entirelysonja

Erika has been using Math Mammoth Blue Series for quite some time, and is perhaps halfway through Add & Subtract 3. I gave her the placement test for Beast Academy 3a, to see if she was ready for that, and based on the results, decided to let her try it.

The first chapter is on geometry, and contains some really interesting and difficult problems. Our approach has been for her to try them herself, and then if she doesn't quite see everything, I let her know that she needs to try again and offer her hints and suggestions if she wants them. I'm very happy with the level of thinking required thus far -- and was amused that I encouraged her to play Tetris in order to deepen her understanding of one of the lessons.

I'm looking forward to seeing how it goes from here, and I'm pleased that she's been willing to accept help; unwillingness to actually be taught has been an ongoing issue for us.

This has definitely been the spring of reading for her -- she just finished the entire Harry Potter series, and has now started reading the Percy Jackson series.

I didn't really expect her to read the entire first Harry Potter book, let alone the whole series! But she just kept wanting to keep going, and I don't believe in censoring kids' reading, so...

... her response to a power outage is to keep reading by the light of the two LED tea lights she had on for atmosphere. I would have gotten her a better light, but it was really time for bed anyway.

We had another great day today, featuring lesson 98 in the Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading (the "oa" in words like "boat" and "float") and various math stuff, including lessons 35 and 36 in MEP.

We did have a bit of a conflict over the use of a balance scale -- I had found some checkers that were part of my old Connect Four set and happened to all weigh exactly the same amount, and had intended to use them to expand on some balancing equations exercises we'd been doing. Unfortunately, she balked at the use of the checkers, wanting to use the metal weights that came with the scale instead. Since there were only two 1-gram weights, we ran into trouble, but she wouldn't consider using the checkers instead. I do think that this evening, when we experimented with many other objects around the house and found that nothing else we found was actually sufficiently uniform, she may have gotten over it. We'll see.

Anyway, other than that, we had a fantastic time. The highlight for me was when I tried a new approach to even and odd numbers. We've only touched on them briefly before, and she clearly didn't get it then. This time, I took out some of Erika's glass "math stones", in groups of 2, 3, 4, and 5. I asked her to divide each group into two equal parts, and then explained that the groups she could divide into two equal parts were even numbers of stones, and the ones she couldn't divide into two equal parts were odd numbers of stones. We then took this further into 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10. The cool part was when she started saying things like, "I don't really need to divide these into two parts, because I know that 8 is equal to 4 plus 4." and "I don't really need to divide these into two parts, because I know that 9 is equal to 4 plus 5, so it's an odd number."

I was also impressed that she was able, after only one reading, to answer the question, "Mary has one more Red hat than she has Blue hats. How many Red and how many Blue hats can she have if she has not more than three hats of either colour?"

The only problem she didn't quite get today was a pattern that began:

|00|||0000|

She completed it:

|00|||0000||||00000|||||000000

Which isn't quite right -- she correctly identified that the number of lines and the number of 0's increased each time, but she didn't figure out exactly how.

Then this evening before bed, she read a Bob book called "Joe's Toe" quite successfully -- there were only a few words she needed help with, and she figured out some long words she'd never read before, like "doctor," without any help. I was very impressed!

This afternoon during Karl's nap, Erika:

Had her first computer programming experience using Scratch -- she had a lion cub and a fox wandering around the screen making noises.

Completed lesson 95 of the Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading.

Finished three lessons in Reading Eggs, and passed the quiz for map 8. She hadn't used Reading Eggs in a while, because the level of difficulty of the lessons had exceeded her comfort zone, but since the company sent me a code for 3 free months of service, I suggested she might give it a whirl and see if it was easier now. Not surprisingly, it was. She still doesn't like anything involving time pressure, though -- she freezes when there's a timer going.

She also watched educational videos on Brainpop Junior while I was helping Karl get to sleep.

Whew!

This week I visited the used book sale at the Wheaton Library, and came out with a pile of great stuff, including a 5-year-old DK/Merriam-Webster Children's Dictionary, the third- and fourth-grade volumes of the "What Your X Grader Needs to Know" series (I already had K, 1, and 6, so now I just need 2 and 5 for a complete set), and a couple of Dr. Seuss books.

I feel as though Erika has turned a corner in reading. She's realized that she can easily read many words in books for small children, which makes sitting down to try to puzzle the rest of the words out more interesting. She's also exhibited some interest in reading together, asking for help with words she doesn't know. My sense is that reading is likely to take off pretty quickly for her now that she's reached this point. Today at the Natural History Museum, she read a simple book she'd never seen before in the gift shop. Yesterday, she read the entirety of "Hop on Pop," a book I don't think she'd ever heard read aloud, without much help. She's also picked up the BOB books again, which she had set aside after reaching a point where they became too difficult; this week she read books six and seven in Costco collection 3 -- I think these are toward the end of set 4 in the regular BOB book boxes.

Today we went back to the Natural History Museum with John, so he and Karl could go off on their own while Erika and I spent more time drawing in the Mammals exhibit. Erika spent about 45 minutes drawing before she'd had enough. She drew a tiger, a walrus, a panda, a caracal, a giraffe, a fennec, and some kind of hopping mouse -- I only had time to draw the walrus, the giraffe, a fox, and the beginnings of a zebra during that time. I'm amazed at her endurance for drawing.

Afterwards, we went up the Old Post Office Tower, where the kids enjoyed looking out at the city. I particularly liked watching the airplanes take off and land at National airport.

Erika definitely has her own ideas about reading, which means she's not terribly teachable. She only likes to work on reading right before bed, when she's exhausted. She doesn't really want any kind of systematic instruction. All she wants to do right now is read Bob books, usually only once for each book, so she doesn't get much practice before moving on to harder material. It's not what I would consider an ideal learning situation.

One of the things that often happens is that she doesn't want to try to decode unfamiliar words that she's perfectly capable of decoding. For example, the other night she professed complete ignorance of the word "skipped" despite having correctly read the word "skipper" in the same sentence. She likes it if I sound out the word for her, at which point she knows exactly what it is.

When the same kind of thing happened tonight, I came up with a new strategy. I suggested that I sound out every other letter.

What I didn't expect is that this would cause her to read the whole word. I just figured we'd take turns sounding out the letters. It turned out that once she'd sounded out the first letter, she just went ahead and read the word. This probably happened 4 times. I guess the idea that we'd take turns made it enough fun that she was willing to focus, and once she focused, she no longer wanted or needed any help.

I'll be interested to see what happens from here.

A few days ago, Karl started asking me which letters start particular words. It's kind of an interesting thing for him to be asking, because he doesn't actually know his alphabet. Perhaps this is his way of learning it.

This morning in the car, he started asking Erika. He probably asked her 20 words before she got sick of the game, and the only two she got wrong were "arm" (she thought it started with R) and "tree," which for some reason she thought started with H -- I think this one may just have been a lapse of attention on her part. She did get the starting letters for ambulance and truck right.

Anyway, I thought it was fun to listen to the conversation between them.

In other reading news, Erika read me a book yesterday! Admittedly, it was a super-easy beginning reader book, but it was a whole book she'd never seen before. Whee!

Today's amusing "homeschooling" activity was play-dough words -- or rather, word. I made up some cards with useful words on them in huge type, and Erika rolled out snakes to lay over the letters. I decided to try this activity because I wanted to see if doing something that required extended time with one particular word would help that word get really set in her mind. Anyway, she decided one word was enough ("you"), but she had fun and seems to know exactly how to read and spell it now. We'll see whether she wants to do this again on another day with a different word.

( Picture of completed word )