I find myself doing a good bit of this, as well. I absolutely consider supplementing or reviewing what I was taught in school as expanding upon my education. Whether I ought to have been better taught, or more engaged, or enabled to retain the information well is irrelevant - clearly I wasn’t!

Do you believe that continuing to expand upon your own education in adulthood is a necessary component of improving your child(ren)’s educational experience? If so, how do you go about doing this? What topics have you learned about? Who led the selection of topics that you learned about?Do you primarily study ahead, or co-learn? Partially related / partially tangential: How do you keep track of ideas or methods that inspire you in relation to education: in your head, as a series of links & bookmarks, a commonplace book or something digital that is akin to one?

For me, it’s the formulaic dryness of it. Language has the potential be dynamic, complex, & beautiful. My experience of written composition in public schools reduced language to a box-checking exercise. A topic no one would ever have willingly chosen was assigned. You were expected to address it with an introduction, five single-clause sentences each for three body paragraphs, and a conclusion that restated the introduction almost verbatim. Any deviation from the formula was marked off. This standard largely reigned until high school AP literature courses, at which point a few “flourishes” were allowed & paragraphs or essays were expected to be longer... but there was little guidance to achieve that & many had become entrenched in the 5-paragraph format. There was no discussion of phrases, clauses, modifying word order or sentence length to increase interest. We didn’t have the shared vocabulary to discuss why some things worked in a composition while others didn’t, why some writing was better than other writing. Those of us who read broadly & frequently could often imitate better writing, but we didn’t really comprehend what we were doing. Even at the university level, my first-year composition professors were bogged down with teaching the class how to write complete sentences. *sigh* I look forward to hearing others’ views re: what composition ought to look like, as we are in the thick of getting started with that!

So, just checking my comprehension here... the basic formation of a day, in today’s words, would look something like this? Morning Grammar review by recitation Reading of great works followed by class discussion, quiz over newly learned materials, & composition assignment Grammar lesson followed by grammar assignment Class contest Afternoon Recitation of memory work Latin lecture Greek lecture, followed by written work in Greek Class contest *Grammar being understood to mean syntax, mechanics, linguistic devices, poetics & also memory work pertaining to the aforementioned.

I really liked this idea & spent some time kind of tinkering with it. I’m sure others’ perceptions shift these pieces around a bit, but this is what I came up with as an interpretation of my own perspective:

This sort of approach to unit studies - where the individual learner is being watched & planned for - prevents the issues I mentioned above. The child is already intrigued by / engaged with the idea & that is the key to absorbing the material. The problem lies in assigning unit study topics arbitrarily - either because the curriculum said XYZ unit should be next or because when you, as the teacher, planned out the year you decided December’s “theme” would be weather.

Oh, I totally agree that it isn’t easy! 😅 We actually have moved away from unit study style work toward more project-based & problem-based work because I found contriving unit studies exhausting for the pace at which DS moves through material. There was never enough, or there was far too much (he lost interest) & my effort felt wasted. Attempting to let DS lead them brought us face-to-face with some of the pitfalls you mentioned. So for now we stick to micro-units inspired by rabbit trails he’s already had his interest piqued by or things with a definite scope & finale!

I think this problem tends to arise when the units are teacher/parent/curriculum-lead rather than student-led. They feel artificial & forced because they ARE. They take a lot of energy on the teacher’s part because the learner largely isn’t putting work into the planning or implementation. For the same reason, I don’t think as much content is absorbed as would be from a study that is driven by the learner. That’s not to say that they have no value; they can be fun if everyone involved enjoys them... but my preference is to follow the learner’s lead.

My nearly-7yo DS will be getting an 18” doll for Christmas as well. He wasn’t drawn to the boy dolls as much as the girls; I got him a girl with a kitty-print top & a “pet” kitten. This is in addition to the dozen or so stuffies (mostly - you guessed it - cats!) & the baby dolls he already owns. I have no doubt that he will love it! He’s also getting (from either us or extended family): an R/C monster truck, LEGOs, MadLibs, die cast cars, a video game, a Playmobil bus, PlayDoh, a larger metal construction vehicle for outdoor play, a light-up tracing pad, an airplane play set, a magnetic poetry kit, & a couple of tabletop games. His interests are pretty diverse (although jeez on the “things that go” - LOL). I see that as a wonderful thing! ☺️

Our #1 is time as a family. DH’s career has him gone quite a lot, with an unusual & unpredictable schedule that does not accommodate the “standard work week” well. This year in particular involved an unanticipated international relocation followed by several consecutive months of him being gone for training. It was so nice to be able to take time to spend time with him without worrying about DS “falling behind” in a new school or being reported for truancy. We take advantage of the ability to experience many more museum exhibits, field trip opportunities, & festivals. We schedule errands, appointments, & individual extra-curricular activities at off-times - which seems like a small thing, but can add so much free time to your days! We plan to travel extensively in the future. We’ll need another year or two to settle in Stateside, but after that we hope to have a significant portion of our historical and cultural studies be done “on location.”

If you mean by attempting to teach him to “beat the test”, absolutely not - it is unethical & completely invalidates his score. He ought to get into the program (or not) entirely on his own merit. If you mean to alleviate jitters by giving him some vague idea of what will happen that day, then sure.

