mommy2ella
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Posts posted by mommy2ella
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We just do the next thing. Sometimes DD has a problem word that she doesn't get as quickly as the rest, but I don't want to hold her back just for a word or two. We'll just add it to a "problem words" list. We keep doing those in addition to our normal lessons until she has them, then hit them periodically again later. On the list are also words that I see her misspell in her other writing. We usually have an additional list of 10 words or so we work on daily along with our AAS lessons.
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We bedschool through colds and low-grade fevers. I just pile everything up on our big bed, get a clipboard for her paperwork, and do school from there. I will tend to cut back a bit on the work if she really seems like she's not getting a lot out of it, but she doesn't take advantage. We may do less written work and more history and literature when she's feeling "off". If she has a high fever or is vomiting, she will not learn or retain anything and she needs to be asleep in bed. I know that when I am super sick, I don't even tend to remember anything that has been happening. I figure school is pretty useless at that point.
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The OZ books, if you also read the Ruth Plumly Thompson and John R Neill books.
Not sure there are 20 but there may be - the "Betsy" books by Carolyn Haywood.
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We've also loved the "A Little Maid" books by Alice Turner Curtis. Here are some set in the Revolutionary War period:
A Little Maid of Old Philadelphia
A Little Maid of Massachusetts Colony
A Little Maid of Ticonderoga
A Little Maid of Old Maine
A Little Maid of Virginia
A Little Maid of Old New York
A Little Maid of Old Connecticut
A Little Maid of Maryland
A Little Maid of Narragansett Bay
A Little Maid of Provincetown
A Little Maid of Newport
A Little Maid of Mohawk Valley
Some of them are available for free on Kindle. There are also a couple that are about the Civil War when you get there if she likes these. :)
Hope that helps!
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Is this the bottom of page 60 that you're confused about? Looks like they're finding 99^99 (so rather than ninety-nine 99's, they're finding the product of ninety-nine 99's) . If you look at the top of that page, you'll see that they've found a pattern. If you multiply a number that ends in 9 by another number that ends in 9, you get a number that ends in 1, and if you multiply a number that ends in 1 by a number that ends in 9, you get a number that ends in 9. It appears that all even exponents of 99 will cause it to end in 1, which means that all odd exponents of 99 will end in 1. 99^98 power would end in a 1, while 99^99 will end in 9.
I haven't had much coffee yet, so I hope I was able to make that make sense! :huh:
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DD would be this kid, and I am this adult. The way we avoid it for DD is to let her listen to audio CDs as she goes to sleep - and not new audio, either. Usually, it's history or science CDs that she's listened to over and over. If it's quiet, her mind whirls too much to allow her to sleep. It's the same for me. Without a book, I'm up an average of 15 times while I'm trying to fall asleep, jotting down notes about things that keep running through my head. My DH wakes up in the middle of the night most nights and has to turn off my reading light and remove the book from my face.
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We're reading The Great Turkey Walk and also William Wilberforce for read-alouds. DD is reading By the Great Horn Spoon, Madeline L'Engle's Time Quintet, and re-reading Harry Potter #4.
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I've got a daydreamer, too. What works well (when the timer doesn't panic her) is to set a timer for maybe 5-10 minutes longer than I know she needs for her assignment using full focus. So if I give her math that should take her 30 minutes if she attends to it, I'll set the timer for 40 minutes. Once she's finished and it's all correct and neat, she gets whatever time is left on the timer to do whatever she wants with before we start the next lesson. If she's got a longer lesson, I'll break it up into chunks and do the same thing. She usually finishes before I even originally thought she could, and is much more accurate, as well.
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Haven't used it yet, but I'm considering a combo of Writers in Residence and Readers in Residence for 5th grade (to address reading more intentionally), with maybe one of the CAP Writing and Rhetoric books thrown in for variety. :)
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As far as reading support, you may want to let him use Reading Eggs for a bit if you're looking for something to get him to take off in reading. It doesn't sound like he'd need it for too terribly long before he's off and running.
