s/o...Nan in Mass, come and elaborate!

[Pata]

Oh, how I wish this thread was around two years ago and I had read it then. I learned the hard way how important it is to stick with phonics, even after they are reading, and that there is purpose in having your child answer in complete sentences. We are a bit behind in the LA department because of it, but I'm encouraged by this thread to keep working on the progression of skills, we'll get there. Thanks again!

[Nan in Mass]

But I don't know if it will help you at all. Your circumstances are different from mine. I think it might be worth talking in this thread about what we did and what we struggled with, just in case it helps someone. These basic skills - copywork, narration, dictation, outlining, logic, grammar, vocabulary - are supposed to lead to being able to speak and write and study, but what happens between practising the basic skills and then putting them together into the adult skills? I fished around a lot, not knowing how exactly they were related and how to get from one to the other.

 

My oldest and youngest are just an engineering-minded boys. My middle one is not engineering-minded - in other words, he has some of the same handicaps without the compensating gifts. (He has other gifts but it took us quite awhile to see them because they aren't what we think of as gifts/talents in our family. When he was about 14, we finally figured it out.) (The older two are in college and the youngest is 16 and has two more years of high school at home with me and community college classes before he goes away to (hopefully) engineering school at a four-year college.)

 

Our public school, which prides itself on its ability to teach its students to write, did indeed teach my oldest how to write. He doesn't necessasily write well, but he can bang out a five page report in a reasonable amount of time. He learned this in high school. In middle school, his idea of a paper about something was three sentences. They did it via the five paragraph essay formula.

 

My middle one, the one who is wired even more differently than the standard, non-language-oriented engineering type (which runs in my family) is slower and struggled a whole lot more but ultimately is going to be a better writer than my oldest. He is much better at wording things. His writing is more elegant. He was in public school until 5th grade when we brought him home.

 

The youngest (who is also engineering-wired) came home after kindergarten. He has benefited the most from TWTM. I still didn't know how important those basic WTM skills were, though, so I didn't do enough of them. Now as I am trying to get him ready for community college science classes, I finally am putting the pieces together and realizing how those basic skills are the foundation of the later skills of understanding what you read, writing papers, answering questions, making presentations, and studying to learn material. As a result, I am posting here to try to help other people avoid that mistake. Things would have been much easier if I had done more of that. I did do some, at least.

 

But back to writing...

 

I will list out the steps my middle one did with approximate age next to them:

 

0-4 Unlike my other two, was not interested in drawing (or building things or puzzles).

4 Had fits when I tried to teach him to write his first name before going to public kindergarten.

5 Public kindergarten. He began not being able to do anything with a pencil at all. The first day, when the other children all decorated their place cards with flowers and trucks and space ships and animals, he drew one line and said it was a caterpillar. The only letters he knew were S (snake says ssss) and the first letter of his name. He couldn't make them but he recognized them. He spent the rest of the year refusing to have anything to do with letters or numbers. Instead, he focused on teaching himself to draw. By the end of the year, his drawings were advanced, according to the kindergarten teachers. They said they didn't often have children who made pictures with attempts at perspective and with things peeking in from off the edges of the page. They managed to persuade him to learn to write his name, but that was it. I couldn't imagine getting him through first grade. When I said so, the kindergarten teachers were surprised, but they said if I was worried, he could just wait a year and repeat kindergarten. Such a simple solution to such a complicated problem...

6 Second year of kindergarten. This time round his face looked more the same age as his classmates and he wasn't so obviously younger in his skills. He learned to write letters and count. He couldn't read, still, but at least he now wanted to learn.

7 First grade. Miserable for a variety of reasons. He did eventually learn to sound out words (and understood the meaning) but he couldn't really string them together to read sentences.

8 Second grade. Very nice understanding teacher. His reading and writing improved a little. The school continued to teach phonics with this complicated system of markings over the letters but they took the children who were still struggling aside and did some other things with them. They said that not everyone learns to read with phonics so at this point they like to double up and teach some other strategies in case that helps. At the end of the year, the school said that many of their children still weren't reading and writing well at the end of second grade, especially the boys, but they caught up later. This had been true of the older one so we didn't panic. They did say that I was going to have to work with him during the summer or he would not do well on the thrird grade MCAS tests (state tests that at that time the state was still telling us were just to compare schools, not individual students - hah).

9 Summer after second grade - I worked with him. He hated writing with a passion, his print was illegible, and he reversed many of his letters, so I told him we were going to do a totally new kind of writing, a grownup kind, and he never had to use print again in his whole life. I taught him cursive. I didn't use a book or anything; I just wrote things the way I had been taught and had him copy them. When he could connect the letters, I made him fill a page every day (no weekends in summer). I didn't care what he wrote. It didn't have to make sense. He just had to fill a page with words. It didn't fix his spelling or all his reversals and it wasn't neat, but it helped considerably. He went into third grade using cursive for everything and feeling good about the writing. I also made him read a page aloud to me every day. He still was reading very, very slowly, but he could at least read better by the end of the summer.

9 Third grade. This was a horrible year, despite a nice teacher who was educated about learning differences. She kept asking if we had a history of dislexia. I kept saying no. I had forgotten that my mother-in-law was dislexic and my engineer father struggled with language arts so much that a desperate teacher suggested that his mother encourage him to read comic books because at least that might get him to practise. (That was so shocking that it made it into family lore LOL. His mother was an English professor.) The school reading specialist tested him and said he wasn't dislexic. We kept saying there wasn't anything wrong with him. We should have listened to that teacher when she kept saying he was struggling more than he ought to. Or should we have? He manged to get through the system with no labels. That might have been a good thing? I don't know. Among other things, the teacher had the children doing reports that required skimming ten or so pages of small print to pick out the pertinant bits. There was no way my son could come close to doing that. It would have taken him all evening to slowly work his way through one page. At that point, we realized that school was not going to work for him because he was the sweetest child on earth and we knew that he wasn't going to be able to keep that sweetness if he continued to have to struggle. At that point, I was homeschooling (at the urging of a ps teacher) my oldest for 7th and 8th to try to renew his interest in learning, so we knew homeschooling was ok. We decided to send him to 4th grade because the teacher was great, and then pull him out after that for 5th - 8th. He took the dreaded MCAS at the end of the year and did poorly on them.

10 Fourth grade. He was reading and writing slowly and behind most of his class, but not so much that he couldn't do the work badly. He astounded everyone with how well he understood some things and how poorly he did on any written work. I'm still glad we left him in school for that year. It didn't do him any harm and he solidified some friendships, was given credit for his intelligence by the teacher, and got to leave school on a high note.

