Another Birthday Week Survived

May 5, 2013 By Alicia

We made it through another birthday week here.

Jack turned 10, Victoria turned 15, and Alex turned 6.

I made a lot of cakes and cupcakes.

Here’s a quick round-up of ten fun ways we played and learned during birthday week….

Victoria chose books for birthday presents, and picked out an awesome assortment at Barnes and Noble (see pic above). She also bought herself the Les Miserables soundtrack and we’ve been listening to a lot of French Revolutionary songs in the car.
We’ve been doing a lot of bird watching. Daryl and the kids have spotted a white-faced ibis, an osprey, blue jays, red-winged blackbirds, lots of song birds, vultures, many kinds of migrating ducks, returning pelicans and a fantastic battle between two hawks in the road this morning, along with a very determined crow dive-bombing a red-tailed hawk on a pole this afternoon.
Victoria taught her younger siblings about Nihilism. Of course.
Anna has been writing poems and doing song rewrites. She has one about Corn and Snow (living in Minnesota) based on Carrie Underwood’s tornado song (I can’t remember the name now) and “I Knew You Were Homeschooled” instead of “I Knew You Were Trouble” by Taylor Swift.
Jack graduated archery class and did an awesome job. We bought a family membership for the rest of the year so we can use the facility and the gear any time.
Alex has been working on sight words. He knows about 30 now. We have a goal of 50 by the end of the summer and I keep track in my journal.
Anna has headed up to Bemidji for the week with family friends. She stays with Guy and Val once or twice a year. They love getting to play parents and she loves getting to be an only child. They also teach her about legal stuff (Val is a lawyer), computers and all of the many subjects they are so knowledgeable about.
Victoria and Daryl went to a writers/actors/artists workshop. They learned about everything from collage to Taiko drumming to writing to charcoal and paint. It was at a nearby college and Victoria made some cool new connections and they both had a great time.
We have seedlings on all the windowsills and have started many gardens. We got a ton of snow on top of my freshly planted seeds, but they’re cold tolerant so hopefully they’ll fare okay. Inside, I have heirloom tomatoes everywhere, along with some exotic eggplants and interesting cabbage. I can’t wait for it to warm up enough to really get serious in the garden.
Daryl, Anna and Jack auditioned for the Wilder Pageant. Victoria is sitting out this year (she has been in it every summer since she was 6), but Alex may join in as one of Daryl’s kids. Daryl will probably be Reverend Alden and Elias Bedal (Walnut Grove’s first mayor) again. We haven’t received official word about roles yet, but the cast photos are on Saturday so we’ll know this week.

We’ve also talked about… European travel, youth hostels, abortion, the Gosnell trial, townships, voting registration and more. The kids have also been doing… finger knitting, Big Wheel riding, ball playing, tree climbing, drawing, Lego building, Wii playing, video chatting, hiking, bike riding, sticky ball tossing, solitaire playing, Free Rice earning, dog walking, cooking, chores, talking on the phone with friends, reading, reading, reading and a whole lot of playing.

If you haven’t seen them, here’s my latest homeschooling articles elsewhere….

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And now, I have one final cake to bake (Victoria would like a gluten-free Red Velvet Cake) so I’d better get to it.

Filed Under: Daily log, freebies, Links, Math, science

Looking ahead to third grade.

May 2, 2013 By tinderbox

Our new school year starts on June 1st. One of my goals for third grade is that Alex start to take a little more ownership of her education, so I asked her what she would like to accomplish this year. Without prompting, she came up with the following list:

1) Learn to write in cursive, quickly.
2) Learn how to multiply fractions.
3) Know the area of a circle.
4) Know the area of the Circle of Life.
5) Be able to write an essay by the first day of fourth grade.

Not such a bad list! #1 hadn’t initially been on my own list – I honestly don’t care if she writes in cursive or print. I learned cursive in elementary school, labored over it for four years, and instantly switched back to printing the moment I hit junior high. It did not impair my efforts to earn a Ph.D. But since Alex wants to learn it, I let her pick her script and ordered a handwriting book in the style she chose (Zaner-Bloser, pretty close to the Palmer script I was taught.)

