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Jackie

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Everything posted by Jackie

  1. DD and I curled up on the couch to do it, sharing the instructor book. They aren’t consumable, but it is good to be able to see it, as poetry can be visual. Maybe one book for every two kids to share to follow along?
  2. We did all of Island and Town, and parts of Voyage. There is a lot of repetition between levels, so the only book from Island that an older student might need is Sentence Island. Every single thing in the grammar, vocabulary, and poetry books are covered again in Town. Unlike others, we really like the writing instruction in Town and Voyage. Thus far, it’s the only writing program that has really clicked for my daughter to develop academic writing. The vocabulary books were great. That’s totally my kid’s thing. The poetry was solid, though rather focused on dead white folks. It was super repetitive between levels, so we did not do the Voyage book. The grammar . . . Yes, it is thorough. It also gets really dry a couple levels in, and is extremely repetitive. Overall, we started out loving MCT. The whimsy was exactly what drew my daughter in. Unfortunately, all the whimsy is gone by Voyage level, and I doubt we continue past it.
  3. Moving across country. Again. This will involve a two week road trip, stopping along the way to see friends and family. Other than that: - Athena’s Philosophy class - Epsilon Camp (Online this year) - a week camping with relatives she hasn’t gotten to see due to the pandemic - a week of watersports camp
  4. The story is all over in gifted forums, especially ones from parents of profoundly gifted kids. Many STEM-focused colleges expect that students enter with Calculus BC done, and a math sequence that doesn’t start Algebra until 9th grade doesn’t allow for this. A lot of smart kids are already bored out of their minds with the pace of math instruction.
  5. Thanks all! She is working through the book Twisting Arms now. I have They Say/I Say on the shelf but am a little hesitant to use it because she is often resistant to formulaic approaches; I can probably work with it, though, and it’s about the right level. Thank You for Arguing, The Art of Persuasion and learning about logical fallacies are all ideas we can use. I talked to her about debate, but I can’t find anything near me open to homeschoolers; she’s kinda burnt out on everything being online right now. It’s definitely something to keep in mind for the future.
  6. Being more persuasive? She tends not to really give much credit to the other side of an argument, which makes it hard for her to argue against or carefully consider issues. She is very “from the gut” in her opinions, though she absolutely understands the necessity of research. For example, I mentioned today that debate teams usually have topics to research, but they are assigned a pro/con side, and she was horrified at the idea that she would truly have to vigorously argue a side she didn’t believe in. Also, she would lie to learn how to be more . . . Sneaky? . . . In her approach to arguing. Here, I am thinking along the lines of how books like The Hate U Give or A Long Walk to Water or A Little Piece of Ground are obviously written to share a certain experience and engage the readers and persuade them to a place of understanding but don’t sit there and lay out research.
  7. My daughter wants to learn how to create better arguments. We’ve been working on some persuasive writing and she has enjoyed it, and wants to improve. She is about to turn 11, has strong reading skills, and is generally resistant to writing and this will go down best if it focuses on argument building and not so much on the writing itself. I was thinking about building an English class for next year based on the theme of persuasion - literature, propaganda, writing exercises, and how to build the most effective arguments. Not afraid of controversial topics as she already follows at least some news and we are a fairly open family. Suggestions for resources?
  8. Build Your Library might be another option. if you’re interested in outsourcing a bit, choosing a solid math program she can do at home or online, plus maybe literature classes from Online G3 or similar might work for some core classwork. She could still do interest-based science and history. She could even be in charge of designing her own program and creating her own checklist.
  9. We have used many classes through Athena’s Academy and love them. They are with an actual live teacher, discussion is usually lively, and the classes are generally engaging. Athena’s is aimed at gifted kids, with courses chosen by ability level instead of age level. I wouldn’t attempt to do all my daughter’s schooling through online classes, but having her take some stuff through Athena’s allows me to focus on the other stuff.
  10. Didn’t see this the first time around. We use Alcumus as our primary set of problems. In other words, DD learns from the book with me but all her independent problem solving is with Alcumus, not the book. I generally require that she work the problems independently and submit one answer. If she gets it wrong on the first try, she can call me over. I read the problem, she explains her reasoning and what she did (and, yes, this took time to develop), shows me her work (she works on a small whiteboard, so only the current problem’s work is there), and I’ll help by either finding her arithmetic error or by prompting her withanother way to approach the problem. If she were calling me over frequently, we would go back to the book for a bit and figure out what she didn’t grasp the first time through.
  11. That’s what I do. I used to staple a set of five together and put them on a clipboard in the car for DD to poke at when she got bored. She’d hand them to me to score when she finished a packet.
  12. DD took it for the fourth year a couple weeks ago. She has always enjoyed this as a low key math contest. And she says this year’s t-shirt is the best one yet. 🙂
  13. We’ve used the NWEA MAP three times now. Homeschoolboss has always been easy to work with. My daughter was testing at the 90th+ percentile as compared to 11th graders when she was in 3rd or 4th grade, so we would have stopped using the test this year (5th) if our state didn’t require annual testing, but it was great that they gave not only grade-level percentiles and grade equivalents but also the percentile as compared to all the other grades. That last bit was the most helpful information I’ve ever gotten from a test. As for reading, I’ve always found it easier to find higher level, age-appropriate material when using nonfiction. Additionally, there are many books out now that have Young Readers Editions, which are primarily marketed to middle schoolers and therefore not generally out of line with what advanced older elementary kids will be engaged by.