Another thing mine started loving at that age was logic. Mind Benders, Perplexors, etc. were, and are, a favorite around here. Some other fun games are Lab Mice and Logic Links.
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You give credit for answers that were initially wrong? Is this common? Maybe it is different where you are but here you get 0 for a wrong answer or if showing working out was required up to 1/2 for a problem where the working out was correct but a simple error resulted in an incorrect final answer. I have never heard of giving partial credit on a test to an answer that was initially marked wrong and then re-answered.
I do. I don't know if it's common, and I don't know if I'll continue it into middle school or high school, but for my perfectionist rising 4th grader it helps motivate her to try again without too much frustration. :) If she makes lots of mistakes, it clearly shows me that we need to stay on that lesson and we will not move on after the test, but she usually gets at least 90% on her tests before fixing errors, anyhow.
I do remember at least one teacher in my own grade school years giving us a chance to raise our grades by fixing our errors. I enjoyed that. It put less emphasis on the "test" to me and more on the learning.
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I really only mark up math tests. I put a "c" by correct answers and circle incorrect answers. Then, once the answers have been corrected, I put a fraction above it for the amount of credit I'll give for that corrected answer (generally 3/4 if it was just a silly error and is easily corrected, 1/2 if it was a more serious error and is corrected without any help from me, and 1/4 if she needs a hint on how to correct it and then does it right).
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Also, the worksheet generators on the website don't generate worksheets for every single lesson. Sometimes they skip lessons for reasons I cannot see.
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My DD has loved "Great Scientists and Their Discoveries" audiobook. Here's the Amazon link:
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I've sort of dealt with the problem of a lack of middle-of-the-road resources by using resources with different biases, then discussing. So we may use Howard Zinn's "A Young People's History of the United States" along with more traditional US history resources and then discuss the different biases each of the writers approached the subject with, and comparing/contrasting the events based on point of view. In that way, I figure we're covering both US History and critical thinking. :)
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We do pictures and a first day questionnaire, a yummy breakfast, a light day of school and then head out to Corvette Diner for a fun lunch and games.
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We love the combo of MUS and Beast, as well. My daughter is one who really needs to feel confident with math. MUS gives her that confidence. She feels extremely solid on the basics. She can then take the knowledge and confidence she has gained from MUS and use them to attack the BA problems. Since she has learned the basic operations already, she can relax and focus on using her knowledge in new ways to attack problems from a different angle. If I were to just give her BA, she would completely melt down.
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We started AAS in 1st grade, and she's about halfway through Level 6 right now in 3rd. Progress has sometimes slowed, and sometimes speeds ahead, but I guess she's averaging about 2.25 levels per year.
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I still have all our MUS books! She didn't like them because they were really repetitive, but I wonder if I presented it as a way to accelerate her learning if she'd bite! (I'd like to use what I have, and save my money for my college expenses!) She was in Delta last year, but I don't know where she'd be now....with ps. MUS would be good for running through 'til we find where she is at! So, how do you accelerate it? Let her just do 2 days per lesson, then test? I think that was what I was doing, but it was still 3 days on a topic, and she was balking at it. With the BA/AOPS, do you assign that every day on top of the MUS?
Honestly, I let her pick when she's ready for the test. While she likes accelerating, she also likes to feel 100% confident. Sometimes she does 1 day per lesson (one new and one review page) and is ready for the test. Some lessons she wants to do another day before she's confident. Occasionally she'll want 3 days before a test. I save whatever sheets she doesn't use in case she ever needs review on the subject. If the lesson is full of long, drawn-out problems I'll let her work on 2 lessons at once so she doesn't burn out on one type of problem, too.
With the BA or Life of Fred, we usually do that a few times a week, as we have time, later in the afternoon. If it's been a long day, we'll skip it.
