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SeaStar
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Is it too early for this post 
We have been back at the books for about a month now. This year we are trying out several new things, and most are going really well.
A few hits:
1. Using "The Bible Tells Me So" as a basis for our religious ed this year.
we are loving it! 
2. "How to Teach your Kids Shakespeare".
It's a go here. I don't know why, but it gives me goosebumps to hear my kids rattling off passages from Shakespeare. Maybe that's because Shakespeare is often seen as difficult or dull?
3. Vocabulary Cartoons
I can't even remember where I got this book... maybe through PaperBack Swap? But oh, my- it makes me laugh. Basically, you learn a word a day.
Each word has a silly picture and caption to help you remember it.
And believe me- the pictures and captions are so silly you WILL NOT forget them. Here's an example for the word lament: We lament that Larry was buried in cement. (picture that in your mind...).
We learn about two words a week just for the comic relief of this book.
4. Clare's Costly Cookie
Wow- what a great read. We read a chapter a day, and it really hits home with my kids. I can see their minds spinning
5. Rightstart Geometry
Despite my meltdown over this earlier in the summer, it is going very well here so far. I am sure it will get harder, but we're good for now
6. Life of Fred
Not new here, but my dc are currently going back through and rereading every LOF book we have. I am finding them all over the house. This is for fun. They love to reminisce about CC Coalback.
7. Mindbenders
(from Critical thinking press)
we work on these together, and oh, my- the first puzzle we tackled was hard! We were like Mo. Larry and Curly trying to do it. But since then we have gotten the hang of thinking logically and look forward every day to doing the next puzzle.
8. IEW
This program is a blessing for us. I am using the Student Writing Intensive B with my dc. I went around and around about ordering the SWB
and thought of just using the TWSS dvds instead. Now I am glad I went with SWIB, though, because as funny as Andrew Pudewa is on the TWSS dvds, he is even funnier on the SWIB dvds. My kids love to watch him.
And they are writing! They dive into it. Four weeks of school, four compositions. Happy mom.
Misses:
1. Minn of the Mississippi
I don't know... I just can't get into this book, and my kids are very lukewarm about it. We're only a few chapters in.. maybe we'll warm up to it.
2. Time Line for History
This is just not ds's favorite thing. At all. *sigh*
3. Changing the order of our day
I had to sit back and remember this week that my ds is very slow to adapt to changes in the schedule. I made one minor change in the order of our work which caused a minor meltdown 
So overall we are off to a good start- though I have obviously jinxed myself by writing this
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Melinda, mom to ds ('02) and dd ('04)
SQUILT Music Appreciation
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sunny
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SeaStar wrote:
1. Using "The Bible Tells Me So" as a basis for our religious ed this year.
we are loving it!
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We are loving this!!! I also enjoy You Can Understand the Bible: A Practical Guide to Each Book in the Bible By Peter Kreeft which I, myself am rereading as we go through The Bible Tells Me So . But I have to admit how much fun The Bible Tells Me So is to read aloud. We are laughing and learning so much! It has terrrific insight and yet is still so accessible. Love it!
Definitley not enough hours in the day, but so far...all curricula is working.
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mom3aut1not
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Hits
Electronic Playground 50-in-1
Mary Daly's diagramming
Pick a Saint
Misses
Grammar Recitation
In Christ,
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knowloveserve
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Excellent notes! We have a similar year planned. My aunt sent us a very generous check to help with school expenses and so I splurged on IEW materials this year. Watching the DVDs have really impressed me so far.
Minn was not our favorite Holling book. We finished it and parts were good. But the kids were much bigger fans of Paddle-to-the-Sea and Pagoo. (Tree in the Trail was only so-so also... Seabird was probably third favorite)
But with trips and events, we are still un started yet!!! Not 'til September 8th! It's killing me... usually we've been schooling all of August by now but our summer was far too busy to hope for that.
Will be eager to revisit this thread in a few weeks as we have some fresh books and plans to explore.
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Ellie
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jawgee
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Which Vocabulary Cartoons are you using, Melinda? I see a few books by that title on Amazon.
We just started this week, and we are having a light week, so I can't give hits/misses yet. So far, though, Stories of America has really been capturing the kids' attention. I know this is true when my 8YO uses his Legos to build Captain John Smith's ship. That's from the kid who really doesn't like history. 
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CrunchyMom
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sunny wrote:
SeaStar wrote:
1. Using "The Bible Tells Me So" as a basis for our religious ed this year.
we are loving it!