The other kind of writing has been much on my mind. In third grade, I really want to focus on translating Alex’s strong verbal skills into writing.

I don’t think she’s quite ready for Paragraph Town, the next level of Michael Clay Thompson language arts. (Boy, would she love getting to move on to the next MCT poetry book, though. Music of the Hemispheres was one of the highlights of this year.) I intended to just have her focus on writing short paragraphs or themes in history and science, but on impulse I bought Writing Strands instead. It’s written to the child – I think it’s time to start making that shift – and it has a mix of creative and expository assignments. One of the things I like is that it focuses on working on the same piece of writing over several days. It looks like Writing Strands 3 will take about six months to complete, and then we can move on to MCT Town level towards the end of third grade.

In math, with regret, we will mostly be leaving Beast Academy behind. They’re now saying that they’ll come out with each new set of books five months apart – and a set of books is only a quarter of a grade level. We’ll still buy the guides for enrichment, and perhaps the practice books as well, but Beast Academy can’t continue as Alex’s grade-level work. Instead, over the next year or so she’s going to work through a compacted version of MEP 4b-6b. Beast Academy has shown me that Alex just doesn’t need as much practice and repetition as there is in MEP. She thrives on moving a little quicker. I’ve reduced the rest of MEP down into about a full year’s work (it will take longer if we intersperse with Beast Academy), and we’ll move at that pace as long as she feels comfortable with it.

The last new thing I want to add for third grade is art. We did great art lessons with Five in a Row in kindergarten and first grade, but since then, sadly, Alex has mostly been on her own. She does great mixed-media and fabric art projects on her own, but I know that she would benefit from some actual instruction. We’re going to try working through Mona Brookes’ Drawing With Children, and see where that takes us.

In addition to these new things, Alex will be keeping on with Lively Latin, All About Spelling, Story of the World, and Intellego science units. That seems like more than enough!

…And!

The really major new thing we’ll have going on this year is that Colin is dropping out of nursery school and becoming a home-preschooler, for reasons I will explain in an upcoming post. Yay, I get to do Five in a Row again! Colin is ecstatic about not having to go to school anymore, although he did cautiously ask if I could give him easy homeschooling, at first. I’m not going to leap right in to a lot of academics with him. Besides Five in a Row, I think I’ll try to spend some time at the table with him most days, doing varying activities: fine motor skills, board games, cutting and gluing, games with math manipulatives, mazes, learning to write letters, and continuing on with a little MEP Reception, or, as it is known in our house, “Colin math.” Oh, and books. Lots of time on the couch reading books.

It’s going to be awesome.

Filed Under: Five in a Row, Math, policy & planning, Writing

Checking In…

April 10, 2013 By Alicia

My goodness, I’ve been gone a lot lately! We’ve been so busy for being recluses.

Here’s a bit of what we’ve been up to….

Daryl had his recheck for his hip replacement surgery at the Mayo. All looks great and he has the go-ahead for physical therapy.

While we were there, I surprised the kids with $10 each to spend at Rochester’s giant thrift store, Saver’s.

My boys pooled their money for light sabers, nerf guns, tech toys and mini figurines.

Anna used her cash for yarn, an awesome high-tech watch, a wizardry book that goes along with Harry Potter crafts, and a 39 Clues card collection case.

Victoria spent it on nothing but books (The Outsiders, Slaughterhouse Five, Farenheit 451…). And then talked me into buying an enormous stack of extra textbooks for her (organic chemistry, psychology, biology, surgical nursing, algebra one if I got her the others…). That girl sure makes me smile sometimes.

Jack and I have been playing this game like crazy to help him learn his multiplication facts (and also because it’s just plain fun).

