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Five Senses Literature Lessons - Reviews/experiences?


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Has anyone here used or heard of Five Senses Literature Lessons? It was recommended to me on a FB group for homeschooling SN. After spending some time pouring over the website and online samples and reading through Cathy Duffy's review, I'm leaning heavily toward buying the Foundations and Fundamentals set, but I wanted to check for reviews/experiences here first since I'd never heard of this program before. With a little tweaking, it looks like it could be a good framework to build our language, pre-reading, and number sense activities around.

https://www.5sensesll.com/index.php/our-store/foundations-fundamentals-level-orange/

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  • 6 months later...
11 hours ago, happycc said:

Following 

We went ahead and did Foundations and Fundamentals this past May through just last week when kiddo finally finished it. It was good! I'm happy with the purchase; we had a ton of fun. We followed the curriculum pretty loosely, mostly just using the lessons as ideas for themed weeks. My DS 7 struggles with receptive language (at the level of a 3-4yo), so I ended up substituting several of the books for some others with the same general topics but with fewer words and/or more simple language. We also probably only did about half of what was scheduled for each lesson, and we often spent more than one week per lesson. Some of the activities were just over my kiddo's head.

DS 7 still doesn't know the entire alphabet, and only actually picked up two new letters over the six-ish months we worked in F&F, but it's honestly not a fault of the program. He just needs way, way, way more repetition and practice than is built into *anything,* and he learned at least as much as I was expecting him to. The F&F workbook pages were awesome.

We've moved onto Wonderful World, which we're using similarly to F&F and finding to be much the same in terms of needed adjustments and having more activities available each week than my kiddo could possibly do or understand. I'm expecting to run through F&F again next summer followed by Wonderful World again next school year, so hopefully over the two years we'll cover all or most of the curriculum.

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On 10/19/2020 at 1:49 PM, happycc said:
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Have you heard of Pinwheels of Rooted in Language? I have been looking at that too. 

 

Five Senses Literature Lessons and Rooted in Language really don't have much overlap at all. 5SLL F&F has minimal phonics instruction. It introduces the 26 basic letter sounds and writing the capital letters. That's it for reading/writing instruction. 5SLL is more of a thematic approach to enjoying children's literature and incorporating related activities. For example, you might read Rainbow Stew and Light Makes a Rainbow, sing Rain Rain Go Away, learn the shape semi-circle (and cut pizza, tortillas, cookies, pancakes, etc in half), paint a rainbow on half a paper plate, cook rainbow stew, talk about healthful eating, and practice the letter R.

But, yes, Pinwheels looks really good! I marked it off our possibilities list (for now anyway) for a few reasons very specific to my particular kid: he's not yet ready for blending, he *cannot* do 3-line handwriting, and his phonological awareness is so low that all phonics-based approaches thus far have failed (and this includes four hours per week with an O-G specialist over the last two years). So, while I'm still working on teaching him the letter sounds, I've decided to try out a more sight-word approach for the time being while we work on phonological awareness with Kilpatrick. At his current rate, DS 7 might have the 26 basic sounds of the alphabet learned in about nine more months, so I don't really feel like we have much to loose with a little experimentation. 

So for my DS 7, I'm using 5SLL Wonderful World, loosely, as I said, and essentially spread out over two years, for literature, social studies, science, fun activities, and a sprinkling of life skills, and I've settled on Happy Cheetah for reading, writing, and spelling. Happy Cheetah is brand spanking new, but I think the approach might work well with my particular kid for where he's at right now and with his particular array of very unusual memory and processing differences that really probably only apply to our particular situation. Plus, I need something streamlined and open-and-go atm or it won't get done at all. We'll still be working on phonological awareness and doing tons of private therapies as well. The other largely-sight-word-based program I considered was So Happy to Learn, which I might try out next year if Happy Cheetah doesn't do it and he's still not responding to phonics. 

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My son did Touchmath and was able to move on from Touchmath.

I thought it really helped him.

There are concerns with it that some kids get stuck on counting the dots and can’t move on to memorizing math facts.  
 

My son had a phase where he loved to roll dice and add up the numbers, as part of a game he liked and would play with by himself.  He played “Dragonwood” with extra dice.

I don’t have any experience with Touchmath beyond adding and numbers 1-10.  
 

The way I have seen it (through school) is that there are dots on the numerals, and then kids learn to tap each numeral and then count up the dots on each numeral.  This is what my son did also with the dots on dice. 
 

I would say I hear about two things.  One, kids who don’t move past this point and maybe it’s the best they can do.  Two, kids who maybe could/should move past this point but they just keep doing this and don’t move on to some more abstract number sense or to be able to use any other strategy.

I think it’s not much different than learning to count on fingers, but my son didn’t really have the OT skills to count on his fingers, so he had nothing.  And then I think Touchmath was better for him than it would have been to just count manipulatives.  It does connect the dots to the numerals.  And, he could get sidetracked into playing with manipulatives VERY easily, but he focused a lot better with the dots.  
 

Edit:  to me, I would not want to “only” use Touchmath.  But it was definitely helpful here!  But it was not the only thing he did, and there was still a lot of time spent working on other things.  He didn’t make a lot of K-1st math connections until he was 9-10.  Then he made some connections and has made steadier practice since.  

Edited by Lecka
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Love Dragonwood here. Hasn't played it in awhile. His is struggling with attention span issues suddenly or at least more so than before. 

He liked Sum Swamp too for a long time. 

We got stuck on counting on. So now thinking I need to back track and teach some of this so he can do the counting on worksheets. He can count like 1,2, 3, 4 but when you give him a number other than 1 to start with....he's stuck. He can't remember what number comes next after that. Never mind going backwards for subtraction. Ideas Ideas? 

Should I just walk around the house counting on from different starting points with him? 2,3,4,5

6,8,9,10 etc

Edited by happycc
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Using a number line and making jumps helped my son.  Writing the number of jumps above a scoop mark drawn on the number line.

Then it helped later to do the same kind of thing for fractions.  
 

We also did a lot with hundreds charts.

He had a paper at school where every day he would have a number and write one less, one more, ten less, ten more, and some things like that using a hundreds chart.  
 

The hundreds chart really helped for ten less and ten more.  
 

He took a long time to learn the teens. Once he was doing well with the teens, he expanded more to larger numbers more easily.  It took him a long time to get 1-10, and then another long time to get 11-20.  In all that time he did stuff with numbers lines, hundreds charts, ten frames, etc etc.  

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