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We are loving this!!! I also enjoy You Can Understand the Bible: A Practical Guide to Each Book in the Bible By Peter Kreeft which I, myself am rereading as we go through The Bible Tells Me So . But I have to admit how much fun The Bible Tells Me So is to read aloud. We are laughing and learning so much! It has terrrific insight and yet is still so accessible. Love it!
Definitley not enough hours in the day, but so far...all curricula is working. |
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Filing this one away for future use. It looks great!
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Lindsay
Five Boys(6/04) (6/06) (9/08)(3/11),(7/13), and 1 girl (5/16)
My Symphony
[URL=http://mysymphonygarden.blogspot.com/]Lost in the Cosmos[/UR
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SeaStar
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sunny wrote:
SeaStar wrote:
1. Using "The Bible Tells Me So" as a basis for our religious ed this year.
we are loving it!
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We are loving this!!! I also enjoy You Can Understand the Bible: A Practical Guide to Each Book in the Bible By Peter Kreeft which I, myself am rereading as we go through The Bible Tells Me So . But I have to admit how much fun The Bible Tells Me So is to read aloud. We are laughing and learning so much! It has terrrific insight and yet is still so accessible. Love it!
Definitley not enough hours in the day, but so far...all curricula is working. |
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Thanks for the heads up about the Kreeft book. I have another one of his books on my wish list.
I am loving the art study tie-in with "The Bible Tells Me So". I didn't realize until this week that the author would be throwing art study into the mix. He says he hands out prints to his class. I wonder if he prints them himself or has a source for them?
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Melinda, mom to ds ('02) and dd ('04)
SQUILT Music Appreciation
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SeaStar
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jawgee wrote:
Which Vocabulary Cartoons are you using, Melinda? I see a few books by that title on Amazon.
We just started this week, and we are having a light week, so I can't give hits/misses yet. So far, though, Stories of America has really been capturing the kids' attention. I know this is true when my 8YO uses his Legos to build Captain John Smith's ship. That's from the kid who really doesn't like history. |
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Vocabulary Cartoons is the copy I have. I think Jeannette here originally recommended it, and I put it on my PBS wish list. But used copies start at one cent on Amazon, so it is a good, cheap buy.
My favorite cartoon is for the word incongruous: The senator from Alaska was incongruous in Congress.
Hmm... what do you mean a hat with viking horns and a bear skin coat do not blend in?
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SQUILT Music Appreciation
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SeaStar
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knowloveserve wrote:
Excellent notes! We have a similar year planned. My aunt sent us a very generous check to help with school expenses and so I splurged on IEW materials this year. Watching the DVDs have really impressed me so far.
Minn was not our favorite Holling book. We finished it and parts were good. But the kids were much bigger fans of Paddle-to-the-Sea and Pagoo. (Tree in the Trail was only so-so also... Seabird was probably third favorite)
But with trips and events, we are still un started yet!!! Not 'til September 8th! It's killing me... usually we've been schooling all of August by now but our summer was far too busy to hope for that.
Will be eager to revisit this thread in a few weeks as we have some fresh books and plans to explore. |
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I feel your pain, Ellie. I remember the year we had company right in the middle of August, and that really pushed back our start date. I tried to breathe easy but felt edgy the whole time.
I am glad to know that Minn was not a hit at your house, either. I keep waiting for it to get more interesting... maybe it doesn't? I guess that I chose it based on the success of "Paddle to the Sea" here and was expecting a repeat of that.
IEW has blown me away. I started it hoping to get my dc writing without the anguish/drama that ds tends to slide into when he feels like he doesn't understand how to do something (I see this a lot with math).
IEW takes all that away. He knows exactly what to do, and it is such a relief for us all! And the program gives plenty of room for creativity. This week the assignment was to rewrite a fable using one who/which clause and one -ly adverb. I told the kids ( as per the teacher's guide) that they could change the characters/names/setting and have fun with it.
My ds wrote a very funny rendition that had us all laughing.
But the really amazing part is that the kids seem very proud of their work- as in they run to get their compositions to show dh or other visitors we have. Goodness! I never expected that.
The beauty is that I set the timer, and we work on IEW for only 20 minutes a day. They are doing so much in only 20 minutes...
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SallyT
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Hits:
*going back to MEP math
*Visual Latin
*Intermediate Language Lessons, which my older kids hated, is going amazingly well with my 10-year-old
*KISS grammar is going well for my 12-year-old
*The World's Story (12-year-old)
*D'Aulaire's Norse Myths (also 12-year-old)
*my plans are running smoothly in general so far: score! I'm having to recalibrate my expectations for the 10yo -- she's showing great improvement here at the end of her course of vision therapy, but I think we're going to have to work up far more slowly in terms of quantity of reading. But her reading is so. much. better!