  14. MOEMS. One year’s test is spread out over five shorter tests. Each of the shorter tests consists of five problems and a 30 minute time limit. Depending on speed and stamina, you could simply give her however many sets of five questions make sense for her in a sitting.
  15. For me, this was always an issue. I read voraciously but didn’t always glean the meaning of unfamiliar words. Now, teaching my kid vocabulary and word roots, I have both the experience of explaining to her some context for he words and seeing a definition and thinking, “oh, *that’s* what that word means!?” I loved going through MCT’s Caesar’s English with her because the author had studied what words came up most often in classic literature and used those as his vocabulary words. I knew the vast majority, but there were definitely words I had never figured out on my own.
  16. Thames and Kosmos has a lot of wonderful kits for science and engineering. Snap Circuits are fun. Binge watching Magic Schoolbus? Documentaries?
  17. DD started taking Athena’s classes when she was 6. She didn’t really want me involved at all, so I didn’t type for her during class, but I did sometimes type up her dictated responses for the homework. I remember her complaining a bit that the chat sometimes moved too fast for her to participate, but her first few classes were almost entirely discussion-based and she was comfortable “raising her hand” and answering questions verbally. The literature classes usually start with every student being asked to type their own question for discussion at the beginning of class; due to typing speed at the time, I had her type her question in Word before class so she could c/p it into the class since she didn’t want me to do it. At ages 9-10, she’s been able to keep up dual threads of conversation - one she is participating in verbally and another she is actively participating in chat.
  18. If we cover history of science, I feel like it is easy enough to grab the Hakim books and do it myself in one way or another. I do realize this is lower level than you are talking, but it is still an option. History of math, OTOH, I haven’t found particularly good, easily accessible source for. Having a child who is very STEM-focused and advanced, this sounds like an excellent class to mix in as an elective.
  19. I would define myself more child-led than unschooling, though we’ve had periods where we fully unschooled. It has worked very well for my kid, who really enjoys and seeks out academic-type stuff but only when it is on her own terms. She has nearly full control over what she learns and how she learns it, but we have some boundaries that mean that choosing to do “nothing” isn’t a viable option. When she was younger, I would choose one thing to require and usually changed it up every month or two so that I would rotate through some basics. Everything else was chosen by her, and I’d acquire materials for her to learn it and/or for me to teach it. She has now hit middle grades (by age) and I’ve started requiring her to choose at least two core classes to commit to each school year, and to hit each of the core subjects at least twice over a four year period. She still gets most the choice over how to address those subjects, and she still fully chooses everything else. She is aware that when she hits high school age, this will change in some ways. She fully expects to go to college someday, and she knows that certain requirements will need to be met.
  20. Mostly, it’s been too long. I do know it was the first time she had ever run into a written version of multidigit multiplication or division. She’d worked those problems in her head for years and freaked out about it on paper for whatever reason. Looking at the topics just now, I remember there was stuff in the logic chapter she hadn’t yet run into. The estimation chapter was new and drove her crazy. Pieces of all the shapes chapters were new to her. But for the most part, it was rarely the concepts themselves that were new; the new part was having to actually work problems instead of passively taking in information. Also, it must have been statistics she was able to breeze through, as it fits better with my memory of timing.
  21. Yes. Her preferred math stuff is always input, not output. So, she reads mathy books and watches mathy videos, but she doesn’t actually work a math problem that isn’t assigned. So, there were lots of concepts in BA that she was familiar with but had never worked a single problem that used the concept before getting to it in the workbook. She often got stuck on problems (and was still having meltdowns when she got stuck back then, so I remember it well!), but once she figured it out, she would immediately learn from it and zoom on ahead. She does clearly learn from the books and videos. We hit one chapter in BA5 that she declared boring because there was nothing new. She had never worked a single problem within the topic before, and she admitted that. I told her if she could work the starred and challenge problems, I’d move her on, and she completed them in about 90 minutes and was done. She is not a fast worker, but apparently she knew enough probability from somewhere to make that chapter too easy. This was not the case at any point in level 3 or 4, but showed up a few times in level 5.
  22. We pieced together lots of stuff for math over time, and adapted a lot of resources. I did not want to reinvent the wheel. (I was already reinventing various wheels for language arts, history, and science half the time.) Beast Academy worked very well for us. We needed almost no supplementation or extra problems, and frequently could skip some problems as DD didn’t need the level of repetition in the books. BA2 wasn’t out at the time, and neither was the online version. She did BA 3-5, then skipped Prealgebra and had no significant problems with the AOPS Intro to Algebra material. There are kids who do quite well with the program. DD is extra mathy, really loves understanding how math works, and thrived with BA.
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