please help me figure this out

[LittleRed]

I am trying to plan for my dd8.

 

If we do MoH and Apologia young explorers with notebooking, will copywork/narrations like in WWE redundant? My plan so far.

 

MUS

FLL 2

WWE 1

Spelling Power

Zaner Bloser handwriting

MOH w/notebooking pages

Apologia zoology 1 w/junior notebook

(I haven't pick out literature yet)

 

Is it too much writing? I noticed copywork in the notebooking pages. She doesn't like to write much. She knows how to write fairly quickly in cursive but still complains about hands being too tired OTOH she'll illustrate pictures of history and science all day long :). I will also add she is homeschooling with my other children ds11, ds6, and dd4.

 

Thanks so much in advance!

[LittleRed]

Anyone :)

[jillian]

Depends. My 5 year old does country copy for geography (writes the name of the country and sometimes a fact if its interesting), aesops fables copy work (the lesson from the story), handwriting for math sometimes (we usually go orally because she has arthritis) and she writes for piano on Monday in her theory book. I don't think it's too much especially if you've been building it up all along

[PeterPan]

I'll bump you. :) It's been a while, but I would say at that age my dd (whose hand also hurt with writing btw, we ended up doing OT for it finally) would have been fine with that. WWE wasn't out then, as I recall. Or else it had just come out. We did lots of dictation. If she likes notebooking, definitely do that. I pretty much tried to pick a TOTAL amount of writing for the day that fit what she could handle and then I added up what she was getting in all her areas to keep it balanced. That way I kept the total reasonable, even though the precise components varied. In general though, I would say go forward. Given how creative she sounds, you might consider Writing Tales for her. Super fun for that age and great with a creative girl. You can type the stories or she can even work on learning to type.

 

You might also try giving her theraputty or PopArty beads to play with while you do the reading for MOH. When she plays with the beads, she needs to use her fingertips, sort of making it look prissy (just the thumb tip and forefinger, not more fingers, no flat sides) to pop the beads. It will strengthen her fingers to make the writing less painful. You can also check her core strength and how she sits, whether she's gripping her pencil too tightly and whether her weight goes onto the arm she's writing with (very bad). All those things can cause pain. More can, but those are places to start. Don't ignore it, because it's actually something you can do something about when you find the cause. It's unusual for a girl to be pencil phobic and say her hand hurts, so there could actually be a reason.