Study Skills Crash Course

The Kid is taking an online class this year. No surprise there, she likes her online classes. But for the first time, this is not a aimed-at-gifted-kids, high-input-low-output class. This is a bona fide high school class, populated with actual high schoolers.

It did not take me long to realize that she was going to need a study skills crash course. I think it happened when she took a quiz, got a D, immediately took the quiz again (being allowed two chances at it), got a nearly identical score, then shrugged. She hadn't even thought about studying, looking anything up (it was open book), or even realized what letter grade a 64% was. This is also the first class she has ever taken that issues grades at all, so it's a completely foreign concept to her.

The hardest part for me? I never learned any study skills myself. I just absorbed what I was supposed to do in order to get good grades by having grown up going to traditional schools. But then it occurred to me that might be all she needs - someone to explain to her the basics of getting by. We talked about the things that seemed so basic to me that I forgot that anyone might need them taught:

- Use the provided formula sheets.
- Look at the answers to the quiz when the first attempt is graded - the answers were all right there for her!
- Don't just read the homework problems and answer them in her head. Actually write the answers down. Then actually check them with the answer key. Then actually look over the ones missed.
- If you don't understand, don't say "I don't understand" and move on. Write to the teacher. Tell her what you're thinking and ask where you're going wrong.

I find it amazing that The Kid doesn't need my help with Physics, but the things above still need specifically taught. Just as well, because I'm even more hopeless with Physics than with study skills.

The Perils of Not Pre-Reading

It's been a few years since I even attempted to pre-read what The Kid was reading. There's just not enough time in the day. Plus, quite frankly, she reads faster than I do. Out trouble isn't with her own chosen reading, though. For that, she mostly gravitates towards books written for her age or a couple years above. (Finally!) Some of it has the usual kids-being-mean and kids-making0bad-decisions, but it's all age appropriate for a tween.

No. It's what I choose for read alouds. Or, rather, listen alouds, since I much prefer to use audiobooks over reading aloud myself. We've always pulled from a diverse, varied selection of books. And most of them are truly excellent. But I should probably go back to paying attention so that we don't get too many more chapters about incest and violence. Somehow, I wasn't expecting that to come up so much in a book about scientific ethics.

But, I'm not going to kid myself. There's no way I'm going to pre-read all our read alouds. It's just one of the perils of reading widely.

And, despite being caught off guard by the incest and violence, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is an amazing book.

Math Resources for Middle School/High School

I've posted a few times before about our less-conventional math resources, which we used either in addition to or in place of traditional math materials. However, now that The Kid has finished Algebra 1, many of those previously discussed math materials are in the past. Fortunately for me, there were a lot of suggestions made during the parent programs at Epsilon Camp, so I went on a shopping spree when we got back and restocked the math shelf with resources to last us a few years. So. Much. Math.

Here's what is now on the shelf:


Art of Problem Solving books. It feels like all of them, but it's really just the introductory level books plus the Art of Problem Solving Volume 1. The Kid is currently wanting a break from traditional math, so I suspect these will sit untouched for a while, but I know she'll circle around to them.

Math and Magic in Camelot. The sequel to the much-loved Math and Magic in Wonderland, which we've already read. These are story books about twin sisters who solve puzzles and go on an adventure. Each chapter has a "play along" section that has the reader doing math and language puzzles. This book looks like it involves a bit of science as well. The math involved focuses much more on logic than arithmetic and could probably be used by any student at about a third grade math and language level or up. I hope it's as good as the first one!

Secrets of Mental Math. Art Benjamin is a lot of fun, and The Kid has watched a few of his lecture series on Great Courses Plus. Math is a favorite subject of hers, and she's good at it, but we've never emphasized speed. I'm hoping she'll work through this book with me and add to her bag of tricks for faster mental math.


What Is the Name of This Book? This is a complex puzzle book. The puzzles build on each other, and there are around 270 of them. This book is a classic, and the author (Raymond Smullyen) was recommended by every one of the Epsilon math instructors, without any of them having heard any of the others make their own recommendation.

Drawing Circle Images. There are a number of books out there that demonstrate how to make interesting drawings with a compass or a compass and straightedge. This is one of them. Fun for kids who like mathy art.

25 Real Life Math Investigations That Will Astound Teachers and Students. We've used a couple of the Zaccaro books before, and this one looks like an interesting "real life applications" version. Topics include loans, interest rates, math mistakes in the media and in laws, inflation, lying with statistics, math and music, and many others.

Calculus By and For Young People. Essentially a conceptual introduction to the concepts of calculus, designed for as early as elementary school level. I love introducing future topics in a variety of ways, so that when we get there officially it's more a matter of figuring out how to apply the knowledge instead of encountering it for the first time ever.

The Book of Numbers. John Conway is one of the best known living mathematicians, and he's an author on two of the books on this list, this one co-written by Richard Guy. Unlike most books on this list, this is not a worktext, nor does it have assignments for the reader. It is an exploration of number theory and patterns. This book starts with some topics that The Kid is familiar with, and builds from there. I believe that she is capable of understanding the concepts in the book, but some of it will stretch her well out of her current comfort zone.

