I worked on Christian’s homeschool schedule for about an hour or so while Lorena and the kids were at Christian’s guitar lesson followed by shopping for new shoes for Christian. I cannot believe it–Christian wears size 7½ now. That is only a half size smaller than me. Lorena got him some running shoes so he could start preparing for a triathlon. After having spent several days getting Kelly’s schedule ready, I decided to change the way we are going to do seventh grade for Christian relative to how we did it for Kelly. There are several reasons. Kelly and Christian are different from each other, Christian is half a year older than Kelly when she started seventh grade, we have learned some new ways of studying that seem to work better for us, etc., etc.
Christian and I looked over the preliminary schedule when I had it pretty well put together. We made some adjustments based on his desire to keep his NerdHow “how-to” blog posting as a non-school activity. Really that is great. He enjoys that and if we turn it into something he has to do, it could be a lot less fun. I have some good writing activities in there already, but I need to add a little more. In addition, I have decided that he will work on the Freshman English Composition CLEP preparation book from the very beginning of the year. A different kind of studying is required to prepare for that CLEP test, so it will be a good English review and a time to practice some new study techniques that will be useful when he gets to college.
Kelly has set up a mailing list for her Betty Blonde comic. If you would like to subscribe to her mailing list, you can click here to do that. Christian is making great progress on his Spike the Cactus comic that uses the same Betty Blonde characters, but from a little different perspective.
Ken, I am really enjoying the homeschool discussions both of the planning for this year (where we will be in the future) and the old posts (about where we were last year!) What was the program you mentioned that your kids used to memorize their multiplication and division facts? Addie spent almost an entire year (2 years ago) trying to memorize those facts and never succeded although we tried many different methods. That is how she got behind in math, and this year her and Konrad (who loves math and just memorized the facts by osmosis it seems) worked together on Singapore 3A, 3B and 4A (we continued through the summer because I felt Addie was behind and Konrad loved it so much he didn’t want to quit!)
Audrey, I will try to look up the old system that we had. It was really quite good. If we have it I will try to send it with the other big manual I have here for you. Thanks for enjoying the posts! It has been interesting looking back at the old posts. We were in a ton of turmoil at the time due to the government school situation and it is REALLY good to remember why we are homeschooling.
Karen
Oh, my, Ken – he might pass you up! (shoe size!) We have a couple of boys doing the same thing — it’s funny though – Osten has the same size to bigger than the older two! Not that I’m real surprised – he’s always had larger hands and feet! and so has Phil. We haven’t had time to think about school here !! and I think everyone is glad!! Conventions are much more encouraging and we are planning on several more conventions! Best wishes to you all – we will be missing you at conventions.
Thanks for the note Karen. I am just getting more and more thankful that we are a short little family. You guys are so tall, you must go through shoes by the case! We were just talking about how nice it would be to go out to Saginaw this year. We are going to try to do just that next year. We are looking forward to seeing you all there if you do not come out here to visit us first!
Hi Ken,
I sent my dad a link to the Betty Blonde Comic strip. I think he will really enjoy it.
It has been interesting reading your old blogs. I have a comment on multiplication facts.
It is necessary that kids learn these so well that they are truely automatic, and there
are so many different ways to go about it…flash cards, math fact pages, the old method
of recitation, learning skip counting songs….all these are well and good, but, if the
memorization of the facts is getting so hard that a child is held back in learning math
concepts, then one must find another method. My oldest boy struggled in third grade memoriaing
his multiplication math facts. He understood the concept that it was just a fast way of
addition and all that, he just couldn’t get them down. I didn’t wait until he had them all
memorized before moving him onto 2 and 3 digit multiplication. I had him use a multiplication
chart or one of those things that has all the times tables on the toy and when you press the
button that says, let’s say, 6×7, it reveals 42 through the clouded plastic that hides
the answer when the button is not pressed down. He kept it right by his side when doing math.
If he didn’t know the multi fact automatically while doing a problem, I let him find it
out this way….he had to say it outloud, for example, “6×7 is…42” as he pressed it
down. In this way he was not slowed down too much and learned his facts day by day as he
moved on into more difficult mathmatical concepts. He didn’t fall behind in math and by
the time he had them fully memorized, he was still right where he should be as far as
math level. I know that some of my friends thought that I was allowing him to
cheat, “Cheat what?” I said and just continued. He learned them just fine using this
method. This boy is now in 8th grade and doing just fine. By the way, he is a 5’8″, 90lb
“bone boy” with a size 9 1/2 shoe! I think he grew 4″ this summer alone, and he is not done
yet!
Ruthie
Hello Ruthie and Audrey. Thanks for the great posts! I am sure Audrey will appreciate your input Ruthie. She is one of our good friends from Indiana. We knew them originally in Oregon. You might already know from the blog that they also have five kids, the last (but not least) of which not only has a very cool name (America), but was born just a few short weeks ago. It sounds like you had a great method for both making sure your kids got the math facts while the kept moving forward. I have exactly the same feelings as you about keeping moving, but assuring that the facts are assimilated.
We used a system called Math-It that worked really well for us. It seemed that, at least for our kids, if they had a cool trick to remember a math fact (the digits of the answer to any single digit number multiplied times nine must add to equal nine, the first digit being one less than the number being multiplied by nine), it was somehow easier for them to remember the trick than to remember the fact itself, even though it often seemed simpler to just remember the number. A laughed at your “Cheat what?” and love that mindset–it is about LEARNING and whatever helps to keep moving forward is fair game! Also, don’t you think just moving on helped. It is not like they are going to quit using those facts in more advanced math.
I think it is great that Audrey is killing two birds with one stone on the Singapore math. Kelly and Christian are just far enough apart in age that they almost never are working on the same thing at the same time. When they can, I think it is a help to the both them. They can help each other as they go along.
Wow! Your kids must be way tall. Our whole crew is pretty short. I cannot imagine what it must be like to be buying new shoes as often as the both of you. You not only have more, but they are taller than ours, so you have to deal with a significantly larger range of sizes! I think this might be the first time I have been truly thankful for my shortness. 🙂