[Nontraditional subjects e.g. economics, psychology, statistics]

I like the idea of teaching Psych in elementary. I went to Rainbow Resource under Science then Psych and found Psych for Kids. It's grades 3-9 but it's been discontinued. Maybe a unit study approach with library books and a topics to cover list?

 

Thanks. A unit study might be the way to go. Sort of hoping someone out here knows of a list of useful books kind of like what I linked to in my previous post for economics?

 

My 7.5yo was asking me about bell curves etc day before yesterday. Maybe I can adapt something for older kids for him, since he's good at math. I just think statistics and economics are subjects that get way too little attention in most K-12 eduction while being very important for creating well-educated citizens/voters. Not that that means they have to be covered in 3rd grade.

 

Curious whether anyone teaches other odd subjects (not that econ, psych, and stat are odd... but they are for elementary grades).

[Nontraditional subjects e.g. economics, psychology, statistics]

We're going to do an economics unit from Moving Beyond the Page this summer. You might like to look at their offerings.

 

Thanks. I'm a little disappointed I can't look inside the books though to see what they're like (they don't even list the number of pages the books have). Have you bought the book yet? What's it like (knowing you haven't gone through it with your child though)?

 

I did remember though I saw a DK Eyewitness: Economy book at the library. My son hasn't liked the Eyewitness books yet, but he might as he gets a little older and improves his reading a little more (Amazon says they're for grade levels 3+, which makes sense).

 

I also came across http://econkids.rutgers.edu/top-5-books-by-concept-econmenu-155 which lists childrens books featuring economics concepts.

[Accents]

I'm new, so I guess that means you can start to read my posts with the correct accent from the beginning, no? I grew up in The Netherlands, so I've got a Dutch accent (I'm sure you can YouTube some of those). It's worse when my parents are visiting. Before meeting my spouse I didn't realize that the 'a' and 'e' sounded differently, nor that a 'd' at the end of a word isn't pronounced like a 't' (leading to the mistake of asking "do you like rat meat?" rather than "red meat"). Took some effort, but I get them right almost all the time now. My 'th' could use some work, and of course my 'v' leans towards a 'f' and my 'w' towards a 'v'. All fairly minor though - people understand me the first time I say something without any trouble. 

 

Incidentally, I've had it happen plenty of times that people thought my Texan spouse and I were from the same place. Don't know what's up with that, other than that I use the word y'all (which now that we live in WNY gets me some odd looks at times). People often guess I'm Irish or Swedish, although I think the guesses have covered pretty much all of Europe by now.

 

When I gave birth to my younger son we were living in Texoma, and in the county we lived in people had 'some' accent, but the next county over had a much stronger accent. For financial reasons I gave birth in the hospital in the next county over and one of the nurses told me I had quite an accent. And I just kind of looked at her, because her accent was soooooo strong.

[Ignoring certain rules--am I wrong?]

I think I see a difference between doing something hard and doing something embarrassing.  I see value in doing hard things, but things that are just embarrassing?  I'll try to help my kids skip those every time.

 

 

But asking for help when you're feeling embarrassed *is* hard. Or at least for a lot of people it is. I think it is useful to be able to take something you feel embarrassed about, realize that everybody has embarrassing stuff happen at times, and to shrug it off (and sooner or later be able to laugh about it). That doesn't mean that I'd send a kid to camp without supplies etc knowing that her period is expected to happen during that week - I don't see value in artificially creating embarrassing experiences. I just don't think it's a such a big deal that it warrants breaking cell phone rules for.

 

[Ignoring certain rules--am I wrong?]

I don't think I'd be any more comfortable having to ask something embarrassing now if I'd done it more often as a kid.  I have a different list of embarrassing or hard things to ask now than I did then, but I do what I can to prepare so I don't get into situations like that and I'll do what I can to help my children avoid them too.  

 

I do think children need to learn how to deal with what might come up in their lives, but I think avoiding problems is a useful strategy too, not just learning how to deal with whatever comes up.