 

I have to go do trig now with youngest... back soon.

[PeterPan]

Lots of comics around here too, lol. They were my dd's first books--Calvin and Hobbes. :)

 

And I assume you know this (but for those who don't), not only does there seem to be a genetic component to dyslexia, but you can be 2E (gifted and dyslexic). So if they were looking too narrowly or seeing the dc's compensating strengths, they might miss it.

[texasmama]

Thank you for posting that, Nan. It was chock full of BTDT practical advice which this mom of elementary kids is soaking up.:001_smile:

 

Question, for anyone: then, suppose you have one of these kids who struggles with skills like narration. Suppose there's an LD involved, say, a language processing issue that results in reading comprehension difficulties :D. While obviously there needs to be a good amount of focus on the skill, what sort of timetable is reasonable? Does anyone have any gentle resources for working on the skill without making it pure torture for the student who struggles with this?

 

This is starting to remind me of one of my boys and piano. I'm making him take piano, and the more he wants to quit because it's hard for him, the more I think he needs it, for some sort of brain development, among other things. (that would be me over there, Mean Mom.)

 

I can answer the LD question. My oldest son has an LD and struggled mightily with the skills of narration and dictation in WWE. My answer was to place him a level below his grade level and work, work, work until he improved. I ignored the protests, broke it down in smaller chunks (reading one paragraph and then asking the associated leading questions) and then started this year out on the WWE level which he used the previous year because he was not ready to move on. He moved on to the next level mid-year, but I am still modifying it. We will repeat this level until it is mastered sufficiently. I am moving at his pace. He was fully capable of learning this skill. He just needed more time, more repetition and some modification from me to do it. He has improved these skills (which come naturally and easily to my younger son).

 

Also, my kids take piano lessons, too, for the same reasons. It is good for your brain. :D I don't care if they ever become concert pianists, but they will learn basic skills, in addition to having the experience of performing at a small "concert" of other students. Invaluable.:001_smile:

[Nan in Mass]

I guess it just takes awhile to explain how I went from non-writing to college writing with three children, for none of whom it was easy.

 

Continuing...

 

11 Fifth grade at home with me. I had read TWTM. The fall was miserable. He had gotten into a habit of passively resisting any written work rather than trying. He would just sit with it in front of him. In school, if he did this long enough, the work eventually went away. He'd miss a few recesses but he was very sweet and the teachers knew things were hard for him and they could only push but so hard. Eventually, they let him go out to recess again and the work went away. We couldn't do that at home. I made him sit in his seat until he had made an attempt to do what I asked. He cried tears every time I asked him to write a sentence, and he wasn't a child who could cry on purpose. We aren't a teary family. We are a stiff-upper-lip family. It killed me, but I couldn't think of any other way to teach him. It took all fall, but by Christmas, he was once again trying to write things. They were badly written and very, very brief, but he would at least put pencil to paper. We were miserable homeschooling and it took all day, so I switched to a system where we began at 7am and stopped at 2pm, no matter what. (We did this until they began community college classes when they were 16 or 17. Later, I added Latin and math homework in the evening and finishing things like projects, books, and papers on the weekends.) We did copywork. It took absolutely forever because TWTM said a paragraph was about right and I didn't think to shorten it. We tried narration and he could give beautiful one-sentence summaries of whatever 5th grade history or science we read, so we didn't do that again until physics when he was about 18 and he was unable to answer the questions in the physics book. Major mistake. I had him outline Kingfisher at least every other week but we gave up on the timeline because I thought he had to write all the dates and things on it and it took too long. (I should have said, "Pick the one most important thing and write down that.") He didn't write reports because it took too long and he couldn't really do it anyway.

We did Saxon 65 for math and I suppose it was good in that it banged the standard algorithms into him, something Chicago Everyday Math hadn't done, but it was a disaster as far as anything else went. He couldn't put the little bits together into the big picture of how each concept worked. We worked on memorizing the multiplication tables, something he had to redo at the beginning of every single year until about 10th grade. I bet he's forgotten them again now, as a sophomore in college.

We read aloud the literature selections but there wasn't much time to discuss them. Major mistake number two - if I had done this, insisting on full sentences, no matter how long it took, high school would have been easier. We tried dictation. It took forever and I didn't think to shorten it to only one sentence. Major mistake number three.

He worked through the appropriate Spelling Workout book but it didn't fix his spelling. He made the weirdest spelling mistakes. A long time afterwards, I realized that he was vaguely remembering that there was a tall letter in the word and so he stuck a tall letter in, any tall letter, making the words match the outline of the correct spelling, but at the time it was baffling. I insisted that he spell things phonetically correctly, even if they weren't standard, so I could read them. I also insisted that he make his tall letters tall, his short letters short, put spaces between his words, captalize the first letter, and put in periods so I could read what he had written.

We did Writing Strands 3, which was actually pretty good. My children carefully worded their sentences and would have hated a writing program that taught "style". Somewhere floating around on the homeschooling board is a post about how to make Writing Strands work. You can't just hand it to the child. I learned to separate the content and the mechanics and comment on the mechanics last, saying, "There are just a few technical problems I'd like you to fix."

We tried Latin Primer, with the videos, which the children loved. They didn't remember any of the words and there was no review built in, so it was a flop. I realized we needed a reading based program and we switched to Salvete! followed by Ecce Romani, which worked well. It attacks Latin whole to parts AND parts to whole, so it worked for us. Sort of. If you look at the amount of time we put in compared to how well we read Latin, you would probably say it didn't work well at all, but Latin turned out to be a very important part of learning to write for my children. It gave us a common vocabulary to use when fixing punctuation errors and disentangling too-complicated sentences. It made them write volume without having to worry about what to write. It improved their guesses about long words. It made the past more real to them (nothing like reading Roman graffiti and discovering it sounds just like modern graffiti).

He tried Abeka grammar 5 but it took so long that he never came close to finishing it.

There wasn't really any time for science. We did occasionally do some of How Nature Works, which was great.

He wasn't retaining any content.

 

12 Sixth grade at home with me. About now I began to panic about content and dropped even more of the basic things like dictation in order to try to memorize some content. This was a mistake.

He tried Abeka 6 but because the books all go in about the same order, it was a repeat of what he had done last year. I should have had him keep working in last year's book rather than advance to the next one.

 

Off to do more trig...

-Nan

[johnandtinagilbert]

I know. If we didn't have kids, it sure would be a lot easier to homeschool. :lol:

This might be the funniest thing I've ever read on the forums...in 7 years!