Here’s a bit of what I posted about it on Facebook:

It’s called Roll n Multiply and you play it similarly to tic tac toe but it’s far more fun. Jack and I love it. You roll two dice and multiply the numbers (they are 10 sided), then put the game piece with that number on it anywhere on the board flipped to your color. The object is to get 4 in a row. BUT, if you roll a number that is already on the board you can take it and use it elsewhere (whether it was yours or your opponent’s, you just flip it to your color and put it where you want it), so you can move things and unblock lines that were blocked before. So if I had 3 in a row and Jack blocked me with his orange 24, and then I rolled 6×4, I could flip over his 24 to purple and win. It’s part luck, part strategy, part math. We play it a ton of and both of us like it. There’s a cheat sheet you can use if you don’t know your facts too, and I think Alex will be able to play it fine even though he’s only 5 and doesn’t know most of his facts yet. You really don’t need to know them but they end up learning them accidentally very quickly. I highly recommend it and I promised Jack I’d buy us a set of our own. You can check it out at the MSU library as soon as I return it and see if you guys like it. It’s nice and sturdy too, which I like. Here’s the link on Amazon (different cover now but the inside looks identical).

We stayed at a hotel for a couple of days while we were there for the recheck and had fun swimming at the pool, putting together fun gourmet (gluten free, vegetarian, etc.) hotel room meals and splurging a bit one time.

We finished off our visit by stopping by a fabulous HS family’s dairy farm to meet up in real life for the first time after us moms had known each other online for years. It was a really special day and so much fun. None of us could stop smiling afterwards and we can’t wait to visit again.

I was too busy having fun to take any pictures but I think Toria and Anna got a few. I snagged this from my friend’s FB feed of one of their new babies. I love the fact that every single one of the 90+ cows has a name (Vanessa, Molly, Avery….) and that they are treated so lovingly (Avery steals peanut butter cups). We learned so much, too! And we just plain adored their family.

In other news, someone made these beautiful flint-knapped driftglass arrowheads for our family. Daryl struck up a conversation with the artist a few years ago as Daryl was looking for sharks’ teeth at a small local lake and this man was looking for arrowheads. They’ve networked a bit since then (the “primitive tech” community is a small and friendly one!), and my sweetie offered him some big chunks of good flintknapping rock that we had sitting unused in our garage. In thanks, he made these for all of us. Aren’t they beautiful?!

We’re also working on our seeds, readying the garden and so much more. Poor Fiona has been in and out of doctor’s offices and ERs the past week (she’s okay) and so much else is going on, but that’s a good bit for the first catch-up!

Oh yes, and we’re in the middle of some crazy winter storm that’s got people all around us without power and everything is covered with ice. Trees and power lines are broken left and right, and there’s some pretty dire situations all around.

Hopefully all of that will pass quickly. Minnesota winters are a bit like movie bad guys. Every time you think they’re finally dead, they grab your ankle and come after you one more time. I’m just pretending it’s green out there and going on with my garden planning.

Hopefully it will be less than a month till the next check in!

Filed Under: Daily log, Field trips & tours, Math

Fractals

April 10, 2013 By liese4

Ahh, finally, my fractal co-op was today. We talked about why fractals are cool (because they are relatively new, Mandelbrot only named them ‘fractals’ in 1975.)

$fractal$
(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mandel_zoom_00_mandelbrot_set.jpg)

We went over the math for fractals:

set

The area is:

area

We talked about complex numbers and how you would graph them on a complex plane (care to do it by hand – go here to find out how.) We talked about how a fractal tree starts with one stem, breaks into 2, then 4 and so on, kind of like your family tree. I passed out some of my Mandelbrot set postcards, they are very cool. We watched this Vi Hart video to see binary trees, fractals and Sierpinski triangles.

If you want to try fraction fractals, watch this video.

Watching the binary video led us to the Sierpinski triangle, I printed out some 1/2″ triangle graph paper from here and we drew Pascal’s triangle onto it and then colored in sections and…voila!

You have Sierpinski’s triangle. (Pascal’s triangle has some amazing number qualities in itself besides the fact that you can doodle a fractal out of it, check out more about Pascal’s triangle here.)

We went here and looked at a Mandelbrot set fractal generator (it’s fractal generator number one.) I put it on the projection screen and the kids pointed to the area they wanted me to zoom into.

We did CD fractals with paint. Just get a CD case and take it apart (so that you can put 2 flat sides together.)

Put small amounts of paint on one side, slap the other side on, squish and pull apart.

We did the same thing with paper, place paint on one side, squish, pull apart.

The CD cases came out very cool, some looked like leaves, coral reefs, brains, trees, flowers. We ended with some examples of fractals, like these.

Trees.

Mountains.