Non-hits so far . . .
I can't think of anything that's been an obvious dud. So far we're off to a really good year.
And none of my kids loved Minn, either. I think it's pretty interesting, but the 10yo, who read it last year, was like, "So, this turtle swims past stuff on the river bottom, and after a while it all seems the same."
:)
Sally
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CrunchyMom
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Sally, what made you go back to MEP? You seemed to really like Fred.
And I am so glad that the vision therapy is helping. We have an appointment tomorrow morning for my 8 year old to be evaluated by a developmental ophthalmologist. It isn't as if I *want* there to be a problem, but I sort of think there is, so I would like for it to be addressed asap. I had to make the appointment back in June!
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Lindsay
Five Boys(6/04) (6/06) (9/08)(3/11),(7/13), and 1 girl (5/16)
My Symphony
[URL=http://mysymphonygarden.blogspot.com/]Lost in the Cosmos[/UR
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SallyT
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Well, my decision was mostly financially driven. I needed book costs to be pretty much zero going into this fall. But also -- as much as I like Fred -- I felt that my kids weren't learning/retaining as much as they learn and retain putting pencil to paper *more.* Fred was working better for my 12-year-old than for my 10-year-old, for whom the math concepts just kind of blew by in the story, but I also found that with him, *I* was doing a huge amount of work to get him through the "Your Turn to Play," because the concepts were so far beyond where he really was.
And frankly, our test scores last spring -- as much as I take these things with lots of salt -- were not what I would have hoped, given how much math we did last year. This was especially true for the 10-year-old, whose visual-processing problems affected her math learning as well as her reading, but it was true for the 12-year-old as well. And even though of course we were, and still are, on a trajectory that is different from the trajectory of the test . . . well, anyway, I was discouraged. And I looked at MEP again and thought, "Why exactly did we put this on the back burner?"
Fred was good in lots of ways -- the first unit in MEP's Year 7 (which is structured very differently from the primary years) is all about logic, sets, and Venn Diagrams, and it picks right up with all the set theory stuff that's in the intermediate Fred books. *I* at least remembered all this, and it's actually come back to him pretty clearly. I dropped the 10-year-old back to Year 3 to remediate, and she's flying along, which is great to see.
So, yes. I will be the first to admit that I'm a math schizophrenic. I do still really like Fred, but not enough to pay money for more books right now, when I have a free resource that's as good and, for us right now, actually better. And it's nice to have *one* program that's both providing enough basic practice AND mind-stretching mathematical-thinking exercise. All in one package, all in one lesson. I am using XtraMath.org for facts drill, 5 minutes at the start of math time for each child, but otherwise, it's all MEP.
I hope your appointment goes well. In our case, it was a relief to have some kind of diagnosis, and I am seeing great improvement in all her work already.
Sally
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JodieLyn
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I think it's perfectly reasonable and even logical to be able to look at a program and say.. hey this was great, we got a new perspective, we tried it out and liked it BUT it's still not getting us to our goals so we're not going to keep with it.
So, for us, we're pretty much sticking with what we've had.. BUT this year we're using a video series on the Constitution for the older kids and the Liberty Kids series for the younger kids.. I use the videos to introduce a topic (so we're following the videos) and then fill in with other bits of video (sometimes we use a school house rock for fun) and some books and discussion. So far the kids seem to like it but we've only just started this week.
Now my systems that so far I'm happy with.. down the hallway I put hooks and each child has a backpack for their school work and a hook for the backpack. Soooooo nice.. no one needs to move someone else's stuff to get to theirs and they can open the backpacks and grab stuff or bring the whole backpack to the table (or wherever).
Also in my hallway is my "not-white board". Basically it's a white board where I've written a bit of a schedule and the bits that are for the week.. so like I can see that some of the kids are reading the first 4 chapters of their book this week.. and such. But I'm finding that if I can go and look at something instead of having to look it up or find the paper or even get on the computer to see it.. that it's much easier for me to keep doing the next thing.
The story of the "not white board" is that I didn't want to spend too much on it and got an inexpensive picture frame with glass and covered the back of it with wrapping paper (already thinking I can change it with the seasons) and I like it much better.. it looks pretty against my white walls in the hallway and less just functional. 
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G-18, B-17, G-15, G-14, B-13, B-11, G-9, B-7, B-5, B-4
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SallyT
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I love that not-white-board idea, Jodie!
