Aras
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Posts posted by Aras
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I don't use the paid curriculum, I used their Engineering Adventures curriculum. That is free and it was developed to be used for after school programs geared towards 3rd-5th graders. You have to fill out a quick survey to be able download it. You can buy classroom kits that provide supplies and teacher's manuals, but the downloaded teacher's manual and student books were easy to print and I found all of the supplies I needed at Walmart and Lowe's.
http://eie.org/engineering-adventures/
I used the Earthquake Engineering unit as a 6 week coop class that had 9yos to 12 yos and it was really wonderful. I loved it and the kids loved it. I am planning on doing the rest of them! My son said, "That was really fun and awesome." My daughter said, "I love engineering!" It was time well spent!
They have also developed a free series for middle schoolers called Engineering is Everywhere. I haven't used those yet.
http://eie.org/engineering-everywhere
I hope that helps :)
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I have my eye on these for later years. It's not a text, but the series seems to cover most of history, and it looks very interesting to teach history with. As far as I know, they are secular.
I purchase the first two volumes of those books on the advice of someone here at the hive. The text is teeny-tiny and very dense. There are some nice pictures but there aren't a lot of them compared to the k12 Human Odyssey and the white Kingfisher History Encyclopedia that I own. I thought the books were nice, but I felt they were meant for adults or maybe high school age.
Eta: They are secular.
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MEP
Engineering is Elementary
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Thanks for sharing!
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I am a Junior Girl Scout Leader. It does take up some of my time, but I don't let it monopolize my life.
I kept my troop small because I didn't want to deal with the logistics of a large troop. We could probably have a meeting every week and attend some sort of activity every weekend, but we choose not to do that. We used to meet every week, but I felt that was too much pressure on me, so now we meet twice a month. I am just not willing to commit that much of my time and money, or the troop's time and money. All of the girls in my troop have siblings that also have activities that require time and money commitments.
It is great that you volunteer, these organizations couldn't function without volunteers. But as a volunteer you can set your boundaries. The parents of my girls honor my boundaries because they don't want to take on the Troop Leader position.
I try to keep an open dialogue with the girls, and we make the meetings what we want it to be. We ditched the journeys because they were lame. We play board games, draw, make homemade jewelry and other crafts. They picked the badges they wanted to do, they chat and form some really nice bonds. We don't have big ceremonies with a lot of pomp because they aren't interested in that either.
That is the way I make it work for me. I have ended up in a lot of time consuming volunteer roles and I can tell you there will always be one more thing to do. No one will ever say, "You are taking on too much." It will never end until you drawn your own line.
I really like Girl Scouts and what it gives my daughter. I hope you can find a better balance with it. :)
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I save paper bags, cardboard boxes, binder clips, clear packing tape, cardboard tubes, straws, rubber bands, jar lids, pipe cleaners, bits of string and wire, popsicle sticks- all sorts of random junk, really. My son is a builder/found art sculptor and my daughter is merrily along for the ride.
For a while my two were on a kick where they were making paper armor and weaponry. Watching them accidentally hit themselves with their homemade nun chucks gave me quite a giggle! Then it was the mini army made of pipe cleaner soldiers. Then it was the spaceship made out of multiple cardboard boxes taped together. Then it was the homemade bow that shot arrows 50 feet in the air. I don't tell them what to make, I just try to leave out as much raw materials as I can.
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I loved the Ascent of Man from Bronowski!
Take a look at The Medieval Machine by Gimpel, I read it in high school and found it very interesting. I have also been watching the How We Got to Now miniseries on PBS with my kids. I really like the way it connects disparate ideas and inventions and shows how they lead to our modern life. I think the series is based on a book, but I haven't seen it.
I love your list and I am bookmarking it! Thanks :)
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:grouphug:
I have a close family member who is also bipolar. It took at least one hospitalization, medication, and counseling to get it under control. There is hope at the end of the tunnel, but I think you have done what you can at this point. She needs outside intervention.
It is hard to cope while it is happening, I'm sorry.
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It might help to pare down some of the lesson. The curriculum was written for a classroom where a teacher has to deal with students at different levels of understanding.
If you look at the top of each lesson plan you will see 3 letter codes: R=revision (review), C= concept?, E=extension. So for example in Year 2- lesson 93, the review is sequences and mental calculation, the main lesson is multiplication and division in context, and extension for the advanced students is the concept of half, fifth and tenth.
If you feel your kids are fine with the concept review, you can skip the review activities. If you feel they are ready for a little challenge, you can do the activities that have "extension" written in the margins next to it. Since it is a spiral curriculum, they will come back around to those extension concepts later, so the extension activities can be skipped also.
