture.â€â€œWith some rare exceptions, the number of cortical neurons is fixed in infancy. ... When we spend time on reading ... we also trade in cortical space. This obviously reduces the brain resources available for other skills--and our face perception abilities may suffer.â€"...children who do not learn letters and graphemes suffer from reading delays. These are often far from negligible and persist for many years..."Proposition 3) There is an optimal time for learning to read:“Before children are exposed to their first reading lesson, their prior linguistic and visual development should play an essential role in preparing their brains for this new cultural exercise. ...at around the age of five or six, when a child begins to read, the key invariant visual recognition process is in place, although it is still maximally plastic. This period is thus particularly conducive to the acquisition of novel visual shapes like letters and words.â€â€œSymmetry generalization, however, is a visual property that impedes reading. It slows down learning and leads to systematic confusions." (most dominant at 5-6 years old, evenly split beforehand, minimal afterwards)"...integration is limited prior to the full development of the prefrontal cortex. .. before the age of five or six, children's search behavior is modular and poorly integrated..our capacity for putting together two separate representations ... seems to be linked to language … a fraction of the child's brain, including the prefrontal cortex, learns to redescribe, in an explicit and abstract form, the older implicit knowledge...[including] full-fledged phonemic awareness"Proposition 4) There is an “optimal†reading network that does not activate early“Initially, written words, like any other visual language, lead to a bilateral activation pattern. Activation then progressively tapers down to a narrower focus that is presumably optimal.â€"as early as the age of seven, the normal reading network begins to activate at the sight of text."“... A few years later, in second grade, a burst of activity appears for printed words when compared with meaningless strings of geometric shapes. When a clearly lateralized response from the left letterbox area first appears, at around the age of eight, specialization is still far from complete. Even in ten-year-olds, the negative waveform...seems to be seen only for words that are frequent and well known by the child. ... The letterbox area only reaches full maturity at the beginning of adolescence...â€Proposition 5) Early readers do not use the “optimal†reading network“Eden...did not find a left-occipito-temporal activation increase during reading acquisition. However she did observe a clear decrease in right occippito-temporal activation, at a location in the right hemisphere that was exactly symmetrical with the letterbox region...““...during the earliest reading stages, the right occipito-temporal region appears to differentiate words from consonant strings. “Proposition 6) Dyslexics do not use the “optimal†reading network"…disproportionate difficulties in phonemic awareness complicate the acquisition of the alphabetic principle. These problems, in turn, impact the left letterbox area, which is unable to acquire visual expertise for written words.""...the left occipito-temporal region does not seem able to simultaneously recognize all the letters that constitute a word...weak lateralization of the activation to the left hemisphere. Their brain activity, moreover, is much greater than normal in the right temporo-parietal region...not typically seen in normal readers""efficient intervention strategies for dyslexia...most...aim at increasing phonemic awareness by helping children manipulate letters and sounds" -
I suspect that your mom thinks a child who is reading that far above grade level should also be able to acheive the grade level 'advanced' designation in math...but generally that is only true for those that are highly gifted or have access to instruction. She may be suggesting that you provide the instruction and the experiences that would let your dd achieve at that level.
That never occurred to me, but you might be right on the money on that one!
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.... I pushed through, but VERY slowly and carefully. Lessons were 5 minutes a day. ... Apparently I was boring him to death.
Been there, done that! Last fall, I was so frustrated, because she was SUCH A PITA! about reading lessons (I was at things like st and th at that point, IIRC). Drove me bonkers (also, I was pregnant and tired). Finally, one afternoon, I said, "Fine! I'm tired and I'm tired of arguing.Go pick any book you want off the shelf and read it to me. We'll call that reading lessons for today." So she went, picked The Giving Tree (Grade level Equivalent: 2.9) off the bookshelf, and proceeded to read it to me. I didn't know whether to laugh in relief, or cry at my stupidity. :lol:
FWIW, my daughter despises puzzles in all shapes and forms. She draws beautifully, makes elaborate collages, etc. She just hates puzzles. It's not always a sign of vision issues.
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Perhaps while we're talking about audio books I should also ask - what do you use to play them? Do you have a designated CD player or some kind of tablet or something? I need something that is pretty fool-proof for the little ones. We have used the Librovox app on our phones but the sound just isn't that great especially if a certain 3-year-old is wiggling or otherwise making noise and whatnot. We actually do not own a CD player but there are lots and lots of audiobooks at the library...is it worth buying one?
CDs are exclusively car time for me. That's where our only CD player (minus the computer, I suppose, now that I think about it) resides, and since we live 30 minutes from anything, it works for us.
We do the phone thing, too, because my husband has this doohickey that lets me plug my phone into the sound system of the car. But generally at home I read aloud.