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I am also struggling with breadth vs. depth. Dd wants to accelerate, and an easier program would allow easy acceleration. However, there's so much to be gained from programs like BA/AOPS that go deeper. She wants to accelerate, and I want her to have more depth. I guess we compromise somehow, but I'm not sure exactly what that would look like. Supplement with harder stuff once a week? but that might keep her from accelerating?
My DD wanted to accelerate, too, so what I did was let her accelerate through her MUS books, but I'm still following up with things that go at the concepts from a different angle, like LOF, BA, and, in a little while, AoPS. So she's starting Pre-Algebra in MUS now, but I'm thinking we'll start AoPS Pre-Algebra in a year or so, once we've finished BA and gotten up to/through Pre-Algebra in LOF, as well. It doesn't seem too repetitive to her because of the different angle, and also because she's liking the story aspect of the math so much.
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We love Frontier Girls!
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I have never used RS so I can't really compare it but...I am using MUS with two of mine that don't intuitively get math. The whole reason I use it with them is because it is very nuts and bolts. You get what you need with MUS, nothing extra.
I personally think math should be more exploration and rabbit trails. Think Beast Academy. Math U See is, imo, the antithesis of Beast Academy. But MUS has its purpose and for some kids, it really is best. Some kids need to start with something like MUS to lay down that basic foundation...and then use something else further on to explore math more deeply. You can't really follow those rabbit trails, and enjoy math exploration, if you don't have the basics, down, kwim?
I would recommend MUS, and add BA later for exploration once she feels comfortable with the basics. It's what we do. Mine lacks confidence and would melt down faced with a BA page if we hadn't really gotten the basic concept of what she's working with. I love MUS for us (and think it would be a good fit for an older kid just starting formal math) because there aren't a ton of problems per page and it's very easy to skip pages if the child masters the concept before you're done with that lesson. It's really easy to understand the lessons as Mr. Demme teaches them, and I think he gives a fantastic base, especially on place value. I also love BA because we've had absolutely no struggles with MUS, and I also want my child to learn to wrestle with tough problems. For us, they're a great match.
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I was in the same situation at that age. I didn't want to start "formal" school with her until much later, but she craved a challenge. So I found a compromise - I still didn't start math or spelling or formal reading lessons, but I did start getting a lot of easy readers and letting her go at those, helping her as she needed. I got a ton of science books to read with her, and we played with math in our daily lives. We also would do lots of puzzle/logic type games. At that age, Lollipop Logic and Can You Find Me books were fun. And, always, we read beautiful picture books for hours every day. She could never get enough of that. She also listened to wonderful audio books daily during quiet time. I think that even driven kids can have plenty to keep them happy and learning without formal school at that age, and I'm glad we waited to begin.
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When DD was struggling with long multiplication and division problems, I noticed it was (a) the sheer number of them that were on her sheet at once and (b) I was used to her working on her math completely on her own, so just left her to it once she got the basic concept. Problem was, she was getting distracted in the middle of the problem and having a hard time finding her place again. What I did was to split up the work so that she was only doing a couple of those types of problems at a time to solve problem a. For the second issue, I talked to her about what she thought would help and she told me that if I just sat next to her while she worked she could concentrate better. For the really long ones, she felt better if I watched and told her if she made a mistake in the middle so she could fix it at that point instead of getting all the way through and then coming up with the wrong answer. That was just discouraging to her. Now she's back to doing them independently again, but if she's feeling especially distractible and gets one of those problems on a review sheet, she will often ask me to come sit next to her while she does it.
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Favorite make ahead on the go lunches?
in General Education Discussion Board
Posted
Ours is bean and cheese burritos. In the morning I grill tortillas and melt cheese on them, and then get some refried black beans super NUCLEAR hot in the microwave. Roll them up into burritos and wrap in foil. They always manage to still be warm many hours later due to the ridiculous heat of the beans when I put them in. :) Throw in some sturdy fruits and veggies on the side and you're good to go!