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I read a lot about different methods of teaching reading. When I grew up, we learned by an eclectic mixture of look-say and phonics, and most of us learned to read. Sarah definitely prefers look-say; her memory for new words is really amazing. She’s going through the intensive Rod & Staff phonics, but she doesn’t like to have to sound out words.

What I don’t see many educators talking about is the importance of vocabulary in reading. Maybe this is because it’s such a basic concept that it doesn’t need repetition. A child who grows up hearing a high level of vocabulary learns so many words just by hearing them….and that makes reading so much easier!

The goal of reading is comprehension. If a child is learning by the look-say method, then when he’s introduced to a word, he already has an idea what that word means. He doesn’t have to look it up in the dictionary. If he’s learning by phonics, he can say, “Oh, I recognize that word! So this is how it’s spelled.”

What’s sad is that so many children grow up in environments where they’re more likely to hear cursing and crude slang rather than good English. This puts the children at a disadvantage from the very start.

Like most homeschoolers we have a few vintage and antique readers around the house, including reprints of McGuffey.

After glancing through the 4th reader, I’m almost convinced that 19th century English will be as incomprehensible as Old English in a few decades….except perhaps among the homeschoolers who grow up on these relics. It’s just amazing to me how quickly our language has changed…perhaps degenerated is a better word. Simplification is not necessarily a bad thing, but I wonder if our ability to express ourselves has diminished.

Certainly our vocabulary has.

I hv to wndr how lng it wl b bfr we all rt lk ths? Lts of kds alrdy do.

I firmly believe that God puts challenges in our path so that we can use those challenges to help others.

In our home-school, we’re pretty challenged by math. I was never a math whiz, but I understood it enough to make an A in calculus and then I waved “good-bye” to the math department for the much more hospitable climes of history.

I DID think that I could help a child understand 2 + 2, though. It’s simple, you just get out some toy animals or blocks and voila! The child understands.

Well, maybe not. Or maybe they understand today and forget it tomorrow.

I started out with some real misconceptions. Not all home-schoolteachers and kids face these challenges. But when you run upon them, they really bring you to a screeching halt.

Before I go into these, let me explain that, if you met my 7 y.o. daughter, you’d probably come away with the impression that she was very intelligent. She came to us from Russia when she was 2 1/2, and although she was late in speaking, she learned English VERY quickly. She is very extroverted and has a wonderful vocabulary for her age. Her manual skills have always been advanced, and she readily builds things. She has also demonstrated that she can spell words backwards as easily as forwards, although she also sometimes READS them backwards as well. She loves wolves and wild canines and says she wants to be forest ranger.

Yet she has lots of trouble with math. But perhaps our trials and errors will help someone else.

Misconception #1: COUNTING ON FINGERS I thought that all children instinctively knew how to count on their fingers. They DON’T. Not even in second grade. At our house we still can’t seem to just “look” at our hands and tell how many fingers we’re holding up without counting them. This may be a coordination or vision issue.

Misconception #2: LESS AND GREATER, BEFORE AND AFTER. I thought all children could grasp instinctively the fact that because 4 comes after 3, 4 is “1″ bigger than 3, or simply the fact that 4 is just bigger or greater than 3. NO. This sometimes causes great confusion. We’ve had to do LOTS of work with less and greater, and also before and after. I also had to clear up the idea that when I said “bigger” or “greater”, she thought I meant the font-size of the number. Thus a 30 pt. 3 was “bigger” than a 14 pt. 100.

The concept of “before and after” may also have been another issue, as our little girl likes to “rotate” images in her mind, so the concept of “before” or “after” was hard for her to grasp. Now she understands that she can’t “turn things around” in her mind.

Misconception #3. ADDITION AND SUBTRACTION ARE EASY A child, after some play with blocks, etc. should understand that when you add two numbers you get a BIGGER number, right? When you subtract, you get a smaller number. That makes sense to us, but not to all children. We still have problems grasping this simple concept. We often have to “prove” that two numbers equal another number with blocks. (I often get asked, “But HOW do numbers X + Y equal N?” or “But I thought Z + Z = N; how can X + Y = N, also?” We still have to do a lot of work with blocks. Not all kids are ready for abstract concepts at an early age.

