Asychrony

In the past couple of weeks, I've been hit over the head multiple times by The Kid's asynchrony.

For a year or two now, I've said her academic level is "um, I don't know, upper elementary? Maybe middle school-ish?" Super-specific, right? Part of the problem is that input and output are vastly different levels. Her ability to understand written or verbal information is awesome, and she has fun with college-level materials. However, her writing is somewhere in the elementary levels. What level does that make her, anyway? What level do you call a kid when listening to college lectures is fun, discussing them is not particularly challenging, but a written response would be miserable?

8-Year-Old Resources (August edition)

I'm still a planner, but I've been handing over more and more of the school choices directly to The Kid. This is resulting in fewer long-term plans, but some interesting school choices. Here are her current plans for fall:

English

• Literature class at Athena's Academy
• How to Read Literature Like a Professor (for Kids) - this book is an introduction to literary methods, tropes, and symbols, and should pair well with her literature class
• Barron's 1100 Words You Need To Know - we're taking a break from the Michael Clay Thompson series, but she really wanted to keep doing vocabulary and spelling, so this is filling in
• Vocabulary Cartoons - also feeding her love of words
• Poetry Teas, Brave Writer style
• Poetry Matters: Writing a Poem From the Inside Out - The Kid has long been writing snippets of poetry, and has requested some assistance in learning how to further develop this skill
• NaNoWriMo Young Writers Program - as usual, this will consume all of November and most of October as well
• Live Writing: Breathing Life Into Your Words - we'll use this as The Kid preps for NaNoWriMo this year
• Magazines: Highlights, Spider

Math

• Art of Problem Solving's Introduction to Algebra - she's working through this at home
• Becoming a Problem Solving Genius - one of the Ed Zaccaro books, this one breaks down lots of ways to tackle hard problems. I suspect this would have been a better fit last year, but if she still enjoys it...
• Hard Math for Elementary School - another one that would have been a better fit if I'd bought it earlier, but it still has just a couple sections that will interest The Kid, like working in base 8 and tiling problems
• 25 Real Life Math Investigations That Will Astound Teachers and Students - another Ed Zaccaro book, this one looks to be more on target for where she is now. Each chapter focuses on a real-life way that math gets used (and somethings misused).
• Amazing Math Projects - we've already done most the projects in this book, and she loved them. We'll finish up and then I need to see if I can find another math projects book!
• The Magic of Math - The Kid has seen Art Benjamin speak twice in person, plus watched some of his Great Courses lectures, so using his Algebra-related book during her Algebra year seems like a no-brainer
• The Cartoon Guide to Algebra - I won't assign any of the problems in this book, it's just for fun
• Math With Bad Drawings - not even released yet, but this looks like a fun book!
• Zometool - there is an entire curriculum that came with our Zometool, and we've barely touched it yet! We definitely need to get this out more.

Science

• Science/math unit study class once a week at an enrichment center
• Structural Engineering: Buildings and Skyscrapers - The Kid has done the first couple of projects in this kit, and we'll get back around to the rest at some point.
• Horrible Science books - she's so excited to finally get this set!
• MEL Chemistry kits - a friend gets these and has generously offered to share
• Magazines: Ranger Rick, Ask, National Geographic Kids, Muse
• Subscription to Great Courses Plus - currently watching a lecture series on Polar Explorations
• Monthly astronomy night at local science center
• Monthly lecture series put on by local science center 

Social Studies

• Social Studies/Art unit study class once a week at an enrichment center 
• Subscription to Great Courses Plus - currently watching lecture series on How The World Learns and another on a History of Food
• History Unboxed - we bought just two boxes to try out, and we'll see how it goes

Foreign Language

• Galore Park's So You Really Want to Learn French, book 2
• Homeschool Spanish Academy - she's continuing on once a week to maintain basic fluency

Other

• Hoffman Piano Academy - as desired, not assigned by me
• Music class once per week at enrichment center
• Lego class once per week at enrichment center
• Robotics club at enrichment center
• Learning how to sew
• Her second year with her Destination Imagination team

Geodesic Dome Out of Newsprint

Building this is not for the impatient. I would suggest at least four pairs of hands and 2-4 hours of time. But I can confirm that it does work! Instructions can be found here. If you don't want to deal with all the ink on newspaper, we used 24" by 36" packing paper.

Learning to Build

This is a post I meant to write last winter, and never got around to it. The Kid participated in Destination Imagination last year, and will be participating again this year. It's an amazing program and I highly recommend that you look into it!

For last year's challenge, the team had to learn how to construct a very lightweight structure out of limited materials. It had to bear weight. A lot of weight. Where to start with such an undertaking and a group of 7-8 year olds? Popsicle sticks, of course!