 

I never said I was against having a tampon in her purse. :)

 

I do think having been through at least *some* embarrassing experiences gives someone the opportunity to learn that they're not the end of the world. I don't think it really matters what those are. But when I lost my son in the grocery store event happened, my first thought (aside from grrrr) was "well, I can check that off the parenting uh-ohs everybody has happen to them" list. I really do think it's kind of like scraping your knee. To most little kids, a scraped knee is a big deal, but as they get older, they learn that it's really not a big deal. Of course, some people never learn that lesson, but trying to prevent every knee scrape is not healthy in my opinion.

 

Avoiding problems is good, so long as it doesn't get to the point where people don't know how to behave if there is a problem, or they are so obsessively trying to avoid problems it turns into paranoia.

[Ignoring certain rules--am I wrong?]

Seriously disagree.

 

Because...?

 

One of my kids ran off in the grocery store a couple of months ago. I was embarrassed. Did that mean that I didn't ask some store employee for help? No. I swallowed my pride, walked up to the first person I saw who looked like he worked there, and said "I lost my son". He was retrieved pretty quickly. Maybe I should have given him a cell phone so I could have just found him by tracking his phone's GPS signal (although I think the resolution is not good enough to help much since I already knew he was in the store).

 

Besides, all a 12yo girl would have to say to a male coach would probably be "I need a phone because my period" and the guy would probably make her stop talking and hand over his phone ASAP. Most probably don't want to hear *any* details.

[Ignoring certain rules--am I wrong?]

If your daughter has a menstrual cycle issue, do you want her to have to ask her male coach to use his phone and explain why?  

 

Yes. I think learning to ask for help even if you're feeling embarrassed is a very useful skill to learn.

[Ignoring certain rules--am I wrong?]

ETA (Re:  the second bolded statement):  If some kid felt the need to text secretly and disappear without a trace, that speaks volumes about the trust and confidence they have in the organizers of the activity.  She obviously felt the need for intense secrecy and there was no trust at all there.  That sends warning flags to me, big time, maybe because my kid was in a position where we didn't trust the adults in charge. 

Haven't figured out multiquote yet. Quote above was about some girl calling her boyfriend to pick her up during some activity.

 

Maybe she felt the need for intense secrecy so she could sneak off with her boyfriend and do things some teenagers do when they're alone, unsupervised with their boyfriends. Doesn't necessarily say anything about what the girl thought about the organizers.

 

I sent my now 7.5yo to a 4 night camp last summer without a cell phone (it had a "no electronics" policy). I spent a year abroad in Thailand as an exchange student in 2002-2003 without a cell phone. I think kids without special issues should be able to manage going to some activity without a cell phone without losing life or limb (fwiw, wrt some other comment, a kid would also survive not having indoor plumbing for a day). That said, I do break rules I think are stupid if it suits me to break them.

[Toe by Toe?? weird name...]

I started it with my oldest DS the summer after he finished K (at public school). He was reading at a late 1st grade level at the time (so technically ahead, not behind), but he was a sight word reader. He could sound out 'cat' because he'd heard it done so many times at school, but he couldn't sound out any other CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) word, let alone anything more complex than that. What I really liked about Toe by Toe is that it had that many nonsense words - words he could not use his awesome sight word skills on. We worked on it daily throughout that summer between K and 1st, and then less frequently since. I haven't touched it, since laster summer (summer between 1st and 2nd grade), and he's back to completely guessing and sight reading because his teacher at school doesn't make him sound things out, so you get mistakes like Mount Merapi (some volcano) being read as Mount Mississippi (I'd be okay with him mispronouncing Merapi, if at least he'd try to sound it out. His spelling is similarly messed up. Planning on homeschooling him for 3rd grade, and we need to get back to doing Toe by Toe again (made it 2/3rds of the way in last time), and just spending a lot more time making him sound things out.

 

So, yeah, I think it is a good program, especially if you have a kid who already knows a lot of words by sight and needs nonsense words.

[Algebra I - 8th or 9th grade?]