There are two blogs that helped me a lot when I made the switch from SM to MEP, they might help you too.
http://ohpeacefulday.blogspot.com/search/label/Mathematics
http://fisheracademy.blogspot.com/search/label/MEP%20math
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Hilarious! I love it!
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Thanks for the link Tanaqui. According to that site my kids are average. I still have concerns, but I guess the situation isn't as dire as I thought it was.
I do think more reading is in order. I am not sure how effective those vocabulary programs are, when I was in school we copied out definitions and wrote our own sentences. It felt like torture at the time ;)
Farrar- thanks for sharing your experience with that section. It's nice to know we weren't the only ones having trouble with that. The section is skipped and we are moving on.
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My son doesn't like it when I invite homeschool families over and they invade his room and mess up his lego creations. It was causing him a lot of anxiety and frustration. Now, when I invite them over, his space is off limits. That seems to help. We still have plenty of board games and video games for them to play in the common areas of the house. Maybe that is some of the issue when your daughter doesn't want to invite other kids over?
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I have been making them look up words in the dictionary, but I'm not sure if they skipped the dictionary step with the problems they got wrong. It was supposed to be a semi-independent exercise ;)
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Thanks for the input. I think we will skip the verbal analogies for now and work on vocabulary building. There is so much to learn, I try not to get discouraged. They have come a long way already so that is my current mantra!
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Oops, my sig used to have that. They are 10 and 11, both in 5th grade.
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I took my children out of ps a year ago now. I quickly realized they were not at the place I thought they were in reading, spelling, and mathematics. So much for "leaving it to the professionals." Anyway, so last year and this year are huge catch-up years.
This year I decided to add in some logic exposure so we started Logic Countdown. It had small bites and it is somewhat independent. Logic Countdown has a lot of word analogies and they are getting quite a few of them wrong because their vocabulary is not what it should be, IMO. But they enjoy the brain exercises of the logic puzzles.
So should I turn LC into vocab and logic work, which might kill their enjoyment of it? Should I add in a vocab program along the lines of Sadlier-Oxford? Should I try one of CTC's Mathematical Reasoning books instead and wait for their verbal ability to catch up? We read classics together, but this might take a while.
Thanks for any input.
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What about America's Test Kitchen online cooking school? A friend of mine also has a budding chef and she signed up for these online lessons. He really enjoys them. She is also quite the chef, but I think he wanted something he can do on his own.
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I wouldn't use all three together.
We dropped SM this year in favor of MEP. We really loved the Process Skills book and those are the only parts of SM that we will continue with. MEP has a lot of cool puzzles similar to those in the SM IP books. In MEP, the 5th day of each week is supposed to be independent review work. When I print those off I put them in a separate binder as work they can do in the car or when I'm too busy to do one-on-one math. I haven't used Beast Academy with my kids so I can't say anything about that.
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McGraw Hill has a support website for their school curriculum in Spanish. If you look under the "Conexión con el hogar" heading you will see link called "Cartas y Actividades" that have those little printable readers for each grade level.
Hope that helps!
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Oh! I really enjoyed his book, The Language Instinct. I looked at the rest of his bibliography and it is really interesting. I guess I have some reading to do!
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This is a thread about logic.
I haven't used Art of Argument, but I am going to try it when the time comes. I did not like Fallacy Detective at all!
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Hmmm, good things to think about. Thanks for telling me about your experiences.
At our current posting, we live in a very small town that has a Walmart and Dollar Tree as our prime shopping choices. The nearest bookstore is 45 minutes away. If I want a "real" city I have to drive an hour and 15 minutes in one direction or 2 hours in another. Despite being a small town, there are no sidewalks and it is not bicycle friendly. The internet is my "mall" now, lol.
I know it could be worse, but I am definitely over this place.
Our dream location, according to my Dd, is a bicycle friendly town where we can ride our bikes in to do a little shopping, then ride home without fear of death. My son wants to live near the ocean and go swimming every day. I would like us to live off post and get to know the culture. I think I would miss the snow, but Alaska is just too much for me!
Long shot-looking for resources about breakdown of materials in the environment
in General Education Discussion Board
Posted
I saw a book in a store once called Recycling Projects for the Evil Genius, it had some really cool projects. It wasn't what I was looking for at the time, but I put it on my wish list for future reference. I think there were some projects where you recycled certain types of plastics into plastic building materials.
http://www.amazon.com/Recycling-Projects-Genius-Russel-Gehrke/dp/0071736123