brendafromtenn Posted March 19, 2009 Share Posted March 19, 2009 Good morning, Jean, Had two questions for you this morning..... How many lessons are in SOS Spanish I AND how long does it take for a student to complete a lesson(minutes per day)? Thanks in advance, Brenda:001_smile: Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jean in Wisc Posted March 19, 2009 Share Posted March 19, 2009 Good morning, Jean, Had two questions for you this morning..... How many lessons are in SOS Spanish I AND how long does it take for a student to complete a lesson(minutes per day)? Thanks in advance, Brenda:001_smile: I saw your question earlier--sorry I did not answer. My mom was back in the hospital. Again. I asked my son how long it took to do a lesson, and he said 20 to 60 minutes, depending on the day. I think the 20 seems rather on the quick side of things, but maybe he is right. I did several of the lessons when I 1st got the program, and if I wrote the vocabulary into my notebook, took notes on the grammar, and did the lesson, it took about an hour. In Spanish I, there are ten "chapters" (since it is all on the computer, it sounds odd to call them that. LOL!) and each chapter has 13 lessons--this includes days for 2 quizzes and a test. So that makes 130 days of work. They have the computer program set up so that you can fill out a calendar for the number of days of school you plan to have, eliminating the holidays, etc., and then it will schedule the assignments. If you have more than 130 days, they will schedule in gap days for memorizing and review. OR you can ignore the calendar and just assign the lessons to the child without there being a due date. The 1st few lessons tend towards whole to parts, which always gets my kids upset--dealing with extrapolating from given sentences. But I've not met a Spanish program yet that did not start out this way (sigh). Very quickly, it starts moving towards parts to whole, with grammar, lots of vocab, spoken Spanish, etc. Kids have done it without a Spanish speaker to help them, but I think they benefit a lot if they have someone to answer their questions--it just helps with the frustration level. To be truthful with you, I am requiring my son to do the 1st 4 chapters in SOS Spanish II before I will give him 2 credits of Spanish because it introduces the past tenses I think they should have. It is obvious that the school systems are not getting this far in their 2 years of high school Spanish, though...so if you want to end with SOS Span I and call it 2 years, you probably would have a kid that knew just as much as his peers (if not more). HTH, Jean Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
brendafromtenn Posted March 19, 2009 Author Share Posted March 19, 2009 130 lessons is very do-able around here. And I don't think the whole to parts would throw my kids, as that is how their Latin program was designed. So, they seem to be comfortable with that. My only issue with SOS is that I would like to see a sample of the Spanish I online, and I can't seem to find it. I don't like to buy something unless I can see a sample of it. Any ideas what I am doing wrong? Thanks for taking your precious time to answer my silly questions. What a blessing that you and the many other ladies on this board have been to me. I will continue to pray for what to do with Spanish I. Sometimes I have to just sit and wait and pray. Blessings, Brenda Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jean in Wisc Posted March 19, 2009 Share Posted March 19, 2009 130 lessons is very do-able around here. And I don't think the whole to parts would throw my kids, as that is how their Latin program was designed. So, they seem to be comfortable with that. My only issue with SOS is that I would like to see a sample of the Spanish I online, and I can't seem to find it. I don't like to buy something unless I can see a sample of it. Any ideas what I am doing wrong? Thanks for taking your precious time to answer my silly questions. What a blessing that you and the many other ladies on this board have been to me. I will continue to pray for what to do with Spanish I. Sometimes I have to just sit and wait and pray. Blessings, Brenda I took a moment to look for a sample on line, but did not find anything. Do you have a homeschool group in your area? Would you be able to ask them if anyone uses this? Just a shot in the dark. Jean Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
brendafromtenn Posted March 19, 2009 Author Share Posted March 19, 2009 Yes, we have support groups around here. But most of the moms in MY group have younger folks....We only have a few high school folks....But I am connected to the groups in the Memphis area. Good idea! Thanks, Jean, I'll go check it out. I like the idea of doing all of SOS I and 1/2 of SOS II.....We can do that! And the grammar is covered! Yea! I just was not comfortable with the RS because of that. And the price is more in line with what we can spend this year. Plus, AOP is having a 20%sale in April which would save us even more. Thanks for sharing your experience with all of us. Blessings, Brenda:001_smile: Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Halftime Hope Posted March 19, 2009 Share Posted March 19, 2009 My mom was back in the hospital. Again. I'm sorry you and she are dealing with this. Is she still there? I know having a parent in the hospital is very hard! I am requiring my son to do the 1st 4 chapters in SOS Spanish II before I will give him 2 credits of Spanish because it introduces the past tenses I think they should have. Could you help me understand? I'd like to look at SOS somewhere, as I'm not sure I want to teach Paso a Paso again for my youngest and a friend. You said two credits for SOS 1, plus part of 2. Do you count one credit = one year of study, or one = one semester of study? How does this compare with what we traditionally called highschool Spanish 1 (full year) and Spanish 2, before schools got into all the lovely block scheduling and only started covering eight chapters out of 14 in one semester and calling it Spanish 1....:rant: (There's a question in there somewhere, I'm sure! ;) Thanks so much, Jean! it really helps to have your btdt experience! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jean in Wisc Posted March 19, 2009 Share Posted March 19, 2009 I'm sorry you and she are dealing with this. Is she still there? I know having a parent in the hospital is very hard! She's home--for now. Thanks for asking :) Could you help me understand? I'd like to look at SOS somewhere, as I'm not sure I want to teach Paso a Paso again for my youngest and a friend. You said two credits for SOS 1, plus part of 2. Do you count one credit = one year of study, or one = one semester of study? How does this compare with what we traditionally called highschool Spanish 1 (full year) and Spanish 2, before schools got into all the lovely block scheduling and only started covering eight chapters out of 14 in one semester and calling it Spanish 1.... (There's a question in there somewhere, I'm sure! In my day, we took a full year of high school Spanish and that one credit was Spanish I. Spanish II was the next full year. A year of high school Spanish was meant to be equivalent to a semester of college Spanish. SOS Spanish I is written to be a full year (one credit) of high school Spanish; SOS Spanish II should be the 2nd full year of Spanish. These would be the equivalent of the Spanish I and II textbooks I used in high school some 35 years ago (aka The Middle Ages. LOL!). However, no high school I know has ever done that much Spanish in one year--in fact, even in my day, we only did 3/4 of the Spanish I book. In Spanish II we finished book 1 and got about 1/2 way through the Spanish II book. Those who stuck around for Spanish 3 and 4 finished the Spanish II book and either went on to another textbook or did more writing and reading. Today, however, many, many, many schools are buying a Spanish I book and are spending 2 years doing it--they call it Spanish I and II and give 2 credits. What is appalling to me is that the colleges seem to have dumbed down their classes so that their semesters also cover less (please someone, tell me this is not so). That is why my daughter was able to test out of 3 semesters of Spanish even though she had only done 1.5 years of SOS Spanish (actually she did not even do the full 1/2 of SOS II, and when she took the equivalent to Spanish III in college she learned no new grammar). So everyone seems to be covering approximately 1/2 of each book and calling it a language credit. That is why I'm saying that if you want to do Spanish lite, you could do all of SOS Spanish I and call it 2 credits--that is what most colleges are going to expect a child to have studied when he comes in with 2 years of high school Spanish. I'm a stick in the mud. I prefer the child to cover through at least chapter 4 of SOS II in order to call it 2 years of Spanish. I think they should be introduced to the past tenses and a few other grammar forms prior to moving into Spanish III--but that my old stick-in-the-mud, old-fashioned beliefs. It is just my own personal :rant: :lol: HTH, Jean Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Halftime Hope Posted March 19, 2009 Share Posted March 19, 2009 Thanks, Jean!! My experience, and what we did in my class, lines right up with what you described, and we added grammar emphasis to what was included in PaP. Gaah!! (I'm going to have to think through this even more...) When we did PaP two years ago, we covered all but the last chapter of 1 the first year, and then covered all but the last two chapters the second year. We worked so hard, and two of those students went right into S2 (their parents' choice) at the CC with no trouble, the third went to a private school and took S3. I guess we did well, but we worked very hard to do it (30 weeks in our co-op year). My youngest wants desperately to learn Spanish, and he's profoundly dyslexic, so I'm trying to figure out what would be best for him. I want him to have the credits on his transcipt, but he really wants to learn to speak the language, not just book study. I'm probably going to have to arrange some dunking, if not immersion, for him. :) Dd likes Spanish but really wants to learn Greek, and ds was happy to be in engineering which doesn't require any more college foreign language--he's just happy, again, as a dyslexic, to have made it through without too much fuss. Any thoughts you have regarding success for my youngest are always appreciated. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Matryoshka Posted March 19, 2009 Share Posted March 19, 2009 I think they should be introduced to the past tenses and a few other grammar forms prior to moving into Spanish III--but that my old stick-in-the-mud, old-fashioned beliefs. It is just my own personal :rant: :lol: Well heck, yeah. I'd think that the past tenses would be somewhere at the beginning of the 2nd year, and certainly covered before the 3rd. I talked to a girl who goes to a local high school, in Spanish 3, and she said they didn't even have a text, they weren't doing any reading, just photocopied grammar worksheets. YIKES!! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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