 

Nan, there is simply too much I want to comment on! You are verbalizing and confirming ideas that have been swirling around in my head...hearing them from a HS vet with some btdt experience truly does help me! The general idea I'm taking away is that there are skills that must be mastered, at whatever rate your specific dc needs to grow. Content can be delayed and changed as wished. Copywork-Narration-Dictation-Oulining are *extremely* important skills;to be omitted over my cold dead body. (But evaluate every year and back up as necessary to make certain these skills are growing...)

 

 

 

I'm going to reread TWTM with a new POV. I need to look more at the progression, and delete the grade levels in my head. I have to look at each skill as an individual progression rather than each grade level as a stage. phew!

 

This all makes theoretical sense...and it all sounds like a lot of work.:lol:

This has been the theme to my year: Some Skills, some content? You decide! Hindsight truly helps to see the need for which skills and also shows how content in some areas leads to stronger (or weaker) skills later.

 

Oh, how I wish this thread was around two years ago and I had read it then. I learned the hard way how important it is to stick with phonics, even after they are reading, and that there is purpose in having your child answer in complete sentences. We are a bit behind in the LA department because of it, but I'm encouraged by this thread to keep working on the progression of skills, we'll get there. Thanks again!

Yup. I learned the "continue phonics" lesson the hard way.

Nan and Elizabeth, thanks for sharing your wisdom. It is wonderful to get the gleanings of experience. In my case, the confirmation is wonderful and the thought provoking is priceless. Sending so much love to you both.

[MamaReads]

Another fan here, thank you to all of the veteran homeschoolers who have taken the time to post. It is easy to get bogged down in the content and lose sight of the skills and this is a great post to galvanize my beliefs about what is the best education for my children.

 

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

 

Jesi

[TracyP]

Oh Nan! It's like a good book and you keep making me put it down.:D Thank you so much.

[Guest aquiverfull]

I have thoroughly enjoyed reading your posts Nan. I'm in the BTDT camp, though I have not yet traveled as far as you have. Copywork, narration, dictation, spelling, writing of any kind has been so tough for my 12 year old. I eventually skipped those things with her when she was younger because they were too difficult and she fought me. For the past year we've been backing up and really trying to get those EXTREMELY IMPORTANT skills covered. I wish I had known how important they were, and didn't think they were just someone's idea of what was important. I also wish that I had not been so afraid to back up. I kept thinking she was going to be "behind", that we had to just keep going forward through the motions. Big mistake, which I learned the hard way. Perhaps we wouldn't have had to back up quite so far had I not been afraid to back up sooner.

 

Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts and experience!

[Nan in Mass]

What I am hoping to show with all this is where I decided to push and where I decided to modify, where I decided to encourage and where I decided to leave him staring at the page until he produced. It isn't the sort of thing where I can tell you, "Do this and you will be fine." It is a touchy-feely thing. I would have LOVED to have had some sort of guidance in when to do which. I had to rely on tears, and even they weren't entirely a good measure. If I had had different children, tears would not have been a good guide at all. Pushing and insisting really worked in some places. I almost always modified and negotiated with the child so when I did insist, they tended to listen and try to do as I asked. It is all such a balancing act.

 

Off to do more trig. Quadrantal angles and position angles anyone?

-Nan

[Nan in Mass]

Continuing on:

 

12 Sixth grade at home with me. About now I began to panic about content and dropped even more of the basic things like dictation in order to try to memorize some content. This was a mistake.

He tried Abeka 6 but because the books all go in about the same order, it was a repeat of what he had done last year. I should have had him keep working in last year's book rather than advance to the next one. Sometimes this is a bad approach, but often it is a good one. If you do it, it might be a good idea to switch to the grade-level book the year after that, at least with cyclical things like grammar that get taught year after year at a bit higher level each year.

 

13 Seventh grade, officially. By now his abilities were scattered all over the place and we had abandonned things like spelling and grammar books. We stuck with Salvete!, Writing Strands 5, Kingfisher, extra history reading, literature, and some memory work. We worked on some Japanese. Somewhere around here I worked on getting him to keep an assignment book, write legibly, keep a nature journal, drawing (Draw Squad), and some science projects. He went to Japan for three months in early spring so a big bite was taken out of our school year. We worked in the summer to finish the math book and I began adding summer reading some time around now. That worked very well. It allowed us to get in more content. It was just reading - nothing else, but some of it stuck. It also improved reading skills, although it didn't speed him up.

 

14 Eighth grade officially. At this point, some of what he was doing was beyond high school level (like peacewalking) and some of it was about third grade level (like writing) and some was about right (like math). I began counting some things for high school, like the logic book he did and the Japan peacewalk and some of the history books he read. We began doing great books a la TWEM. This worked really well for English. I continued to push the writing and he worked at Writing Strands 6. His writing baffled me. Math took two or three hours every day but we kept doing it. He took three months in the spring and ran crow hops with an international group on a Native American sacred run across the US. There, he met people who didn't know where the rain came from, couldn't read, and couldn't double a simple recipe. He was considered brilliant at math because he could do those I-leave-in-a-car-from-here-and-you-leave-running-from-here-where-do-we-meet problems in his head. Yeah Singapore math. (I am including that part because it was important for his self-esteem. I think the modern self-esteem movement can do more harm than good sometimes, but I also have seen the results of having a bad self-esteem, both in teenagers and adults, and it can be very bad.) At this point, I panicked over his output. His input, with my help, was more or less age appropriate, but his output was all over the place. You can look at my past posts to see how we did math and great books. I panicked over the spelling and decided to go for the quick fix and teach him a few basic spelling rules and homonyms (like whether and weather). I picked a few words from whatever he had written, rewrote them on the back of the page, and had him copy them 5 or 10 times. To my amazement, his spelling improved drastically. So simple! We kept doing that all through high school and I began doing it with my youngest when he turned 14. There is a great list of spelling rules on a dyslexic sight (I will look for it for you if nobody has it) and I used those with the youngest. We kept working at Writing Strands and I added in bits of Powerful Paragraphs (really good book) and Format Writing (dreadful but useful). I made him read very short folk tales and retell them to me in the car. We also did "three things", a game that somebody here suggested. You pick a subject like dog or love and have the children name three aspects of the subject. Then you can add details about the aspects. This builds towards the 5 paragraph paper, which Writing Strands introduced about then.

 

The rest of high school - We continued to work on study skills.

 

More trig - sorry.