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I have K ,,, reading Level 1 readers ... I have OPG ... I do think it's a nice book, an I might use it to teach reading ... I just don't think it looks like much fun for them. They would do it with me for maybe 10 minutes or less, then want to go play. ...
I think 5 minutes with that book is plenty. "Hey, see this? This is how you say it." "Got it? Good. Go play." It's the snail, slow and steady, repetition that makes it so useful. IMHO. :)
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Joy Hakim's Story of Science:Aristotle Leads the Way - Chapter 1, page 1.
Yep! Thanks!
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I just got done with a teacher training on this. No, they will probably not offer Algebra I, Algebra II, etc. Common Core implementation is going for a "blended" math. Algebra I's topics have been shoved down to 8th grade math. They will then offer Math 1, Math 2, Math 3, and Math 4 (or something named similarly in your state). They've gutted a good portion of geometry, algebra II and trig (those topics are included, just not to the same extent) and replaced it with nearly a year's worth of statistics. Kids who are good at math will get "STEM" versions of Math 3 and Math 4. Everyone will have to take a version of this. There is no more conceptual math, which is a huge blow to low-IQ students.
Here's the various options:
- An approach typically seen in the U.S. (Traditional) that consists of two algebra courses and a geometry course, with some data, probability and statistics included in each course
- An approach typically seen internationally (Integrated) that consists of a sequence of three courses, each of which includes number, algebra, geometry, probability and statistics (most common implementation)
- A “compacted†version of the Traditional pathway where no content is omitted, in which students would complete the content of 7th grade, 8th grade, and the High School Algebra I course in grades 7 (Compacted 7th Grade) and 8 (8th Grade Algebra I), which will enable them to reach Calculus or other college level courses by their senior year. While the K-7 CCSS effectively prepare students for algebra in 8th grade, some standards from 8th grade have been placed in the Accelerated 7th Grade course to make the 8th Grade Algebra I course more manageable
- A “compacted†version of the Traditional pathway where no content is omitted, in which students would complete the content of 7th grade, 8th grade, and the High School Algebra I course in grades 7 (Compacted 7th Grade) and 8 (8th Grade Algebra I), which will enable them to reach Calculus or other college level courses by their senior year. While the K-7 CCSS effectively prepare students for algebra in 8th grade, some standards from 8th grade have been placed in the Accelerated 7th Grade course to make the 8th Grade Algebra I course more manageable
More details here: http://www.corestandards.org/assets/CCSSI_Mathematics_Appendix_A.pdf
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:chillpill: There is no research showing that kids who learn to read at 7 are any further ahead by 10 than kids who learn to read at 5 or 6. She may just not be developmentally ready for "sit down" schooling. 30 years ago, no one would have made her sit down to learn to read, and yet, somehow, all those people learned to read. That said, maybe she'd dig this: http://kk.org/cooltools/archives/14583
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The one item that made me lean towards classical homeschooling was the study of logic. I don't want my children to get sucked into some cult (including but not limited to the religious type, but not including actual religions) because they couldn't see through the errors in logic associated with whatever craziness is going on. I want my daughters to be rigorously grounded in logic, both formal and mathematical. (Yes, I know that they end up being the same thing.)
So, aside from the 3 Rs:
- logic
- Latin (additional logic skills!)
- piano
- cursive (even if she never uses it, she needs to be able to read cursive writing--I've had professors write it with one hand and erase it with the other)
- financial literacy
- the ability to type precisely, accurately, and quickly
- self-care (cooking, nutrition, mending, cleaning, exercise)
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All of them. I hate reading books aloud. Audiobooks from the library and Gutenberg are my friend. My dearly beloved husband takes on the task of doing the extensive daily bedtime reading.
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Not well. AKA we're having our first play date with people who live in the next town over next week. I have yet to connect with anyone in the town I live in, even though I am acquainted with some. :(
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I went to Space Camp as a kid. Loved it.
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I love books like that! Here's a short list of some I have read. YMMV for your kiddos:
- Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World
- The Story of Sushi
- The Secret Life of Lobsters
- The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell
- The American Way of Eating
- Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer
- Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us
- The Omnivore's Dilemma
- The Emperor of All Maladies
- The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right
- Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health
- Animal, Vegetable, Miracle
- Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion
- The Swerve: How the World Became Modern
- A History of the World in 6 Glasses
- Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
- 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
- Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong
- The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements
- The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?
- The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
- The Mismeasure of Man
- Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
- Debt: The First 5,000 Years
- At Home: A Short History of Private Life
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We did K without it.
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Could it be that your mother is either jealous of having to work when you don't, or upset about having to provide housing because of it? ....But as other people are saying, your mother's words are pointing to a bigger issue. (I can't believe, for example, that she'd really want your kids to "suffer equally!")
