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.