Clouds.

Spirals.

Flowers.

Leaves.

Crystals.

Fractals are fun, cool, interesting, amazing and you can find them all around!

Filed Under: co-ops, Curriculum, Links, Math

Free Printable Math Placement Tests for Grades K-7

March 22, 2013 By Alicia

Curious what level your kids are up to in math? K12 has all of its math placement tests online here. You can print them out for free without registering or jumping through any hoops.

The tests go from kindergarten through 5th grade in two semesters per year, and then four semesters of pre-algebra, which is roughly middle school age.

Note that it automatically prints the answers too, which doubles the pages printed. For instance, the kindergarten semester test is 4 pages but it prints 8 pages because it prints the test and then the test with the right answer circled. If you want to save paper and ink, just print the first half of the pages and check the answers online (if you don’t know them yourself).

You know we don’t follow a structured curriculum, and this was a nice way for me to see what subjects to introduce next to Jack and Anna. Alex just plain had fun with it, too.

Filed Under: freebies, Math, testing

Accelerating without a net.

March 16, 2013 By tinderbox

Sushi is our traditional reward for finishing a math book.

On Thursday, Alex finished MEP 4a, which is theoretically the first half of fourth grade math. I looked ahead in math to see what our likely sequence might be. On the pre-algebra pretest at the Art of Problem Solving website, the only things she can’t do now are multidigit divisors, operations with decimals, and negative numbers. Allowing for plenty of practice, she could realistically finish the elementary math sequence in another year. Which would put us on pace to start pre-algebra somewhere around her ninth birthday.

That scares me.

I am grateful that homeschooling allows us to proceed at Alex’s own pace. I am glad that we can calibrate her math work based on our own observations, without having to justify our case to an educational bureaucracy. And yet it’s also scary to be accelerating without a net. What if we’re missing something?

What if we’re self-deluded?

After all, one of the most common tropes in modern American parenting is the parent who overestimates her kid’s talent. I’ll admit that I’ve seen things written by other parents that have made me cringe. So it’s uncomfortable for me to talk about giftedness or acceleration; I vividly remember the scornful condescension with which an anonymous commenter once explained to me that Alex, while “cute” and “obviously well-exposed,” was certainly nothing unusual.

In general, I’m a fan of a “deeper, not just faster” approach to math; rather than race Alex quickly through the levels of a standard curriculum, I’ve sought out the most challenging programs I can find. I’ve been planning to run her through the majority of MEP and Beast Academy, so that she’s exposed to different teaching strategies, emphases, and enrichment topics. I’ve looked to add in fun enrichment and have contemplated substituting logic for math one day a week. And even though we’re doubling up on curricula, I have avoided compacting either program very much. After our experience with Beast Academy 3a-c indicated that she does fine with less intensive practice, I did approach MEP 4a with greater willingness to eliminate problems – but it wasn’t until near the very end that I dared to eliminate a few whole lessons.

Part of what’s been in the back of my mind, through all of that, is discomfort with the whole idea that she might hit algebra at ten or eleven years old. I’ve found myself assuming that “slowing her down” is inherently a good idea, without looking at that too closely. I haven’t, after all, wanted to be “one of THOSE parents.” Really, when it comes down to it, I’ve been afraid to accelerate in any significant way. It feels safer to have her be no more than a year or so “ahead.” It’s scary to be her parent and her teacher, making the call about sending her flying out there without the “net” of some official validation.

Filed Under: Math, philosophy and politics, policy & planning

Pi day

March 14, 2013 By liese4

I really like Vi Hart, but I’m not switching to Tau. I’m not saying I won’t use Tau, I’m just not replacing Pi with Tau. Today after school we got started on some Pi day fun.

I set up some parallel lines for us to toss sticks at like Buffon’s needle problem.

I am happy to report these numbers after 10 sticks were dropped: Hannah – 2.5, Grace – 2.85, Bethany – 2.22. {2*number of sticks used/number of sticks hitting the line}

We did the virtual drop and got close to 3.14 by dropping 100 needles 6 times and dropping 1,000 3 times. Note that more drops does not necessarily get you closer to Pi.