This part of the project could easily be done by anyone. The challenge I first issued to the team was to build a structure out of no more than 50 craft sticks that could withstand weight being placed on top. (For their purposes, we dropped Olympic weights on top. That takes a structure tester to do safely, and that also makes it less tenable for an at-home project.) The structures they built used only craft sticks and glue, had to have an open center, and stand at least the height of one craft stick. Once they could manage a basic structure, we moved on to competing to see who could make the lightest weight structure that still held significant weight.

I was amazed at the construction skills this taught. They had to start with which glues held best. We bought a whole pile of glue, glued together pieces of wood, and then broke them apart to see how much force it took, and whether the glue broke or the wood broke. They experimented with how much glue made for a good joint. They played with clamping vs not clamping the pieces together. They experimented with jigs. They learned how to use cutting tools. They learned about angles and cross bracing. They learned about types of woods, and how much they weighed.

And that was just one part of their challenge. I can't wait to see what next year brings!

There's the box, under the giant stack of books!

Poetry Teas, Simplified

Yes, we do Poetry Teas, though not as often as The Kid would like. Originally inspired by Brave Writer, these have gotten less and less formal with time.

When we started them, we would plan a great snack, do the shopping, do the baking, make the drinks, carefully choose the poems... you get the idea. There might even be flowers.

I found that, for us, all those preparations meant that we almost never actually got around to the Poetry Teas. So, it's been simplified. Now, Poetry Tea is often sparked by having baked goods around in our house. Did we make cookies recently? Hey! We could just add a drink and grab some books and we now have a Poetry Tea!

Or, maybe we just have realized that it's been a very long time since our last Tea. What can we possibly grab to turn this into a Tea? Triscuits and cheese? Perfect! Grab some books!

We have tea, lattes, mochas, steamers, lemonade, limeade - basically, whatever drink we have on hand that we enjoy. No fancy tea set, as we don't own one and don't have space in the cabinets to add one. Heck, we don't even own a dining table. This is all done at our kitchen island bar, where we do all our eating.

And it still works.

Hoping for Long-Term Math Love

Halloween, age 5. This costume relates to math, I swear!

Math has been a bit of a meandering subject around here. The Kid loved math as a preschooler. We played with RightStart manipulatives. We counted how many steps we took in walking a block, and estimated how many steps to get all the way home. We played mathy games. We eventually transitioned to using RightStart Math, which worked well... until it didn't. We tried Beast Academy, but she wasn't yet ready for it then. We took off from formal math for most of a year, while reading mathy books and playing mathy games.

Then back to Beast Academy, which was rough going at first. It was hard. She got wrong answers. She didn't know how to tackle some of the problems. It was a slow, and sometimes painful, slog for a while. But by the time she finished up level 3, she was in love with it. Alongside, we continued reading mathy books and playing mathy games. She played around with Math Kangaroo practice tests, worked in Zaccaro's Primary Grade Challenge Math book, did some Hands On Equations.

She then tackled level 4, which was great for her... until it wasn't. I realized that all the meandering math meant that the second half of level 4 was mostly going to be review for her. I tried just assigning the starred and challenge problems, but those were still too easy. I let her start testing out of full chapters.

Around that time, I had her take the Woodcock-Johnson test. She'd taken it a year before, so I thought I could predict her scores fairly well. Nope. Her math scores had gone through the roof. Among other things, this opened up the option of applying to Epsilon Camp. Unfortunately, our finances took a major hit this year, so that wasn't an immediate option. I discussed the camp with The Kid, who fell in love with the very idea of it. Math lectures all morning! Yippee! (Yes, really.) Thinking ahead to next summer, when she will have just turned 9, she will be required to have not only the test scores, but also have completed Algebra 1 in order to qualify for Epsilon.

We discussed. She very much wanted to give this a try. But... Beast 5, Pre-Algebra, and Algebra all before next summer? Yikes.

We made a plan. She would continue testing out of Beast chapters as appropriate. Beast 5 would serve as most of her Pre-Algebra. She would double her math time from 30 minutes per day to a full hour. Selected chapters from Jousting Armadillos could be done alongside Beast 5 to cover any Pre-A topics that weren't covered in Beast. I could see no way to do both AOPS Pre-A and AOPS Intro to Algebra in one year, so AOPS Pre-A would be skipped. Once Beast 5 and Jousting Armadillos were completed, we would move directly into AOPS Intro to Algebra.

It feels a bit crazy. But in the three months since, she has completed over 2/3 of Beast 5 and almost all of the sections of Joust Armadillos that I selected. Looks like we'll be starting Algebra in September.

Pumpkin pi. She thought it was hilarious!