We suspect as much, however he has not been formally assessed. For the sake of transparency, I do think I ought to mention that his work here is heavily scaffolded. He used NaNoWriMo’s YWP materials to design his characters / setting / plot in advance & I have helped him throughout with keeping his story focused & moving forward along that plot line. That’s not to say it isn’t a huge accomplishment, though - we are both very proud of his hard work! We actually never got to the rest of MCT this year, but he big-puffy-heart loved the parts we did last year! I do acknowledge that this is advanced work. I’ll admit I was thinking 1 or mayyybe 2 grades advanced, & from your comments it seems I still underestimated. It can be hard when you don’t have anything else to compare to! My primary goal is just to keep things engaging enough that it continues to nurture his natural interest. ☺️

Thank you for the feedback! I knew that quotation marks weren’t commonly used at his age - I taught him those because he was “getting lost” when re-reading his work - but I had thought that capitalization & end marks were pretty standard first-grade fare. I plan to focus primarily on spelling & word choice (he has recently begun expressing a desire to use “fancy / special” words) with paragraph formation being something of a stretch goal. I would like him to do some nonfiction writing, as that is something he has almost no experience with. I’ll be sure to keep a close eye on his enthusiasm level - if it wavers we can easily shelve the goals & focus on just the fun stuff 😊

Thanks; he’s been working on it since mid-November. Alllllmost done 😅

We are in the US now, as well - we moved back this summer. I will ask about this.

A bit of both. There are certainly sensory things that help him calm down when overstimulated (firm hugs) but the energy level is pretty constant & often the only solution is finding a way for high levels of activity to happen in a way that is suitable to the environment. He definitely requires increased movement to focus on challenging tasks. Having adequate intellectual stimulation is the thing that helps the most. Unfortunately, his father’s is one of the few. An ADHD diagnosis makes obtaining a first-class medical exceptionally unlikely & use of any of the medications will bar him entirely. If he has ADHD, that’s fine - being able to help him is far more important. If he doesn’t, though & is misdiagnosed I suspect that could be really difficult to have officially removed from his records.

Assuming it turns out to be a representational assessment, this evaluation will be able to differentiate between hyperactivity as a symptom of an attentional issue vs a sensory issue, right? The primary reason we are pursuing this is to make that distinction. We want solid data rather than purely trusting our guts, particularly as an attentional deficit diagnosis will prevent DS from being able to follow in dad’s footsteps career-wise (possibly moot, but we’d really like to avoid misdiagnosis).

Yes, those scores were from his initial assessment in March. Unfortunately our relocation was unanticipated & extremely short-notice (a matter of weeks) so we weren’t able to repeat the tests before leaving. The headaches, resistance to reading, & tracking issues have all either disappeared or improved dramatically. Yes, his tasks included work with flippers (which he HATED) + red/green bars, as well as some near / far activities that I don’t know the appropriate terminology for.

This is a good thought; thanks. I should probably go ahead & try to book one before our insurance cards come in... if I wait it might not happen before the assessment.

It’s likely that the procedures followed, testing chosen, therapies offered, & terminology used are all different due to where we were. Hong Kong is incredibly traditional / clinical. The VTOD we saw was literally the *only one* who worked with kids who had developmental vision issues other than amblyopia. I really didn’t care for him much (he was kind of a jerk about DS being so “busy”) but he was something of a necessary evil given our options for helping DS at the time.

Yes, the overall conclusion was a combination of convergence & accommodation insufficiency as well as difficulty with the saccadic eye movements necessary for smooth reading of near print. He is presumed to be 2E (guess we’ll find out soon!) & yes, he was / is reading above grade level - though not dramatically so. We sought out the VTOD because he had been “stuck” at the same reading level (around J/K) for a full year & was complaining of headaches when trying to read. Since spending a few months on the tracking exercises, he has advanced another grade level & has begun reading for pleasure.

I’m sure this is at least partially true, as well. The VT was simultaneously very bland & very difficult. I was stunned at how poorly DS did on the directionality assessment, as he hadn’t ever shown significant reversals in his writing & didn’t mis-read similar letters (b,d,p,q). I never would have believed it if I hadn’t watched him do the assessment myself.

This could be it. His tracking difficulties only surfaced with reading - once text began shrinking & lines moved closer together. His gross-scale tracking (catching a ball, doing soccer / tennis drills) seems fine.

Kind of a splinter question... Something isn’t adding up for me, so if someone who better understands could explain that would be greatly appreciated. Last year, at age 6, a developmental optometrist assessed DS. He documented Accommodation Dysfunction, Severe Visual Tracking Dysfunction (1st %ile), & inadequacy in directionality (10th %ile). He definitely had severe tracking difficulty when we took him to see the VTOD. He was dependent upon a bookmark to keep his eyes on the correct line of text after more than a year of reading at a similar level & the tracking exercises helped tremendously. He struggles with attention, focus, & spatial awareness. A year earlier, At age 5, an OT gave him the Beery VMI & he scored above average for both visual motor integration & visual perception. He has always had excellent (clear, straight, consistent) handwriting. He excels at age-appropriate mazes & hidden pictures. Don’t these results contradict one another? If not, what is the difference in what is being assessed?

DS enjoys storytelling / creative writing. He’s just shy of 7; halfway through 1st grade. He likes BIG projects, so this year he’s written a play & a short story (still in progress). I’m happy with his penmanship & the volume of writing he produces (the sample below is 2-3 days’ work). I’d like to get feedback on his spelling / mechanics. Next year’s goals are to work on paragraph formation, increase variety in word choice, learn to write a nonfiction “report” (one paragraph) & continuing to improve spelling. Is there anything else we should pay particular attention to?