The Symmetries of Things. This is the book that kickstarted the replenishment of the math shelf. Another book by John Conway, it was co-written by Heidi Burgiel and Chaim Goodman-Strauss. Chaim also happened to be one of my daughter's instructors at Epsilon Camp, and she was especially curious about the book he co-wrote. Geometry is not my strength, and flipping through this book has be completely lost. This may be a resource that The Kid tries to tackle and truly understand, or it may be one that she flips through for the beauty of the illustrations right now. Either way, it is definitely an introduction to a type of mathematics she will never get through the standard curriculum.

Visions of the Universe. This author of mathematical coloring books was recommended by Chaim when I asked for kid-accessible resources for some of the interesting geometry he was talking about.

Patty Paper Geometry. A fully hands-on pre-formal-geometry book. This one is written to the teacher, with options to either guide your student fully through the constructions or to give your student some ideas of how to accomplish something and then let them experiment to learn. As you might guess, The Kid and I are fully in the "experiment to learn" camp. She has gotten into a bit of origami lately, so this seems a natural extension. And, as I mentioned above with the Calculus book, I love to introduce concepts before we get to them formally so that the formal math is an application rather than a first exposure.

Transitioning from Beast Academy to AOPS

We actually did this transition about a year ago, but I thought I’d post about it now that we’re a bit further along. The Kid had finished up Beast Academy 5, and was ready to move on. She really wanted to make it into Epsilon Camp (hopefully I’ll get around to another post about that later), which meant that she had a deadline to finish Algebra 1. Looking at the AOPS Prealgebra book, I found there was so much overlap between BA5 and Prealgebra that we decided to skip directly to the Intro to Algebra book.

Math-wise, this worked well. Most of the first few chapters were review, just as you’d expect if coming from Prealgebra. Format-wise, we had some struggles. Gone were the colorful, cuddly Beasts, only to be replaced by a wall of text. For the life of me, I couldn’t understand why things were moving along so slowly when the math itself was not a challenge for my kid. She watched and loved the free AOPS videos. She understood the content. But everything was taking foooreeeveeer.

First, I had to model how to work problems in a notebook instead of a workbook. The Kid has always resisted writing her work down, which has been fine in the past because she was able to do it mentally. Algebra was the first time that writing it down became necessary for her. I sat next to her and would scribe 1-2 problems as examples, showing her to number the problem, write down the work, and box the answer.  She caught on to this reasonably well, though I’d still need to show her what might be helpful to write down with new problem types. 

But, still, it was taking so long. Much longer than could be understood by me given her previous math pace. I decided to see how she liked Alcumus, which is the free adaptive program by AOPS for online problems. She loved this system. She would work the problems on a small whiteboard, get immediate feedback as to whether her answer was correct, and if she knew the material then she could move on after only a handful of problems. She started flying through at the pace I’ve come to expect of her. I found the Alcumus problems to be mostly along the lines of the regular problems in the book, even with the challenge level adjusted up (which you can do in the settings), so I decided to also give her a small selection of the challenge problems, but I’d learned from watching her on Alcumus that this would go better if I copied them out so she was only seeing one problem at a time. There’s something about seeing a whole group of problems with no white space that seems to have been what was derailing her when using the book.

Back to the Epsilon Camp goal, her options to substantiate having completed Algebra were to take an approved online class or to take the camp’s Algebra test. The Kid decided she didn’t want entry to hinge on a single test, so we signed her up for the AOPS Intro to Algebra class. This would mean repeating several chapters, but she was ok with that to get to the eventual goal. 

So, she started the class. The online classes from AOPS are 100% text-based. No video, no audio, just text on the screen from the instructor and students for about 90 minutes. Those turned out to be a barrier for my daughter instead of a help. She found the format so unengaging that she was constantly answering a question, spacing out while waiting for the instructor to push the answers through, and then missing when they moved on because there was nothing except text scrolling on a screen to indicate it was time to tune back in. The workload was also much higher, but most of it did not add substantial depth. In addition to the relevant Alcumus sections, she needed to do about 10 other problems about the same level as Alcumus, plus one problem along the lines of a Challenge Problem, plus one writing problem. This actually meant she was doing far more problems than she was with me, but fewer challenge problems. The writing problem is an amazing aspect of the online class, and was definitely a worthwhile experience. For that, students have to solve one challenging problem, and write up a full explanation of how to solve the problem. The task of writing out the full thought process is one that isn’t usually given in math classes until much higher levels, and really stretches a student’s ability to mathematically. The writing problem is graded for both math content and style by actual people, who give both a grade and written feedback on the solution. 

The Kid did finish the class, because we knew the official grade would be helpful to her. However, I do not foresee her taking online AOPS classes in the future. Going forward, we’ll combine the books and Alcumus in ways that work for her.

Yes, we still read! (Books for 8 Years Old)

I used to write long book lists in the early years, back when I was actually the one choosing the books. Now, my daughter chooses most of her reading for herself, though we do still have a regular family read aloud time every night. (Well, “listen aloud” may be more correct than “read aloud”, as we’ve switched to mostly using Audible for this.)