Why no BFSU 3-5 posts?

Some of my most popular posts on the blog are the Building Foundations for Scientific Understanding unit study approach posts. I've been asked a few times why there are no posts for the 3-5 book once we finished the K-2 book. There are two reasons. The first is simply that the prerequisites in the 3-5 book (and the 6-8 book) don't jump around threads nearly as much as the K-2 book, making it much easier to just work your way through each thread from top to bottom. The other reason, however, is that we stopped using a science curriculum.

Don't get me wrong, I still have the BFSU 3-5 and 6-8 books on the shelf. They've been fantastically useful when The Kid asks about a topic and I don't even know how to get started breaking down the concepts for her. I just look up the concept she is asking about, then follow the prerequisites backwards until I can see the path to get from here to there. It gives me ideas on how to do that. It lists books that I can reserve at the library.

But I slowly realized, as our time with BFSU K-2 was coming to an end, that The Kid was more htan ready to lead her own science education. She read the books on her own. She asked to listen to lectures or watch documentaries about science. She started taking things apart to figure out how they worked. She wanted extensive time and depth on particular subjects. And she wanted to go further and deeper than any curriculum was going to take her.

Hogwarts Battle

 

Anyone else with kids super obsessed with Harry Potter? These books are some of the only fiction that The Kid chooses to actually reread. She role plays stuff from the books any time she can find another kid to play with. She even learned a bunch of Quidditch terms in French. It's a little ridiculous.

But we do totally agree on this game. Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle is a cooperative game; all players are working together to defeat the villains before the villains can capture a set of locations. You play as a HP character, you cast spells and use magical items in order to attack, you get stunned instead of dying, and everyone wins or loses together. The game is progressive in that when you beat Year 1, you move on to Year 2 the next time you play. If you lose, you replay the year until you win. Each year alters the rules a bit and adds complexity, so it starts very simple and ends up as a fairly complex (and long!) game by Year 7.

The expansion pack, Monster Box of Monsters is also excellent. It's an add-on for after you've beaten the entire base game.

Reading List for My 7 Year Old

I didn't do a Literature List this year like I have in past years. I'm choosing not to assign literature, and The Kid is more inclined to choose her own books than read whatever I put in her library bin at this point. But that certainly doesn't mean we didn't read! We had a lot of reading with the Cultural Geography study, we continued to have family read aloud time every night (though we switched to mainly using audiobooks for this), and we listened to audiobooks in the car. So, at the end of the year instead of the beginning, here's the summary:

The entire Harry Potter series. Yes, the whole thing. It was immense and it took months. But The Kid is now fully obsessed with HP.

We read both Ramona Forever and Ramona's World this year, finishing up the entire Ramona series.

We also worked on finishing up a full tour of Roald Dahl's fiction this year, a project we started a few years back with The Minpins. I think The Witches is one of the scariest of Dahl's books, and we therefore left it to near the end. DD loved it, though - the visual language in this book is wonderful! And the little boy and his grandmother teaming up so well to work against the witches is fantastic.

I don't know how this one of Dahl's got left so late! It may be my favorite of the whole bunch. A brilliant little girl with horrendous parents, who eventually finds her way with the help of a lovely librarian and a supportive teacher. Plus, a little bit of magic, which always helps.

This was an amazing and imaginative story about a girl who was fed a bit too much moonlight as a baby, making her powerfully magical, and the witch, swamp monster, and Perfectly Tiny Dragon who raise her. It's a coming-of-age tale, written for middle grades but appropriate for younger readers who are ready for the themes typical of fantasy books, including grave danger and death. Winner of the 2017 Newbery Medal.

Middle grades book that is appropriate for younger readers who are okay exploring the theme of loss. Newbery Honor Book.

Planning, Then Throwing It All Out

I’ve been deciding what we’ll do next year. Much of it isn’t difficult, as I’ve leaned more and more unschooly, which means I have to do a lot in the moment, but far less planning. Too bad, really, because planning is a strength of mine.

Except maybe not with this kid. 

She teaches herself. Which is awesome. Really. 

By that, I don’t just mean that she reads the book, answers the questions, and doesn’t need me. I mean she thinks about a concept, comes to logical conclusions, then thinks about that conclusion and thinks about logical conclusions, and so on.

Recently, she was thinking about fractions. Half of 4 is 2. That’s easy. Half of 7 is 3 ½. Also easy. This seems to mean that she can write any number as X/2 and then simplify. Is the same true of other unit factions? Yes. Is the same true of other non-unit fractions? Try out several problems and… yes. Cool, figured that out. How about division? I don’t know exactly how she made the leap here, but she did. Somehow, she knew how to divide fractions without ever having seen it or having been told it. 