I think she is absolutely Not Happy that I'm not leaving the house at 6:30am. But, she enjoys her work, enough so that she hasn't actually made any inquiries about retirement. OTOH, while this may be TMI, she doesn't pay for anything in the house (mortgage, electricity, etc.) So it's not like her work is providing for me.
"Suffer equally" might be a bit of an exaggeration, but she certainly doesn't see why my kids shouldn't have to deal with whatever the rest of the kids are dealing with.
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Does your kiddo love to learn?
I think that's the best question. My daughter loves to soak up knowledge when it's not "school." She had a miserable experience at her private school this winter. Ironically, I sent her there while I was working so that she could avoid the drill & kill, high-stakes testing regimen, and have lots of free play time (they were supposed to be playing 2 hours per day). That didn't work out. For example:
She came home sad in January because the teacher had them filing out 100 board charts. She could only get to 30. So I said, "Let's do it tonight, if you want, together." She was all thrilled for getting all the way to 100 before bed, and wanted to take it to show her the next day. So my husband helped her stow it in her backpack. You know what the teacher said? "Someone helped you with this, didn't they?"
When I went in to talk to the teacher about her progress in February, for the bi-annual parent teacher conferences (no grades), the only thing that the teacher found her praiseworthy of was her reading skills, which are considerably above grade level, because I taught her how to read last year. Nearly all the academic work required was significantly above grade level--and it's not that she wasn't doing it, for the most part (she's had trouble counting by rote to 100, and writing it neatly in D'Nealian), but she can quickly estimate numbers under 20, find patterns, and write dictated addition equations correctly. When I talked to the teacher about how bizarre it was that a 6-year-old felt bad about her academics (to the point of actual nightmares and tears), I got, variously: 1) Your child is just being moody and manipulative. 2) Do you push your child to be competitive? (but we don't compete in this school!) 3) Have you avoided putting your child in competitive situations before? [uh, a) she's 6 and B) she plays sports?] 4) If your child is stressed out that she's doing badly, then she needs to put some effort in. 5) Since my child isn't a behavioral problem, she is just the kind of kid who obviously needs to know something before they cover it in class, so I should pre-teach everything--and here's a list of things to cover.
Yeah, I gave my 30-day notice to break the contract at that point. I've been trying to be supportive of her interests. I shelled out $$$ to get a membership to the Carnegie Natural History Museum because she loves dinosaurs, for example. But I'm still trying to get her out of that horrible mindset from the school.
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Just out of curiosity, what standards are you using? (The Common Core that I have seen does not have mastery and distinguished levels.)
These are the state standards based upon the Common Core. I don't use them for anything in particular, other than to reassure my mother that my daughter is doing fine. Which, obviously, I've completely failed at doing. :)
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I am not clear on what it is your mother thinks you should be doing. Are you?
Oh, yes. I should be going back to work next year, and leaving my child with the cheapest babysitter available. And my older child should just "deal" with going to public school. She wants me to to work like she does, and get a pension, and cheap health benefits. (The teacher health benefits are excellent here: $168/month for full family coverage, plus a $400 deductible, and yes, teachers here get actual pensions.)
Apparently something about ordering next year's materials got a disapproving response.
Does she want you to redo K instead of going on to 1st? Does she want you to use different materials than you just ordered? Does she want you to stop homeschooling--and if so, why?
She wants me to stop homeschooling because she thinks it's foolish to depend on your husband to provide for the family. That's a whole 'nother ball of wax.
Does she think your child would do better in a brick and mortar school? And if so, on what basis?
I don't think "better" is the right word. She thinks children should just suffer equally, I suppose. That if everyone else is sending their kid, it must be OK. That I'm overreacting when I substitute and am disgusted by schools where principals "encourage" teachers to call students by numbers instead of their names, as in "12, 22, finish your worksheets. 13, sit down and stop talking." Or that it's not that big a deal when I've seen teachers sit and play on Facebook on their phones for an entire period (in front of me, the substitute!), rather than actually teach something. Or that 8-year-old children need to "learn to deal with difficult people" when their classroom teacher, whom they spend all day, every day with, yells things like, "I can't stand to see you face another second. Get out of this room!" Don't get me wrong, I think public schools serve a valuable purpose, and I think that there are some wonderful teachers, and excellent schools--but I've not been impressed by some other things I've seen.
Even though you got her to clarify her first remark, to me the whole thing is still muddy.
Me too!
ETA: And what is the competition about? Are you or her Grandma trying to get her into an elite 1st or 2nd grade program? Or is Grandma concerned that Harvard is going to reject her based on her K scores?