Instead of listing everything we’ve read or listened to in the past year, I’m going to lost the favorites here:

The Apothecary by Maile Meloy

The Candymakers by Wendy Mass

Millicent Min, Girl Genius by Lisa Yee

Prydain Chronicles (series) by Lloyd Alexander

Born a Crime by Trevor Noah

The City of Ember by Jeanne DuPrau

The Penderwicks by Jeanne Birdsall

One Crazy Summer by Rita Garcia-Williams

The Misadventures of the Family Fletcher by Dana Allison Levy

Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly 

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

A Long Walk to Water by Linda Sue Park

The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart

Tuesdays at the Castle by Jessica Day George

Frindle by Andrew Clements

Wonder by R.J. Palacio

Theodosia and the Serpents of Chaos (series) by R.L. LaFevers

Alcatraz vs the Evil Librarians by Brandon Sanderson

The Girl Who Drank the Moon by Kelly Barnhill

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind by Bryan Mealer and Wiliam Kamkwamba

I Am Malala by Malala Yousafzai

Plus, The Kid reread the Harry Potter series about a million more times. That obsession shows no signs of slowing down!

Brave Writer and Michael Clay Thompson

Let's start with this: I did not intend to use two English programs. I definitely did not intend to use two English programs plus several supplemental pieces. But that's what I've ended up doing. I notice others doing similarly on various forums, but given that both of these programs are hard to wrap your mind around until you start using them, I thought I'd have a bit of a comparison post.

Brave Writer's strengths include its focus on creativity and language as a natural part of our world. It encourages Big Juicy Conversations, not just about books but also about movies and art and life. It encourages us to simply enjoy what we read without feeling the need to analyze it all. Brave Writer emphasizes how much our writing can be about the things that we naturally enjoy and are inspired by, and not necessarily related to traditional academics at all.

Michael Clay Thompson's program's strengths lie in the absolute joy it takes in academics. The love of academic writing and language comes through very clearly. He emphasizes that the most enjoyable reading starts with writing that is extremely well done.  Because of this, he focuses on technical grammar, classic vocabulary, and academic writing.

So, can you see what the likely weaknesses of each program are? Brave Writer can come across as almost anti-academic at times, and MCT's program feels as though it is almost discouraging creativity. They both start with a love of language, and they both eschew teaching/following formulaic writing methods, but they approach it from very different sides.

We don't try to use these at the same time. It would be far too much. We started with Jot it Down, and it was a light, fun introduction. The Kid wasn't ready to move on to Partnership Writing yet, but did want to know parts of speech, so I crossed my fingers (there are nearly no sample pages!) and bought MCT's Grammar Island. She loved that, and learned easily and quickly from it, so I picked up the rest of the Island level as well.

We continued on like this. When we would hit a point where we were getting restless with one approach, or finished one level but she wasn't ready for the leap to the next level, we would switch to the other one. They have balanced each other perfectly for The Kid, giving us a solid set of academic books, and a good number of creative projects.

Suppose the Wolf Were an Octopus

We piece together most of our curriculum here. It is the easiest way to meet The Kid's needs. One of the pieces I have loved for Language Arts and keep coming back to is this wonderful little series from Royal Fireworks Press.

The books are split by grade level (K-2, 3-4, 5-6, and 7-8), but they all follow the same format, simply using books more likely to appeal to each of those grade ranges. For example, the K-2 level focuses on picture books and early chapter books. The 7-8 version features books like Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry and The Hobbit.

For each book, there is a total of 18 questions, 3 questions in each of six "levels". The levels correspond to Bloom's Taxonomy and the basic idea is that when you begin to work on comprehension, you would start with level 1 questions. As children become more adept at understanding and discussing literature, you would work your way up through the levels to more complex discussions. However, they include all the levels of questions for each and every book, so you would start with the book level that matches your child's interest level and/or reading level, then use the questions to adjust for comprehension ability.

The levels used in the books are:

1. Remembering: Basic facts about peoples, places, or things
2. Understanding: Often about why a character did something, using situations where the "why" was often explicitly stated in the text or is easy to discern
3. Applying: Questions that have the student apply situations in the book to their own lives - what would they have done if...? If you could interfere at any point in this story, when would it be?
4. Analyzing: examines information and situations in the book. There are a lot of "how", "why", and "what do you think caused _____" types of questions in here. 
5. Evaluating: Asks the students to make judgments about the books - was an action an example of courage or cowardice? How did a character apply their own sense of judgment and was it consistent with what they said about their morals? What was a character's biggest strength and biggest weakness?
6. Creating: These are invitations to rewrite the story, or part of the story. The series title comes from a question in the K-2 book, relating to Red Riding Hood: "Suppose the wolf were an octopus. How would the story change?"

We've used these books in a few ways, all of which boil down to helping me come up with more creative questions than I manage on my own. When The Kid wanted to learn how to write paragraphs, we used questions from these books to come up with good topics. She recently is tackling essay writing. We're using MCT's Essay Voyage as the main text for this, but find their assignments uninspiring, and she was thrilled to see me pull these off the shelf to replace the assignments. They cover enough variety of books that we've ever actually read just to match up with the series, we just find something in the list that she has read and enjoyed and wants to write about!