And she was correct.

We already use Beast Academy, which is the most difficult curriculum I can find for elementary. And then we hit five chapters in a row with material she had already self-taught. Half a year’s worth of material! I tried to just have her do the starred/challenging questions. She did them. Half a chapter in half an hour, and she thought they were boring and not challenging. 

While figuring out how to move on, I’m readjusting my plans. 

Giftedness doesn’t mean more. It doesn’t mean faster. It doesn’t mean… well, a lot of things. It means different. And I’m finding that even parents of other gifted kids aren’t always the most helpful in navigating these waters.

Onwards, upwards, outwards, and beyond, and all plans be damned!

In Defense of "Too Much Curricula"

I see it all the time - people asking "here's my plan, is it too much?" And, inevitable, many of the answers are a resounding yes. I often disagree, as I think it's the attitude toward schoolwork and education that needs evaluated, not the pile of curricula.

Anyone who has read my yearly resource posts will know that we have a lot of educational materials around here. They fill shelves. Several of them. And they aren't all on the school shelves - they're on my daughter's own bookshelves, they're on the game shelves, they're on the toy shelves...

And that's great for us! We love variety. When I say that I am going to do two language arts programs plus a pile of supplements, a science program plus multiple science units plus xyz else in science, I don't mean that we're using each one of those things every day! Or every week. Or even every month. As a general rule, I don't care when (or, sometimes, if) we finish whatever our "curriculum" is. Sometimes a resource will stay on the shelf for a year or two and then it suddenly fits perfectly with what we want to accomplish. Sometimes we're bored and burnt out (hello, winter!) and want to do something different. Sometimes I see others complaining about how they're dragging through lessons in order to get to the next break, and I'm reaching for something we haven't used in a while and pulling it off the shelf to rejuvenate us.

I love having these options!

This isn't even all the math we're using this year!

7 Year Old Resources (Second Grade, Take Two!)

It's halfway through the year and I never did post this year's annual school resources post. As I posted earlier, I have no idea what grade to call her, but officially this will be second grade with an independent public charter school. This is the grand list of everything I plan to pull off the shelf at some time this year.

Language Arts

• Michael Clay Thompson Town level - we completed much of this level last year, but not the writing assignments or the poetry book. We'll go back through this year, filling in what we left out previously.
• Brave Writer - we always use bits and pieces of the lifestyle (especially poetry teas!). I also have Partnership Writing and a few Arrows in waiting.
• NaNoWriMo - The Kid is already excited and planning to write a sequel to a book she wrote two years ago. We'll spend most of October on the workbook before she does the writing in November.
• Editor in Chief grades 3-4 - The Kid is working through this workbook to clean up a few odds and ends that we may have missed along the way.
• Homemade copywork plus calligraphy/creative lettering books - her handwriting has really been catching up this year. By the end of the year, we may be able to start transitioning to less copywork and into some dictation.
• Vocabulary Cartoons - these are fun! I had the spine cut off so that I can hang up one word per day, and they really do seem to stick in her head. This is a great option between levels of Caesar's English.
• Burning Cargo - this is a game-ified typing program that has really worked to improve her fluency.

Math

• Beast Academy - our core. Just starting 4th grade, but will also do the 2nd grade books as they come out.
• Zaccaro's Primary Grade Challenge Math - The Kid has done bits and pieces of this book, which I expect to complete this year.
• Math Kangaroo - DD has decided she would like to compete in Math Kangaroo next spring. To that end, we'll practice using some old tests and a prep book from Borac.
• Hands on Equations
• Math Projects - I found this nifty book on Amazon and it should work to add some more hands-on ideas into our math time
• Kumon 4th grade math workbooks - these have been useful for practicing algorithms after The Kid learns the theory from Beast Academy.
• Math-y books - I Hate Mathematics!, Math for Smarty Pants, Murderous Maths, Sir Cumference

Science will be fully interest-based.

• Athens's Academy Marine Mammals class - eight week class in fall
• Athena's Academy Cryptozoology class - eight week class in spring

Social Studies

• Homemade Cultural Geography course

Foreign Language

• Hoemschool Spanish Academy once per week to keep up skills
• Galore Park's So You Really Want to Learn French, book 1 - The Husband is using this as a spine for the first year of introductory French. He's a fluent French speaker, so he gets to teach this in the evenings and weekends, whenever it fits.

Extracurriculars
The Kid has had her usual mishmash of extras, including Hoffman Piano Academy, tennis, swimming, ceramics, circus arts, gymnastics, and indoor skydiving. She's changing things up more often than usual, preferring to do just a session at a time then switching off. She's taking art, music, Lego, and a math games class at the charter school.