Here in NY, homeschooled 9th-12th graders must take a standardized test every year.  The 9th grade test lines up with Algebra 1.   Should I stretch Algebra 1 into fall of 9th grade so it's fresher in his mind by test time?  Advice?

 

Hopefully he'd keep using the Algebra 1 skills as he continues through higher math. I wouldn't stretch out Algebra 1, but maybe throw in regular review questions to make sure he's not forgetting anything (important regardless of whether you have a state test or not - calculus is harder if you've forgotten half of algebra and trig, even if you had A's in those when you took them). Also, he's going to want to keep all his algebra skills handy for the SAT.

 

As far as my own kids are concerned, too young to say (oldest is 7.5yo, youngest 4yo), but I suspect before 7th grade. I went to school in The Netherlands, and we had algebra in 7th grade (but, all secondary school math is just called 'math'). I skipped 9th grade (which involved a lot of trig), and halfway during 10th grade they started calculus (my grades were well above average, but I really should have done more trig). My 10th grade math teacher was lamenting that back when *he* was in school, they started calculus at 12yo (7th grade, I suppose - never asked him... it felt like "back in the day everything was so much better", lol... not sure I believed him anyhow - I was 14yo in 10th grade (summer birthday + 1 grade skip), but my classmates were 15, often 16 by the time they started calc in spring). Then they continued calc and other math through 11th and 12th grade - like I said, it was all just called 'math', but we did things like geometry proofs etc as well, not just 2.5 years of calc. FWIW, they've changed it since then and now they start calculus in 11th grade. This was in the pre-university track of secondary school - the vocational track (which graduates at the end of 10th grade) never got any calculus in secondary school.

[4th/5th grade goals, anyone?!]

I'd love to see my daughter start handling her work more independently as a 5th grader. I tried it this year with giving her a weekly plan listing all her work by day, but she wasn't ready for it so it flopped. She's gained a lot of maturity in just the last couple months so I'm hoping I can try again in the fall.

 

My oldest kid is 7.5 (he's actually the one in the pic with me... really should update pic), so I haven't done this yet, but when I was in school we got a weekly to-do list with thing that had to be done. At certain times the teacher would make everyone work on math or on language arts, but other times he'd say to go work on one of the things on the to-do list. So, not a daily to-do list with the entire day to be arranged by the student, but a weekly one with the days partially managed by the teacher and partially by the student (and with the ability to work ahead in some subjects or to spend more time reading/drawing as long as the other stuff got done too). 

 

Not sure if that's clear, but for things like memorizing the capital cities of some continent, it might be on the to-do list for the week, but it was up to the student to decide which day to do it. For math though there were scheduled times to work on it and a couple of hours a week that we had to schedule in ourselves. Of course, which subjects you'd want to schedule in would depend on the kid... if you have a kid who will do math all day and who will not touch e.g. language arts unless made to you might just leave the math scheduling completely to the kid but schedule some language arts time every day. And then over time you might leave larger and larger portions of language arts scheduling to the kid as well, once successful in getting the other subjects done on the weekly to-do list.

 

Again though, this was how they ran the school I attended... I have not tried this at home.

[Nontraditional subjects e.g. economics, psychology, statistics]

Hi, I'm new. I have a 2nd grader who I'm planning on homeschooling for 3rd grade, and a 4yo at home who has already mastered pretty much all there is to master in K so should probably be in 1st grade next year. Wrt my question (about nontraditional subjects) I'm mostly curious about 3rd grade, but any elementary grades will do.

 

I'm curious... does anybody cover subjects like economics, psychology, statistics or any other odd subjects in the elementary grades? I know that social studies curricula often touch on these, but that's often as far as they'll go, as far as I'm aware. A lot of these subjects would be easy to find books for at the high school or college level, but not much for elementary levels.

 

What nontraditional subjects do you teach in the elementary grades and what do you use to teach them?

 

ETA: my 2nd grader is very good at math, math-wise 4-6th grade material is fine... but his reading comp is not at the same level... that's definitely at 2nd grade level, presumably at 3rd grade level next year.