-Nan

[FO4UR]

:bigear:

 

 

So much of the younger years sounds familiar (except I've never had him in ps and drank the TWTM and CM Kool-aid:tongue_smilie: when he was a tot). My ds8 didn't draw until he was about 6yo, and now he's an avid drawer. (He saw a drawing my dad did of me as a girl, and drew his own self portrait during a quiet time one day...dh didn't believe ds8 did it and I've saved it b/c he will want it when he's grown. LOL) He was sent to an OT for fine motor delays at 4yo...couldn't/wouldn't draw the basics, let alone write numbers & letters. He didn't need professional therapy, but the OT spent some time explaining how to work with him (and how to fight a Kindergarten Teacher if he goes to ps;)).

 

I started him off with cursive, but the only way I've been able to nibble away at those reversals is through dictating the letters for him to print /b/ and /d/ and /p/ and /g/...we spent tons of time starting off our school days with columns of b, d, p, g, q....and n, u, m, w....dictating sound to print. He had no trouble being able to write the letters (he picked up copying print without much direction from me at all), but his brain *still* reverses things. Cursive helps, but he will still sometimes invert phonograms (we started off with SWR)...hs for sh....ht for th...and he doesn't notice the difference unless he's comparing my copy to his. SWR was miserable for him! It did get a LOT of phonics in his brain without the actual ability to read, and I learned some good techniques that I still use today...but oh, how I wish I would have had another guinea pig before him...

 

 

Reading - he has had the ability to decode since about forever...he is a logical kid and can puzzle things out. He did not, however, remember the words (SWR) for reading...he did not spontaneously pick up books and read (SWR:glare:) even though he was/is an AVID listener. (He's outside re-enacting Robin Hood right now with a homemade bow & arrow.:biggrinjester:) "Mommy, can you read this to me?" is probably his most common sentence said to me...he has all the phonics needed to read...yet he wasn't/isn't reading. I finally ditched SWR this past fall and began systematic reading practice (in spite of what I learned from SWR:tongue_smilie:). He's in the middle of McGuffey's 1st reader. He's progressing slowly but steadily. Phew! (I just ordered Dancing Bears Fast Track for him...I think we'll finish the 1st reader before moving on to this.) Bottom line: He needs specific and systematic *practice* reading.

 

He's doing Apples & Pears spelling now...and I'm thinking of your advice to back up here. He did really well until about Level 20...and I slowed WAYYYYY down, but I think I need to take him back again over some of the lessons. The point at which we started slowing down, I should have supplemented as well...with extra copywork/spelling with magnets/etc. It has spiraled dictation within the lessons, which I think is exactly what he needs. (I plan on doing studied dictation via CM after we finish the A&P books...the best laid plans and all;)) I need to back him up a bit and make sure we are *mastering* as we go.

 

I just ordered the Classical Writing Primers for him. I think another year of basic copywork & narration (with dictation mainly in his spelling) will benefit him well.

 

Grammar: He knows the basic parts of speech, but I put this on hold to spend more time on reading. I have The Sentence Family to use with him...sometime during 3rd grade. I think the drawing will make it a bit more meaningful...diagramming with colored pencils, all the better. He actually enjoys the grammar we've done...the only reason we aren't doing it now is b/c I am prioritizing reading practice. (He gets 2 20min reading lessons daily...at the least.)

 

...off to rescue one of the merry men of the Sherwood Forest...:tongue_smilie:

[Nan in Mass]

The rest of high school - We continued to do bits and pieces of various writing curriculums. What worked best if when I taught him myself. Sigh. Writing Strands gave him what he needed to be able to do Great Books. At the beginning of high school, I insisted he learn to type. Earlier, I had resisted this despite the public school's advice to get him working with a word processor when it appeared he had trouble writing. I was afraid he wouldn't be able to write by hand if we switched too soon. He very reluctantly learned to type one fall knowing that I had signed him up for an online essay writing program (Bravewriter) in two months. We tried doing it ten minutes a day, but that didn't work. He needed to practise at least half an hour, preferably 3/4 hr., in order to get anywhere. Ug. It was boring and he was angry. "I can finally write quickly and easily and now you are making me learn a new way of writing and making it hard all over again." He was not happy. In the end, of course, being able to use a word processor turned out to be a nice thing, and he needs to be able to type for college, facebook, the internet, and many other nice tech-y things. Bravewriter helped. We kept doing bits of Writing Strands 6 and 7. I had him sit down with his father, who writes technical papers all the time and remembered being taught how to write a 5 paragraph essay in high school in expository writing because he uses it all the time. (I had the same class and don't remember it at all. LOL) They wrote three papers together in one evening, including research, and a few more the next night. Then he tried a few. My son says that was the most helpful thing we did in high school. When he was 17, he took composition at community college. I was so worried! He got a 4.0 and the prof wrote him a very nice college req. And that is about the end of his story.

 

The youngest is the best writer at this point. He doesn't have anything more than the normal engineering lack of talent with language arts. He did one grammar book in elementary school (or at least part of it) and then got the rest of his grammar through our Latin program, which has nice explanations. I think this is much easier than trying to explain the English. He demanded to learn to read when my mother gave him a Frog and Toad compendium hardcover for his 5th birthday, so I made up a method to teach him, since he didn't know any of the letter sounds and only recognized the S and the initials of his brothers and himself. It worked beautifully. By the time he was done with that book, he was reading. He moved on to the Magic Treehouse books, then all those books about the animals (thank goodness there are so many of them), then My Father's Dragon, then Dover's fairy tale and folk tale books, and then he was reading things like Pyle's book about Robin Hood. No problems there. I got stacks of books from the library and he read them for school while I worked with his brother. I chose TWTM mostly because it assumed I had a reading-but-not-yet-writing first grader. Again, I didn't do enough of those basic skills with him in elementary school. He did Writing Strands. About 8th grade I began to despair that he would ever be able to write organized papers longer than a paragraph and in 9th grade I panicked. I tried lots of different things. Then somebody posted here about the Schaffer paper format. Bingo. He now writes papers. Phew! I am currently trying to teach him study skills and this is when I made the link between those skills and studying. He is technically in 10t grade, so I have awhile to speed up his ability to read a chapter and take notes on it. That website I posted helped enormously. So did the book Study Is Hard Work. I think he is going to be ok. Of course, I am still trying to get him to put a date on his papers and write things in his assignment book but he has taken speech and drawing at the community college so far (to get used to being in the classroom) and I think he might not totally flunk a science class next year. I hope. Speech and drawing made great first classes. Speech teaches the writing process without the actual writing - very useful. And drawing is good and a no-stress introduction to being in a classroom.

 

All three of my sons did gymnastics until they were 16 or 18. I think that helped, too.