We read the section on Pi in the book Why Pi? and learned about the squaring of the circle and how to get Pi and why we use it. We also cut Pi, this was very interesting. We found a round object and measured the circumference with yarn, then measured the diameter. Then we cut the yarn and came out with 3 whole pieces and a little left over (like Pi 3 and a little bit more .14)

We found that it didn’t matter if the circle was big or little, you could still cut 3 whole pieces of yarn and have a little left over.

Grace measured the stool and found it to be C=41″, D=12.75″. She cut her yarn pieces into 12.75″ lengths (about) and had a tiny bit left over. Her C when multiplied by Pi was 40.0, so she was pretty close in her measuring. Bethany measured around a tea cup and got C=7″, D=2.3″, she cut her long piece of yarn into 3 whole pieces and had a little bit left over (her C when multiplied by Pi was 7.2, so not that far off either.)

I made some soft pretzel dough and we made some Pi pretzels and some weird shaped ones. We ate them with our afternoon tea, one day I am going to have pie on Pi day. Finally, we used this site to search for number groups in Pi. Do you think that 12345 appears in Pi at some point? If you said yes, you’re right. (My birthday is in there as 323 and as 323 with my birth year too.)

Filed Under: Math

Pi Day!

March 11, 2013 By Alicia

Are you ready for Pi Day?

Here’s a heads up so you can gather whatever you need to celebrate this fun math holiday on 3-14. We always have fun with it!

I put together all sorts of Pi Day carols, crafts, activities, links, etc. here:

Celebrate Pi Day on 3-14!

Have fun!

Filed Under: Fun, holidays, Math

Math perils.

February 28, 2013 By tinderbox

When Beast Academy was first released, I was prematurely confident that my math choices were now settled. Beast Academy might have been tailor-made for Alex: fun, story based, challenging, novel, and not overly drill-heavy. It’s her perfect curriculum, and it would’ve fed us neatly into AoPS at the end of the sequence.

The problem is that we were ultra-early adopters, and they just can’t write math books as fast as we can finish math books. There was a gap of a couple of weeks between when we finished 3b and when they released 3c, and between 3c and 3d it’s been a few months. We’re still planning to buy the BA books as they come out – I think they’ll be great for review and enrichment. But it is increasingly obvious that BA can’t be our main curriculum.

Sigh.

The early transition back to our old curriculum, MEP, was rocky – Alex resented doing “traditional” math again, and seemed to have forgotten a lot of the things she’d learned. But she’s settled down nicely and is making steady progress. I’m not as impressed with 4a as I was with level 1 – it seems like a good, solid program, but not nearly as innovative and unusual. Maybe I’m missing BA too.

A couple of weeks ago, I picked up The Book of Perfectly Perilous Math. It’s not a curriculum, either – just a collection of 24 math puzzles focused on death and destruction. For example, the first puzzle finds you bound to a table under a slowly lowering pendulum, while a rat chews through the ropes to free you. At given rates of progress, will the rat free you before the pendulum slices you in half?

On Alex’s least favorite day of the week (Wednesday), we’re planning to do a chapter of Perilous Math instead of MEP. There is typically one problem, a worked solution, and a “math lab” hands-on activity (sometimes valuable, sometimes pretty stupid) for each chapter.

It’s aimed at middle school level, so we’ll see how far we get. This week we hit the third problem, and the first one that was really challenging for Alex: she had to figure out how many days it would take to spend a million dollars at a rate of 50 cents per second. That was tricky because there are a lot of steps to organize, and because she hit a point where she had to divide 1,000,000 by 43,200 – when she’s never even faced a two-digit divisor before.

She was awesome:

I was impressed with the way that she made a plan and followed through the steps without losing track. I gave her some advice along the way, suggesting that she label the answers to her intermediate steps and showing her that she could do the multiplication step of a long division problem off to one side if it was too challenging to do in her head. But she did a fantastic job of jumping in and generalizing from single-digit divisors to a multi-digit divisor. Most importantly, she didn’t back away from trying to find a solution even when it obviously called for math she hadn’t been taught yet. That makes me so happy.

(She had to, of course. The story behind the problem had her at risk of annihilation by lasers if she didn’t. Which is just the sort of thing that keeps Alex happy.)