I have a bench in my hall that the three still at home use as "locker" space -- each one has a book/supply bin, and they fit snugly end-to-end on the bench, so so far it's staying pretty neat. My 11th grader is gone every day to campus with his dad, and I've been worried that books were going to get lost in the shuffle, because this has been known to happen with this particular Absentminded Scientist in the past. But so far he's done a good job of reshelving a day's books in his box and getting out the next day's to take to school.
Actually, that's another thing that's working well: having a rather disaffected 16-year-old out of the house most of the time. Makes him happy (happier, anyway) to be on the college campus, and we don't have him glooming around upstairs, fogging up the whole house with his moods. He has been campaigning to graduate a year early (i.e. this year), which he could do, in terms of credits, but which we don't really want him to do, so keeping him maxed out with outside classes, for which he's earning dual-enrollment credit, is one way to make being stuck in a small town while his sister and friends take off for college go down a little easier.
And I have the younger two all to myself, which is very nice. For years they were the little kids in car seats, tagging along to everything the older kids did. Now they're their own "school," and I think we all like that.
*sigh* I guess the 16-year-old's life is something that's going both well and not-well, depending on how you look at it. My husband has actually started to entertain the idea that he *could* graduate this year, if his college of choice (Virginia Military Institute) would take him with a substantial-enough scholarship on the basis of his current test scores, which are very good. I'm not sure I think this is the answer, but it might be. St. Monica and I have been very, very good friends lately, so I hope she'll help us sort all this out!
Sally
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CrunchyMom
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Thanks, Sally. That makes sense. I was just curious, not doubting your Fred loyalty or anything  I actually have always used MathMammoth alongside Fred, alternating days, and this is the first year I planned to use straight Fred, so I'm mostly just having first of the year second guesses. We'll see. I know we like the Math Mammoth blue series, so I figure I can always fill in gaps with a foray into the areas where we need to stop and spend time.
Sometimes it is hard to remember that plans aren't set in stone, isn't it? That just because you decide to do something at the beginning of the year doesn't mean that you can't easily change if it isn't working as you hoped.
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Lindsay
Five Boys(6/04) (6/06) (9/08)(3/11),(7/13), and 1 girl (5/16)
My Symphony
[URL=http://mysymphonygarden.blogspot.com/]Lost in the Cosmos[/UR
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SallyT
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Yes, I'm already doing tons of tweaking -- I wasn't sure what kind of pace the vision-therapy kid could handle, so I overscheduled, and am now scaling back. But that's fine.
And I did really like the Fred year. The kid for whom it worked better enjoyed it, though by the end of last year even he was burning out, especially as he couldn't do the Your Turn to Play on his own -- even for a very language-y kid, it was just too many words.
But it set him up well for what he's doing now, which is our run-up to pre-algebra. That's my other concern -- being well prepared for high-school math. For my oldest, math was a source of constant stress, her ACT and SAT math scores were not good, and though she did do fine in her one college math class, she's now stressing about the math on the GRE. It's not going to matter that much, since she's applying to English programs, but still . . . I'd love for everyone else not to have to stress out that much! And while elementary-level standardized tests don't matter in the great scheme of things, scholarship money is tied to SATs and ACTs, so I do think about our readiness for those hurdles even now . . .
I don't know -- I don't really have brand loyalty as such! I just know my own unfortunate propensity for going, "This! Yes! This is the best thing ever! It is the key to our whole existence! It's what I've been looking for all my life! . . . Oh, wait. No, it's not." :)
Sally
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SallyT
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Didn't mean to hijack the conversation! Back to hits and misses!
Sally
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setonmom
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JodieLyn- I am curious about how to make one of the not whiteboards. So you are writing on the glass of the picture frame? and then the picture is just white paper so you can see what you wrote? Is the wrapping paper the frame or is it the picture ( under the glass) ? Sounds like something that would really help me stay on track.
setonmom
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jawgee
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I've seen those not whiteboards before. I assume she means something like this.
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Monica
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JodieLyn
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jawgee wrote:
| I've seen those not whiteboards before. I assume she means something like this. |
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Yes, exactly. Except mine is just one larger frame.. the wrapping paper is light enough to write over it and still see it. I'm doing well with a patterned paper, but you could get a solid color if you'd find it distracting.
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Jodie, wife to Dave
G-18, B-17, G-15, G-14, B-13, B-11, G-9, B-7, B-5, B-4
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4Real Forums : Living Learning
Topic: Hits and Misses of the new school year