 

And that is probably way, way more information than you would ever find useful. : )

 

I hope something in all this enormous mass of information helps somebody else avoid the mistakes I made and figure out the balance between spending time trying to make them barely adequate at something and spending time making them good at something they can do, the balance between pushing and relaxing, backing up and going forward, skills and content, basics and their own interests, depth and bredth, working with them and having them work on their own, and all those other balances that one has to get right.

 

-Nan

Edited March 18, 2011 by Nan in Mass

[Capt_Uhura]

If that takes too long, make it simpler, but don't not do it. TWTM has very nice directions for helping with getting the child to summarize a paragraph for an outline. I would use those. I would work on all four things simultaneously, not wait for the child to get better at one before adding the next, at least if they were older. And I would keep checking to make sure the child could still do all four as their reading level increased. I would check a few times a year. Eventually, I would add in Cornell notes and writing an abstract or summary and skimming for information and making notes in a book and other higher level study skills.

 

Does that help?

-Nan

 

Nan, anyone, can you point me to page numbers in WTM where this info can be found?

 

Thanks,

Capt Uhura

[Capt_Uhura]

I know. If we didn't have kids, it sure would be a lot easier to homeschool. :lol:

:iagree::iagree::iagree::lol:

[FO4UR]

 

And that is probably way, way more information than you would ever find useful. : )

 

I hope something in all this enormous mass of information helps somebody else avoid the mistakes I made and figure out the balance between spending time trying to make them barely adequate at something and spending time making them good at something they can do, the balance between pushing and relaxing, backing up and going forward, skills and content, basics and their own interests, depth and bredth, working with them and having them work on their own, and all those other balances that one has to get right.

 

-Nan

 

 

I find this whole thread useful!:001_smile: Thank you so much for spending the time to write all this out for us!

 

I'm going to be saving this one to read periodically. Sometimes it's easy to know that I need to find that balance, but difficult to *see* what specific balance we need in the moment.

[MyLittleWonders]

I am so glad I found this thread - it is wonderful. It's making me realize that I need to backtrack with ds#1 now before he gets any older. Thank you all, Nan especially, for your wisdom. :)

[Another Lynn]

Nan, Thank you. What a blessing to read the progression of you as teacher and your ds as student. So helpful.

 

I struggle constantly with the content vs. skills question - often at the expense of the skills.... so this thread is timely admonishment for me. I always debate whether to address skills separately so we can really "enjoy" the content without the angst of skill work.... or whether to address skills within the content we love, hoping that it will make the skills more palatable. The good content has been the heart of our homeschool and when I push the skills it feels like we lose something. Balance, to be sure, is important as you have said... so I'll keep searching for it!

 

Thank you!

[FO4UR]

Nan, Thank you. What a blessing to read the progression of you as teacher and your ds as student. So helpful.

 

I struggle constantly with the content vs. skills question - often at the expense of the skills.... so this thread is timely admonishment for me. I always debate whether to address skills separately so we can really "enjoy" the content without the angst of skill work.... or whether to address skills within the content we love, hoping that it will make the skills more palatable. The good content has been the heart of our homeschool and when I push the skills it feels like we lose something. Balance, to be sure, is important as you have said... so I'll keep searching for it!

 

Thank you!

 

 

Fantastic point to ponder!

[PeterPan]

Well WTM wants you to connect the skills and content. The trouble is that, for some kids, it can really suck the joy out of the content subject. But as I said, we're finally seeing that shift, where she's able to have them connected. Just as an efficiency thing, you really want to if you at all can.

[happyhappyjoyjoy]

THANK YOU NAN!!!!!

 

I had never heard of Cornell notes. My DS was shocked. Needless to say our children will learn them.

[linguistmama]

 

And that is probably way, way more information than you would ever find useful. : )

 

I hope something in all this enormous mass of information helps somebody else avoid the mistakes I made and figure out the balance between spending time trying to make them barely adequate at something and spending time making them good at something they can do, the balance between pushing and relaxing, backing up and going forward, skills and content, basics and their own interests, depth and bredth, working with them and having them work on their own, and all those other balances that one has to get right.

 

-Nan

 

I just want to say thank you for posting about your experiences. Being able to learn from moms with older children is invaluable to me as we are starting our journey!

[Kuovonne]

Thank you ladies for this thread. I naturally tend to emphasize the skill subjects (English and Math) over the content subjects (history and science) and sometimes wonder if I am shortchanging my kids for doing so.

 

Teaching study skills to adapt to the way a brain is wired only recently occured to me. My DD was having a horrible time filling out her worksheets. She could read the material with easy and enjoyment. She could quote long sections of the text. She could answer my oral questions. But she'd stare at the blank worksheet unable to fill in the blanks. Finally it occured to me to have her write down all the vocabulary words as she encountered them in the textbook. With this one little lever, she could suddenly whip through the assignments in a fraction of the time. Now I need to find out how to teach other study skills in an age appropriate manner.

 

I find that reading it chapter by chapter from back to front works for me.

 

Cool, I thought I was the only one to read novels from back to front! DH can never tell if I have just started a book or am almost done with it.

Edited March 19, 2011 by Kuovonne

[shanvan]

I have thoroughly enjoyed reading your posts Nan. I'm in the BTDT camp, though I have not yet traveled as far as you have. Copywork, narration, dictation, spelling, writing of any kind has been so tough for my 12 year old. I eventually skipped those things with her when she was younger because they were too difficult and she fought me. For the past year we've been backing up and really trying to get those EXTREMELY IMPORTANT skills covered. I wish I had known how important they were, and didn't think they were just someone's idea of what was important. I also wish that I had not been so afraid to back up. I kept thinking she was going to be "behind", that we had to just keep going forward through the motions. Big mistake, which I learned the hard way. Perhaps we wouldn't have had to back up quite so far had I not been afraid to back up sooner.

 

Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts and experience!

 

Kelli,

 

You're not alone. I did the same thing with my 12 yo DS. A couple of years ago I realized I needed to back up with skills. But, I find I still have to continually fight that little voice in my head that tells me we will get 'behind' if I stop to focus on x,y, or z. After 7 years I should know better! Some thought patterns are hard to break! With my younger DD I've been much more skills focused and not so pushy with content areas. The younger ones get all the benefits of our experience with their older siblings.

 

Shannon

[Capt_Uhura]

Nan, Thank you. What a blessing to read the progression of you as teacher and your ds as student. So helpful.

 

I struggle constantly with the content vs. skills question - often at the expense of the skills.... so this thread is timely admonishment for me. I always debate whether to address skills separately so we can really "enjoy" the content without the angst of skill work.... or whether to address skills within the content we love, hoping that it will make the skills more palatable. The good content has been the heart of our homeschool and when I push the skills it feels like we lose something. Balance, to be sure, is important as you have said... so I'll keep searching for it!

 

Thank you!

 

My goal for this year has been more writing fluency. Just as reading fluency aids in comprehension, I think writing fluency aids in content. We have sacrificed content for skills this year but I think it's been a good trade off. I think it will make using these skills in the content areas have less of an impact on the enjoyment of the content areas if he is fluent in these skills.

 

It's so hard to find that balance!

[skissugar]

Thank you for the wonderful posts!!!--- thinking i might need to print this out .. just to better chew over it for the next few days :)

Edited March 19, 2011 by skissugar

[FlockOfSillies]

diagramming with colored pencils

 

OH MY GOSH! I LOVE THIS IDEA! :thumbup:

[FO4UR]

OH MY GOSH! I LOVE THIS IDEA! :thumbup:

 

 

I've yet to try it...you go first and lmk how it goes...work out all the kinks and post it all for me.:D:tongue_smilie::lol:

[Nan in Mass]

If you have a quick child, you can have both. If you have one who is slower at academics, you are probably going to have to sacrifice one for the other sometimes.

 

My children always made it plain that they didn't want the bits of their education they were particularly interested in being ruined by having skills added, even if it made their school day shorter.

 

At some point, though, I found that if we didn't apply the skills to content, education stopped happening. It was like knowing your math facts but not being able to make change. They needed practise applying the skills. They usually needed to learn the things they found hardest out of context first, but then we needed to go back to applying them to content as soon as possible. On a day to day basis, this meant that as soon as they could write more, more easily, they needed to start writing papers in their content subjects. Our family's time table was nature journals, science and history and book reports when they were in middle school, and then in high school, for science they did lab notebooks, nature journals, persuasive papers and reports, for literature they did various sorts of papers, including literary analysis papers, and for history they did the occasional report or persuasive paper. At first, these were very short, like one or two paragraphs, but as they wrote more, they got better and faster at it and were able produce papers that were a page or two long, sometimes longer. When they were younger, I tended not to correct any spelling and punc. on anything but the writing they did for Writing Strands. Not very efficient, but it kept them from mutinying.

-Nan

[cjbeach]

(This thread should have a "MUST SUBSCRIBE TO THIS THREAD" label. Mandatory reading. Also, a mandatory Google doc;). Ok, so I made a google doc out of it.)

[PeterPan]

Nan, I'm going to go do a board search, but can you tell what order of the day you use for your subjects? I keep working on this, trying to find a blend that works for dd. Some things really wear dd out, and it's so hard to find that balance. In theory you'd like to put skills earlier in the day (math, writing, etc.), but those are the things that really draw on her. I was just curious to see how you've dealt with that and whether it has changed over the years.

[PeterPan]

(This thread should have a "MUST SUBSCRIBE TO THIS THREAD" label. Mandatory reading. Also, a mandatory Google doc;). Ok, so I made a google doc out of it.)

 

Well I was going to joke and say the mandatory follow-up is for us all to buy a recording of SWB's new workshop on "Teaching the REAL Child" hehe... But on this google doc thing, what is that? You mean you copied our posts in this thread and pasted them into a publicly viewable document elsewhere? I'm not sure that's appropriate. :confused: Sorry, maybe I'm misunderstanding.

[cjbeach]

Well I was going to joke and say the mandatory follow-up is for us all to buy a recording of SWB's new workshop on "Teaching the REAL Child" hehe... But on this google doc thing, what is that? You mean you copied our posts in this thread and pasted them into a publicly viewable document elsewhere? I'm not sure that's appropriate. :confused: Sorry, maybe I'm misunderstanding.

Google docs that I create are usually for me only (will appear as "private" when creating). Google docs can be public for sharing or private (with snippets of threads I make private, for my viewing only).

Because I have to compartmentalize my life to maintain some order, I use Google docs exclusively for homeschool info.

[MyLittleWonders]

Well I was going to joke and say the mandatory follow-up is for us all to buy a recording of SWB's new workshop on "Teaching the REAL Child" hehe...

 

Will she be selling a copy of this? I so need it! Though I have an opportunity to travel to Cincinnati to see SWB give this workshop, I don't think it'll work out ... so an MP3 would be ideal. Please SWB?! :D

 

Oh, and Nan ... you keep adding more gems that I need to copy into the document I'm planning on putting front and center in my plan book. I couldn't imagine homeschooling without the internet; because of things like this very forum, I feel I am better equipped to help my boys through their education than if I had to do it alone. So, thank you again all who are sharing their stories.

Edited March 20, 2011 by MyLittleWonders

[Nan in Mass]

We struggled with that too. Until you mentioned it, I had forgotten my solution, since it doesn't work with older children as well. I can't take credit for the idea, either, because somebody here suggested it. This was one thing that I did right (after a few years of trying things that didn't work very well). What worked beautifully for us for years was to put skills on Mon-Thurs and content on Friday. I didn't do it exclusively because we needed a bit of relief from the hard work of skills Mon-Thurs and it was a disaster if we took three days in a row off from math, music, and foreign languages. In fact, I assigned homework (independent work) in foreign languages and math so that we hit them twice a day and at least once over the weekend. If I didn't, we didn't get anywhere. We needed a break from the harder skills, so Mon-Thurs we did drawing and reading aloud in between the harder stuff as a reward for doing a particularly hard one. I tried to alternate the subjects where I sat between them on the sofa with the book on my lap and we worked together (Latin, for instance) and the ones where we sat at the table and I just oversaw their work. I only had two and for a few years, I worked out a careful schedule of this one working on this indpendently while I taught the other one (in other words, split up math) but I found it didn't really work very well for us. It was too complicated and something always messed it up. It was actually more efficient for us to just do math all together even though one child sometimes had to wait for me to get the other one started. They were expected to read something school-like to themselves while they were waiting for me and not wander off and play. I had to be careful to think about when *I* focused best and put the hardest subjects then. When they were older, it was more important to work around their schedules, but when they were young, it turned out that other than putting piano early in the day, the most important thing was that *I* be able to concentrate and be able to be firm, something I found I can't do well after lunch when I would rather be napping. There were a few years when I tried putting the content subjects in the afternoon but that wasn't very successful. There were a few years when I put math last because I knew I wouldn't skip math (another suggestion of somebody here on this board).

 

After I got what we wanted to accomplish for the year figured out, I spent a month or two arranging and rearranging next year's schedule until I came up with one that I thought would work. My children had gymnastics and piano and scouts on Mon - Thurs, sometimes several of those a day, since if you don't do a lot of gymnastics and get good at it, you can't really do anything fun. That meant that if my children were going to get any play-outside time or work-on-your-own projects time, I had to stop doing school with them at 2 on Mon-Thurs. Therefore, it was really important that I work out a minute-by-minute schedule or else I tended to be over optimistic about what we could accomplish. Besides, school is hard work for my particular family. We all needed to know when it was going to be over. It is a lovely idea, the idea of the line between school work and play being blurred, but if you have children for whom those academic skills do not come easily, it turns out that you need to put in lots of hard, boring work, the sort that causes one to stick one's tongue between one's teeth and breath funny and stare into the distance and do whatever else one needs to do with one's body to get one's brain to work (like walk around or rub things between one's fingers, to name my own personal two). If your child happens to be particularly driven to challenge themselves or particulary focused on a goal that they can see requires this sort of hard work, he might choose to do it on their own, "for fun", but otherwise, somebody (you the parent) is going to have to make them sit down most mornings and do it.

 

Friday, with the weekend in sight, was the perfect day to do history and science. We did our skills in the morning, then we did history (harder because it involved outlining), and then, after lunch, we did history read-alouds and science. We could work well into the afternoon because the science (if we managed to get to it that week) was interesting to us than the other subjects. Everyone knew that we were going to end at more like 4 than at 2. As the children got older and I was trying to get them to write reports in history and science, they finished their reports over the weekend. This had the advantage that it put pressure on them to speed up their writing. I was lucky - I didn't have a child who did a totally sloppy job just to get finished, so I could get away with this strategy.

 

Every fall we would start out working minute-by-minute according to my schedule and we would think we were going to die, it was so hard, and my husband would lecture us all about how any new schedule is hard and how it is always hard to go back to work after vacation and promise that we would all get used to it in a few weeks. We would grit our teeth and claw our way through the schedule. And sure enough, in about mid-October, the schedule would be easier and feel like it fit loosely instead of being a horrible squeeze. At that point, I would relax and the schedule would become more of a do-things-in-this-order thing instead of a watch-the-clock thing. The shorter tasks would bunch together and I would have a few target times I knew we had to hit if we were going to finish everything by a certain time.

 

It is horrible. The timing is so important it is scary. Improvement is so slow in some things that work from the beginning of the year looks like work from the end of the year and it is only by comparing work from two years ago that you can see any that you actually were getting some where. I think probably you can waste a lot of time trying to teach someone to do something too soon, before they are ready. My aunt swore that you could teach a three year old to tie his shoes. I'm sure she is right (for most of our family), but I also know that if you wait until they are older, you can teach them in a tenth of the time. You can spin your wheels getting nowhere if you wait too long between practice sessions, too. It took me a few years to figure out that my children had to do their foreign language and math work at least twice a day because those are the two subjects that are a combination of content (remember this) and skills and my family is seive-brained and can't remember things easily.

 

When the children got to high school, I had a different system, but I still work out exactly when we are going to do everything so I know if it is can all fit. We don't actually follow the schedule much, but it is still useful. Towards the end of high school, they are doing so much work that a schedule doesn't really work. The line between their own projects and school projects finally gets blurred.

 

If I had academically bright children, children who were bright about all the academic skills instead of only being brightish in a few spots (grammar and English vocab) and dismal in others (memorizing), this is not the approach I would take. The line would be blurred much, much sooner. We wouldn't have to work so hard on so many skills because they would pick some of them up naturally (the way my two younger ones picked up grammar and vocab and, to some extent, logic).

 

-Nan

[Nan in Mass]

And just in case I haven't said it before in this thread:

 

(The short answer to the original question of why one practises skills in TWTM - copywork, dictation, narration, outlining, grammar, logic, vocabulary, spelling, phonics, handwriting, typing.) (Hopefully I didn't skip any.)

 

I think the key to being able to write well is to read tons of well-written material (like great books), to have the physical part down so you don't have to think about it (handwriting and typing), to have something to write about (good knowledge base and good research skills), to have a system of taking the mishmash of thought and putting them together in an organized way (find a method of putting them down in an unorganized way, organize them into a linear structure (outlining), and then rewrite - word processor is nice for this). You need to work on narration and logic for organization, vocabulary and grammar for style. Copywork and dictation deal with the mechanics of spelling and punctuation in a whole-to-parts way and spelling books and grammar books deal with it in a parts-to-whole way. You need to do the narration and the dicatation in order to put the pieces together and apply them.

I think the key to being able to read well (once the phonics part is out of the way) is grammar (so you can understand non-standard word order - think Shakespeare and poetry) and vocabulary. That is the parts-to-whole part. And then I think you need to do tons of reading and narrating and discussing. That is the whole-to-parts, applying what you learned, part.

I think the key to being able to learn the content subjects is study skills, and those depend on dictation (think note-taking), outlining (picking out the main points from the details), narration (summarizing), being able to read well at a variety of speeds from skimming to sentence-by-sentence reinterpreting, and being able to memorize (memory work).

I think the key to being able to teach yourself things as an adult or the key to being able to survive college is reading well, writing well, test taking skills, some sort of knowledge base, good study skills, and good organizational skills - keeping an assignment book, keeping track of one's materials, efficiency (resisiting the temptation of the internet, games, cell phones, and whatever else one does for escape and socializing), prioritizing (skimp on this because that is more important), and dividing large projects into little ones. One also needs to understand the system, how to pay attention to what this particular prof wants, and how to get help if you don't understand something. That last is more important and harder than one might think so I recommend finding opportunities to practise approaching strangers and asking for help. Truly - this is one of those things that seem obvious and easy to grownups but turns out to be a practically insurmountable obsticle to young adults, one that causes them to flunk courses. Sigh.

 

HTH

-Nan

Edited March 20, 2011 by Nan in Mass

[PeterPan]

Nan, that's all very helpful! On your math and foreign language homework, did you do that before 2 pm or in the evening?

[Nan in Mass]

In the evening. Often times, in the car on the way to or from gymnastics. The quality of work wasn't great, but it was the best we could do. At least the material got a quick review. I realized fairly early on that we were all handicapped in the memory department (LOL - early on like when my husband and I were in high school and groaned about it together) but unfortunately, it took me awhile to figure out that I had to teach my children the way I myself memorize things. Awhile meaning years and years. Sigh. For me to learn something, I have to go whole to parts to whole again, and then I have to commit the thing to memory (the hardest part by far) and then I have to review it BEFORE I have forgotten it again, and then keep reviewing it at longer and longer intervals but still before I have actually forgotten it. That interval is dismayingly short at first, like ten or fifteen minutes. It is perfectly possible for me to spend months reviewing something daily, rememorizing it, and having it all gone by the next day. Unfortunately, my children are built like this too.

-Nan

[PeterPan]

Thanks! Lots to think about! :)

[Mommyfaithe]

I know. If we didn't have kids, it sure would be a lot easier to homeschool. :lol:

 

:D

[MicheleinMN]

Just reading and realizing how much I need to *back-up* and work with a couple of my children where they ARE, not where I would like them to be.

 

Thank you for sharing, Nan!

[dakarimom5]

I have only gotten to page 4 but I had to reply with a big THANK YOU to Nan and Elizabeth. I have read TWTM twice and it still didn't "click" until your posts. Up until this point I have not admitted to anyone how terrified I was of next year. This year with just DS#2 home was very eye opening to me in regards to how much he DOESN'T know. Next year I am bring my other two sons home, as well as starting my DD in kindy. Sure,I know I can teach them but to give them a first rate education, that I was unsure of.

 

Your posts,and many conversations with my two friends, have made me realize that I need to start at the beginning and go from there. So next year I will have all my boys in WWE1 and FLL1.

 

Thank you again.

[Julie of KY]

Thanks for all your wisdom. I always enjoy reading Nan's posts (as well as others) and this has given me much to think on. I have a math/science kid with dysgraphia and we've been lax on the writing side of things. I've been trying to figure out where I need to go back and work on things and this has given me food for thought.

[cin]

I know. If we didn't have kids, it sure would be a lot easier to homeschool. :lol:

:smilielol5::smilielol5:

 

And parent, in general!!!! :lol::smilielol5:

[Halcyon]

Aime here on the boards (sorry, don't remember her screen name, but she uses her name in sig) has talked about a fabulous Unjournaling book that I think I ordered for next year. She had great success with this journaling, the drip drip of working on one facet of expressive language, the GETTING IT OUT step. :)

 

 

I believe this book is called Unjournaling by Dawn DiPrince. We ordered it to use next year.

[happyhomemaker25]

As a reader, I am begging those participating in this thread to please refrain from posting any further thought provoking ideas. A person's brain can only handle so much after a full day of homeschooling. And you are making me want to make changes...uggh! Geesh! :tongue_smilie:

 

I'm headed to the treadmill where I will try very hard to pretend I did not read any of this thread.............then I'll come back to see what else has been posted and hope my brain does not explode!

 

Shannon

 

PS- Lest I hurt any feelings, the above was all in fun since I have been nodding my head all the way through this thread and considering what changes I may want to make.

 

 

If you want to make your brain really hurt grab your copy of TWTM and start reading again cover to cover while chewing on these threads. Repeat. Yep. I'm excited to have remembered what I wanted to accomplish with homeschooling and sad that I got so far off track in the last five years.

[Nan in Mass]

This applies to this thread so I am linking it here. I am still having nightmares about dooming children to years of drill with no fun stuff GRIN. I am one of the most out-of-the-box homeschoolers here, but many of you on the curriculum board don't normally read my posts so you don't know me. We're the ones who spent a whole fall reading The Iliad aloud together paddling our feet on the dock feeding the ducks, or cuddled up with the dog on our feet in front of the fire. I'm the one whose children vanish for months or weeks every year peacewalking in the middle of the school year. I'm the one whose 16 year old this year turned the temp on the refridgerator up so that it wouldn't cycle noisily on and off when he was using it as a soundproof box for a science experiment and we didn't discover it until a month later, after we finally decided that it might be our fault, not the grocery store's, that the milk kept going sour. This might help:

 

http://www.welltrainedmind.com/forums/showthread.php?p=2564001#poststop

 

: )

-Nan

[Critterfixer]

I am still having nightmares about dooming children to years of drill with no fun stuff GRIN.

 

Actually, Nan, I found the thought liberating. When you are focused on the teaching of skills rather than the stuffing of minds full of content, it reduces stress. Now I can let go of that nagging little anxiety that my first graders did not memorize the seven ancient wonders of the world. But I can be proud of what they did learn: the use of an elaborate pumping system to get water to the top of the hanging gardens of Babylon. I am not as concerned that they might not know that the Sumerians were important for written language. Instead I can be thrilled that they know who Gilgamesh is and know that story backwards and forwards from requesting it so much! And I am not unhappy that they have only an acquaintance with early Greek history. Instead I am delighted that when reading SOTW on the adventure of Odysseus my son listened for a while and then his face lit up, "I KNOW this story!"

 

To be sure, drill is important for certain things (Math comes to mind) but not so that the child just knows all the answers. The goal is to KNOW the story...and that goes for just about everything out there.

[Nan in Mass]

Your post is comforting.

I felt the same way.

I am amazed and pleased at how much my college-aged student retained of the history he read. I don't know how old your children are, but I highly recommend TWTM reading lists, both history and literature. Then sit back and watch your teenagers mix thier fantasies with those myths and fairy tales. It is amazing. Wait - you have to teach them to draw or you don't get to see what they are thinking about GRIN. They won't show you their journals (if they keep one), but they most likely will show you the cool picture they just drew.

: )

[FO4UR]

Actually, Nan, I found the thought liberating. When you are focused on the teaching of skills rather than the stuffing of minds full of content, it reduces stress. Now I can let go of that nagging little anxiety that my first graders did not memorize the seven ancient wonders of the world. But I can be proud of what they did learn: the use of an elaborate pumping system to get water to the top of the hanging gardens of Babylon. I am not as concerned that they might not know that the Sumerians were important for written language. Instead I can be thrilled that they know who Gilgamesh is and know that story backwards and forwards from requesting it so much! And I am not unhappy that they have only an acquaintance with early Greek history. Instead I am delighted that when reading SOTW on the adventure of Odysseus my son listened for a while and then his face lit up, "I KNOW this story!"

 

To be sure, drill is important for certain things (Math comes to mind) but not so that the child just knows all the answers. The goal is to KNOW the story...and that goes for just about everything out there.

 

:iagree: At this point, my dc *love* history and science and literature b/c we simply love those things as a family. This isn't our last chance at the ancients or life science...it is our best chance at many of those skills. I don't have my dc memorize dates, but I do mention them. They are ever asking me who was alive then...they like knowing if grandma was alive then or if the pharoahs were...or if Laura Ingalls Wilder was...

 

Now, if I can just keep the basics simple so that we can master them as my siggie says, we'll be in good shape.:tongue_smilie: (No more reading threads on math or LA currics unless and until I have a need...or the thread hits 3 pages, whichever comes first.:willy_nilly::w00t::001_tt1::leaving:)