I have no clue what "the competition" is about. They don't even test kids into the gifted program until the 2nd grade here, and I'm not interested in having her test in. I do want her to be able to take challenging classes, but by no means do I think that "gifted" kids are a goal to be attained. BTDT myself, as a "gifted" kid, and I found it to be a miserable experience. I'd be quite happy for her to be an "average" student, to know what it means to work hard, and have good social skills. I think, maybe, possibly, Grandma is concerned that if she doesn't meet "the competition" on their level, then she won't be permitted into the more challenging classes later on.
Is it possible that Grandma is actually upset about something else entirely and this is just a convenient thing to have some other or perhaps even some unspecific unhappiness and dissatisfaction show itself?
Oh, yes, see above re: my going back to work.
I don't think, given her initial critical sounding statement, that you were wrong to ask her what she meant...but I think maybe you need to actually go farther and figure out what is actually going on.
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My focus is different. My long term objectives are different. But they achieve my goals for them and that is what matters to me.
Well, I'm iffy on my long-term goals here. I have some hopes and dreams, but I don't know if I'll have to put her back in public school at some point, because of the finances. I don't want her "behind" if that happens.
I personally think that kids should still be playing in kindergarten and not worrying about learning how to read and write. Imaginative play does so much to develop a child's brain! Kids will also pick up reading, writing, and math much faster if you wait a couple of years and introduce it when they are 7-8. I wish I hadn't put my son in preschool when he was 4 and just kept him home with me for a while reading to him and playing.
I so agree! This is why I kept her out of public school this year, and why I limited our "school" time to as little as possible this year. I have friends whose 5-year-olds seriously have 20 minutes of free play time per 7.5 hr school day!!
Just out of curiosity too, since you're quoting standards--does your curriculum teach to those standards? Or are you using some separate curriculum, then also working towards the standards as a separate thing that you feel you have to reach?
I'm wondering what "competition" your child is going to be up against that your mom is worried about, lol.
No, I'm not using a box curriculum or trying to hit the standards. I'm just trying to keep in the "flow" if you know what I mean? Just keeping it challenging without being overwhelming?
We started with Saxon Math K, and it was both boring and way too easy, so we switched to Singapore Math Essentials for K in mid-March and did the first book in 3 weeks. We kept the calendar bit from Saxon because she likes it, and did some of the worksheets because she likes to color. We finished up the calendar prompts and worksheets last week. The second book in Singapore Math is taking her a little bit longer, but we should be done with it by mid-June, I think.
We started with HWT (because even though she adores drawing and has excellent fine motor skills, she resisted writing), and then she spent 4-months at a private school for kindergarten her teacher insisted on making her re-learn how to write in D'Nealian (long, painful story) and gave her grief about her handwriting. So then, when I brought her back home, I figured since she mastered most of the D'Nealian, I'd reinforce it with some easy print-out worksheets, doing a letter per day, which we finished up.
We've been working through OPGTR (Lesson 79 today) and PP (page 88 today), but not stressing about it. She voluntarily reads stuff at the 3.5 - 4 grade level, so all I want to do is formally introduce her to all of the phonemes and rules for their use.
We did the first Kumon telling time workbook because she wanted to learn how to tell time, and it's low-stress and easy to do, and now we're on the second book. We do two pages (1 page, front and back) per day.
Today we finished "school" in less than 20 minutes.
She also does a drop-in art class that she loves, gardens with her father, does dance class, swimming lessons, and soccer, and watches entirely too much TV. Up until the last month or so, I was thinking I'd send her to public school in the fall simply because of the finances, but now that I have the chance to keep her home, I will. I was not happy with three weeks she spent learning how to fill in bubble sheets at her private school.
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To clarify, my mother's opinion matters to me both because we live together and I'd like her support, and because she's BTDT and got the T-shirt, so I like to touch base with reality occasionally. ;). I can be really overbearing with my kid sometimes, so I want to make sure she's not sacrificed on the altar of my expectations. Plus, isn't it nice to discuss curriculum with other people sometimes?
That said, it's not a matter of testing for me. It's just me checking off the CSOs and making sure my curriculum isn't out to lunch. (Not that I think Singapore Math is outré) I know she can hit those standards because I watched her do it.
But, yes, I really do believe those standards are developmentally inappropriate for most kids (& I'm not the only one: http://www.edweek.org/media/joint_statement_on_core_standards.pdf
It irritates me to feel like I'm somehow doing my child a disservice by not pushing her to compete with theoretical peers doing developmentally inappropriate work. I feel like it's insanity multiplied.
Spelling, Phonics, Grammar for a 1st Grader?
in K-8 Curriculum Board
Posted
Sounds like my daughter (reading about 3 grade). FWIW, my daughter is weird and likes dry things in 5-minute doses. She hated the BOB books, and adored 100 EZ Lessons. *shrug* So, next year, for 1st grade, we're doing: