length of time working- is this better

[choirfarm]

Ok.. so this is what we just did. First of all I let her sleep in today. She is my night owl. She is just getting started when I go to bed. Likewise, she would easily sleep until 10... while I get up at 4. Anyway, she awoke at 8:45 and didn't feel like eating. ( She just isn't much of a breakfast girl.. For one thing she doesn't like most breakfast fare.) She played on the piano for about 15 minutes trying out her new Christmas pieces her teacher gave her yesterday. Then I got her started at 9. She did x-tra math and was happy. Actually she sang the numbers as she typed them in. "It makes it more fun if you sing them."

 

Then we sat down and I taught her about volume. I asked her how to know the perimeter of our farm: walk around the fence row. Correct. How about the area? You multiply one side times the other side. Yes, that tells us all the land on our farm, right? Right. Now we will do volume. I had a index card box filled with water. Why won't the area tell me how much water is in the box? We talked. Right. You need the heighth. So multiply the length x width x heigth. That took all of 5 minutes, less actually. I'm sorry, but I'm not sure how you would make a lesson longer than that. So then I made her do the entire sheet. She started to whine, but remembered she wanted to read her book. Instead she had silent tears running down her face as she did it, especially the subtraction. It took her 15 minutes. ( 3 volume problems, 4 subtract 10, 6 greater/less than 6 digit numbers, 3 word problems, 8 3 digit subtraction problems, and 4 checks) I didn't want to push my luck and have her do the other lesson yet so we will save that for the afternoon. I just don't see how you have kids sit for 45 minutes of math.....

 

Next I read the rest of the Make Way for Sam Houston chapter. She then did her Rod and Staff worksheets which consisted of labeling 12 sentences statement, question, command or exclamation then labeling 6 more and adding end punctuation. Writing the subject of the command sentences and underlinning the verb twice for 10 problems, and diagramming 8 sentences. This took her 10 minutes. She did a Daily Gram worksheet. We zipped through another 4 lessons of All About Spelling and then I just let her have a break. She made herself some soup and is reading her beloved Hardy Boys book.

 

Once again language arts took maybe 25 minutes. She will do copywork later as part of her Texas history. Anyway.. that felt like an eternity for her.

 

I'm going to make her do science and history as her next block along with either violin or piano practice. So that will be an hour and a half.

 

The next block will be the 2nd math sheet which will take 20 minutes and whatever instrument she didn't practice.

[choirfarm]

Ok, just ended up doing second block:

 

I have several charts for her to fill out on battles during the Texas Revolution. She filled out a couple of them by looking on the giant map that has the information on dh's wall and by remembering what we have read over the last few days. She then colored some paper dolls I found on the internet: Texan woman, Texan soldiers and MExican soldiers. She LOVED that and wants to do another set for some of her guy friends at church. All of that took around an hour. She then spent 20 minutes copying 3 sentences from her IEW paper in cursive. ( Half the paper.) It looks gorgeous, but I don't know how she is ever going to do everything in cursive. ( I decided not to do her Texas History copywork today since she is doing this.) It takes her forever. She prints much faster. At some point, I feel like she ought to be able to just write a whole paragraph in cursive from scratch. My boys certainly could at this age. She is currently figuring out more Christmas carols on the piano. They use both hands, so it takes he awhile. Still pretty good considering this is her first year of formal lessons.

 

We'll do science, which will be lapbooks from the Zoology 3 notebook, theory, and violin next block. Is that better???

[dcjlkplus3]

I don't know how old she is, but this sounds good...

[dcjlkplus3]

Ok, just ended up doing second block:

 

I have several charts for her to fill out on battles during the Texas Revolution. She filled out a couple of them by looking on the giant map that has the information on dh's wall and by remembering what we have read over the last few days. She then colored some paper dolls I found on the internet: Texan woman, Texan soldiers and MExican soldiers. She LOVED that and wants to do another set for some of her guy friends at church. All of that took around an hour. She then spent 20 minutes copying 3 sentences from her IEW paper in cursive. ( Half the paper.) It looks gorgeous, but I don't know how she is ever going to do everything in cursive. ( I decided not to do her Texas History copywork today since she is doing this.) It takes her forever. She prints much faster. At some point, I feel like she ought to be able to just write a whole paragraph in cursive from scratch. My boys certainly could at this age. She is currently figuring out more Christmas carols on the piano. They use both hands, so it takes he awhile. Still pretty good considering this is her first year of formal lessons.

 

We'll do science, which will be lapbooks from the Zoology 3 notebook, theory, and violin next block. Is that better???

 

better than what?

[choirfarm]

better than what?

 

http://www.welltrainedmind.com/forums/showthread.php?t=329873

[Tabrett]

Know what's funny? Your wake up time! 4am???? Your dd's wake up time seems normal. My household doesn't wake till 8-8:30. We go to bed around 10-11 and start school around 9am. What age is your dd? It is hard to make a judgement on proper length of a school day without knowing what age she is.

[choirfarm]

Know what's funny? Your wake up time! 4am???? Your dd's wake up time seems normal. My household doesn't wake till 8-8:30. We go to bed around 10-11 and start school around 9am. What age is your dd? It is hard to make a judgement on proper length of a school day without knowing what age she is.

 

4th grade. She is 9 and will be 10 in a couple of weeks. Read the thread I referenced above for more info. Everyone said she didn't work long enough.

[Caribbean Queen]

Is that better???

Are you making lessons take longer? Are you doubling up on them? Adding in more subjects? I don't get it.

 

As I said in the other thread, we also zip through our lessons.

My children's skills are progressing well.

They have lots of free time which they use constructively (not watching soaps while eating pork rinds). I believe they will be smarter, better people for having all that free time.

We are happy. It's working for us.

 

Why school longer? What would the point of that be?

To do busywork and make it fair for the public schooled students who have to be in school all day?

Do double and triple lessons and make the neighbors jealus when my kids graduate at 12 y/o?

[choirfarm]

Are you making lessons take longer? Are you doubling up on them? Adding in more subjects? I don't get it.

 

As I said in the other thread, we also zip through our lessons.

My children's skills are progressing well.

They have lots of free time which they use constructively (not watching soaps while eating pork rinds). I believe they will be smarter, better people for having all that free time.

We are happy. It's working for us.

 

Why school longer? What would the point of that be?

To do busywork and make it fair for the public schooled students who have to be in school all day?

Do double and triple lessons and make the neighbors jealus when my kids graduate at 12 y/o?

 

I guess because her skills are not progressing. To me, a 10 year old should be able to sit down and work on something for an hour. In school, they write papers all the time. Mine takes 20 minutes to write 3 sentences in cursive??? Her friends have a timed writing test where they are writing a page and a half in 40 minutes. ( My oldest wrote a 3 page paper (printed though) in second grade.

 

She is on lesson 112 of the Horizon 3rd grade book, but she is in 4th grade.

 

She has no concept of sitting down and working at something for an hour unless she likes what she is doing ( As in the Gettysburg speech.)

 

She is embarrassed in Sunday School and AWANA because she doesn't know how to spell half the words and can't write like her friends can. She calls herself dumb. She isn't. But if she can't do it perfectly, then she thinks she is.

 

I'm doubling up on math so we can get to 4th grade material. Plus, if one lesson is taking her 20 minutes, then it probably isn't too hard, right? Now if one lesson was taking 45 minutes, then that would be another story. It looks like Horizon makes a leap in 4th grade. The lessons ARE 4 pages instead of 2 in 3rd grade, so I decided to bump it up. To me, she needs to get to where she can work for 45 minutes of concentrated effort on math. So for now, I'm MAKING her work for 20 minutes at a time instead of the 10. Maybe in a month I'll have her work for 30 minutes at a time. I don't know...

 

My 9th grader has had a rough adjustment to high school ( yes, I'm homeschooling). Suddenly I wasn't as fun and flexible. High school is serious. No more flexible deadlines. Work must be done. He said school went from easy to WHOH!!!! ( He is taking Biology, Geometry, AP Gov, Spanish and Racquetball from cc, English and Health) He said he realized just how lazy he has been. He told me not to make the same mistake with her. ANd she can't do half of what he did at this age!!!!!!!!!!!!

[boscopup]

This may be a silly question, but is the work maybe too easy? I don't have a child that age, so take this with a grain of salt, but if the work is too easy, my son doesn't want to put forth any effort. Now I can't make it TOO challenging, but if it's too easy, it ends up "busywork". R&S English? Completely busy work for my son. Even doing a grade level up (R&S3 in 2nd grade), I still had to double up on lessons and only assign 2-3 sentences, because that was ALL he needed to fully understand (and as we went over command sentences in FLL3 this week, he remembered the "understood you" that he learned in R&S3 this summer, despite not doing all the exercises). In math, it's the same way. If the problems are all too easy, he gets incredibly bored. It's one thing to practice some skills that need work, but if all the problems are too easy, he will balk at doing any of the work.

 

Math lessons didn't start taking 45 minutes for him until we got to a level of work that actually made him think a bit. I don't just say "Here, do all these problems" because they're on the page. I assign what I know he needs to do. He also doesn't need a lot of repetition, so a spiral math program would drive him insane. He needs occasional review, but not daily review. To double up on lessons in a spiral program, I think you usually need to skip the review problems in one lesson. My friend does that with CLE (her 4th grader is speeding through 3rd grade CLE right now). She'll do the new section of several lessons in a sitting at times, but they'll only do the "we remember" for one lesson, and even then, they might cross something out (if they did several lessons).

 

Sometimes my son likes something easy, to "take a break", but if it's easy on a daily basis, he gets bored, and that's when the dawdling begins. And no, you can't reason with him that if it's easy, it shouldn't take long. :tongue_smilie:

[choirfarm]

This may be a silly question, but is the work maybe too easy? I don't have a child that age, so take this with a grain of salt, but if the work is too easy, my son doesn't want to put forth any effort. . :tongue_smilie:

 

But if this is so, why does she cry and say it is too hard? She seems to think that if she spends 15 minutes on anything it is too hard. The problems she really hates are the long subtraction and division because she can't do it in her head. And I wondered yesterday if I needed to MAKE her show her work sometimes. For example she did the following question in her head showing no work:

 

4 + n = 5 + ( 2 x 6)

 

But this is the same child that cannot remember 8 x 8 or many other multiplication facts despite drill. She skip counts a lot of them. x-tra math is helping some.

[choirfarm]

See here is a post where it seems like she should be

 

http://www.welltrainedmind.com/forums/showthread.php?t=330277

[boscopup]

But if this is so, why does she cry and say it is too hard? She seems to think that if she spends 15 minutes on anything it is too hard. The problems she really hates are the long subtraction and division because she can't do it in her head. And I wondered yesterday if I needed to MAKE her show her work sometimes. For example she did the following question in her head showing no work:

 

4 + n = 5 + ( 2 x 6)

 

But this is the same child that cannot remember 8 x 8 or many other multiplication facts despite drill. She skip counts a lot of them. x-tra math is helping some.

 

It's not unusual for bright kids to fall into the trap of "coasting", and then they don't know how to work hard on anything. My son used to break down in tears if something was the least bit hard. He was bored by the easy stuff, but if he had to think, it was tears. :tongue_smilie: I had to ease him into doing things that take a bit of mental exercise.

[Haiku]

But if this is so, why does she cry and say it is too hard? She seems to think that if she spends 15 minutes on anything it is too hard.

 

Sometimes it's just personality. Some people just don't like to work. Some people are very dramatic about the things they don't like. Perhaps this is your dd's personality.

 

The problems she really hates are the long subtraction and division because she can't do it in her head.

 

Of course. These are harder. My dd, who is also 9/4th grade, has reached the point in math where she can't do everything in her head. It's throwing her for a loop, and she doesn't like it. I just tell her, "Sometimes math is work, and there's nothing that will make it easier. You just have to do the work."

 

And I wondered yesterday if I needed to MAKE her show her work sometimes.

 

My kids have to show their work for every problem. Every time. No exceptions. I know that there are problems they do that they could easily do in their heads, but the way I see it, I'm not going to get into nitpicking about which problems they should show their work in and which they shouldn't. I don't need the headache. If you can do it in your head, fine, but you also have to show me how you did it. It's important, to me, that before they get to higher level math, they are familiar with translating what they have done in their heads into mathematical language.

 

I just don't see how you have kids sit for 45 minutes of math.....

 

Like I said yesterday, you don't have to do things my way (or anyone else's); you just have to find what works for you and your dd. But to answer your question, I have the kids sit down with their math, and I set my timer for 40 minutes. They work until the timer goes off, and then we stop. I don't care if we are in the middle of a lesson or whatever. My kids need 40 minutes to work on math. The level of math they are working at is sufficiently challenging for each of them that they aren't just rehashing material they already know. Their math incorporates review of concepts into new concepts, so everything is building on itself, so they are constantly working on new material. Fifteen or twenty minutes of math wouldn't give them enough time to really cement their knowledge. Also, when they make mistakes, we go through the problem right then and there to correct the mistake (I check their work after each set of problems), and with dd 9, correcting a mistake could take five minutes. If we only did 15 minutes of math, she could spend half or more of her time working on one problem if she worked it out, got the wrong answer, and spent the time correcting it.

 

Tara

[julikins]

I commented on your thread yesterday, I believe. I think what you did with her sounds wonderful. She'll get used to it and won't struggle as much as she realizes that it's not as bad as she thinks. 3 hours of work per day for a 4th grader sounds a lot more on track than 1 hour.

 

Consistency is key, especially at the beginning. I've heard it takes 3 weeks to form a habit, so make sure you are extremely consistent for at least that long. Then announce breaks ahead of time (like tomorrow is going to be half day because you've been working so hard, I thought you should get a reward for changing your attitude toward your schoolwork the last few weeks).

 

I didn't think what you're doing sounded like busy work; you have a reason behind the amount of work you are requiring of her and she will progress toward increased skill because of it.

 

Rewarding her with the reading time will make the books even more special to her. It sounds like she does need the breaks in the day to help her get up enough stamina for the next hour of work, so keep that up. Maybe next year or toward the end of next year you can start expecting 1 1/2 to 2 hr sit down sessions before a break. That's what we've been working up to with my 4th grader and she's getting better at it. Sometimes I tell her to get up and do some jumping jacks or run around the house a couple times--she even asks to do that sometimes to get the wiggles out and then she can tackle something else.

 

Now regarding the writing, I think she's doing great to get 3 sentences done in 20 minutes. My daughter's the opposite of yours--cursive is much faster than printing (and much more legible). But it is an area that my daughter struggles with tremendously, she is not a good speller and hates to write anything that she has to correct because she's a perfectionist, but she rarely spells a whole sentence correctly. So we're working on that. May I suggest that you teach to her current ability and build up from there, instead of the other way around. She has different strengths and weaknesses than your son, perhaps, and may struggle in this area where he did not. But she will grow and you are doing well to get her working to improve her speed and accuracy in writing.

 

Just want to encourage you that you sound like you've thought this through, you have a goal and are going in the right direction. She will learn, she will grow and she will get used to working (a worthy goal for her future) and will be much better for having a mommy who lovingly made her do the hard thing.

[choirfarm]

I have the kids sit down with their math, and I set my timer for 40 minutes. They work until the timer goes off, and then we stop. I don't care if we are in the middle of a lesson or whatever. My kids need 40 minutes to work on math. The level of math they are working at is sufficiently challenging for each of them that they aren't just rehashing material they already know. Their math incorporates review of concepts into new concepts, so everything is building on itself, so they are constantly working on new material. Fifteen or twenty minutes of math wouldn't give them enough time to really cement their knowledge. Also, when they make mistakes, we go through the problem right then and there to correct the mistake (I check their work after each set of problems), and with dd 9, correcting a mistake could take five minutes. If we only did 15 minutes of math, she could spend half or more of her time working on one problem if she worked it out, got the wrong answer, and spent the time correcting it.

 

Tara

 

So then I just sit her down with the workbook pages and have her do as many as it takes for 40 minutes? I'd have to work up to that. Plus, since we get a new concept every few, I'm not sure that would work either.. So far she doesn't make mistakes...maybe one for the entire lesson. Yesterday it was a clock one...silly. She looked at it and told me the right answer.

[Haiku]

So then I just sit her down with the workbook pages and have her do as many as it takes for 40 minutes? I'd have to work up to that.

 

We worked up to it, also. Last year, in 3rd and 2nd grades, the kids started the year doing 30 minutes of math. Every month or so I bumped it up by a minute. (Yep, at one point my kids did exactly 33 minutes of math every day! When a new girl started where I work and found out my kids did 37 minutes of math a day, she thought that was hysterical.) Last month I bumped them up another minute and we hit 40 minutes of math. I'll probably keep it there for a few months, then bump it up again so that by the end of the year they are up to 44-45 minutes.

 

Plus, since we get a new concept every few, I'm not sure that would work either..

 

Every time my kids start I new lesson, I go over it with them. When they do math, I am sitting at the table with them, so I am aware of what they are doing. When they turn the page to a new lesson, they tell me, and I teach them the lesson. I take the child to another room when I am teaching the lesson so I don't distract the other one.

 

So far she doesn't make mistakes

 

Then, imo, it's too easy for her.

 

Tara

[choirfarm]

 

 

 

Then, imo, it's too easy for her.

 

Tara

 

But I can't switch to 4 because it assumes things have been introduced that haven't been. I guess I'll just keep doing 2 lessons a day. It did slow her down to show her work some. She was doing the divisions with remainders in her head. I had to show her how to show her work. She didn't understand that at all at first, but eventually got it. I also made her show her work on the algebra problems like above.

[Haiku]

But I can't switch to 4 because it assumes things have been introduced that haven't been.

 

I don't know whether you are interested in moving her into 4 already or not, but if you are, could you just do the things in 3 that she hasn't been introduced to yet and then move into 4? I don't know what math you're using so I don't know whether that would work.

 

And, to elaborate/explain more fully, when I said "It's too easy for her," what I meant was that if kids are only working within their comfort zone, they aren't being stretched or growing. They are just kinds running in place. If she never makes mistakes, she's probably not being challenged. If everything is easy for her, then it will be harder to develop the ability to persevere when something is hard and work through frustration.

 

Tara