Misconception #4: ADDING 1 IS EASY This seemed like a no-brainer. I though that children should be able to easily understand that if you add 1 to a number, you get the “next” number. No, this sometimes takes a lot of work. We’ve found the concept of stairs to work better than a regular number line. Once again, I think it’s a pattern-recognition problem.

Misconception #5: DIFFERENT USES OF NUMBERS
Most adults easily understand the difference between different uses of numbers, such as “1″ the numeral when counting vs. “1st” the ordinal number vs. “1″ as an amount. Not all kids grasp this quickly. (The idea that there was “1″ space between 3 and 4 caused us WORLDS of grief. She was confused because there’s no “1″ between 3 and 4, After all, “1″ comes before “2″. It was hard to help her understand that there are different uses for the concept “1.”

Misconception #6: COUNTING Any child can count, and a child who can count should be able to count starting at any number (i.e. 5, 6, 7) and count backwards easily. NADA. This sometimes takes LOTS of practice. The change from one ten family to another sometimes takes LOTS of work (39, 40…..49, 50….etc.)

Misconception #7: THE PATTERN 1,2,3,4… I thought a child should instinctively understand that the pattern 1,2,3,4……. is repeated over and over in math: 21, 22, 23, 24……. and 10, 20, 30, 40. But you can’t take that for granted.

Misconception #8: Children can understand mental gymnastics such as Math-U-See’s “9 wants to be a 10″ (and thus takes “1″ away from the other addend.) Not all kids can do the multiple steps required by concepts like this. The “Doubles + 1″ concept is similar. It involves understanding some slightly complex ideas about numbers and putting them to work all together. We’re still working on understanding that the sum of 6 + 7 is greater than the sum of 6 + 6. Once again, these concepts seem easy to adults, but can be hard for kids who still need concrete operations.

NOW FOR THE SUGGESTIONS & THE GOOD NEWS

Our daughter can now (2nd grade) count fairly well into the 100s. Sometimes we still have trouble with “before” or “after” numbers, though. It takes thought to remember which comes before or after. We know lots of math addition facts, although a few still elude us. We’re working hard on subtraction. It simply takes a lot of time and patience.

Multiplication, for some reason, is coming to her much more easily. I don’t understand it and I don’t even try.

HELPS
We’ve tried lots of things, so I thought I’d share some of our ideas with you. Some work and some don’t for us, but each child is different.

A) Regular workbook-repetition of Math facts. She can write math facts all day (if there are too many of them) and still not learn anything. When presented with a “math test” she would also just sit and cry because she couldn’t remember how to figure out a problem (although we learned how to figure out sums by drawing circles, counting on her fingers, number line, etc.) The abacus helped here, because it did empower her a little.

B) Flash Cards (regular & “triangle” style)- These helped us when used with just a few problems at a time.

C)Abacus- this helped. It’s small and portable and helps kids who have trouble memorizing the facts AND can’t seem to remember how to work them out any other way.

D) Math U See or Toys- Great help, although the series lost her pretty quickly. We’ve also used toy animals, blocks, cars and anything we can lay hands on for addition/subtraction. The toy animals are great for multiplication. You simply build Z number of corrals or pens, then put Y number of animals in each pen. Then show that Z X Y would equal the same thing as Y X Z. With division, you give the child a handful of animals and Z number of pens and tell the child to divide them equally so that the animals get the same amount of feed. It’s fun and it’s actually worked…..although it didn’t seem to help with addition and subtraction.

E) Math Stories. These were fun, but she couldn’t seem to transfer the knowledge to help her on her math pages. If you want a copy of my math fact stories, email me. I hope one day to get them on the website.

F. Doing math facts while exercising or doing hopscotch. This has not worked well for us. I know it has helped other children.

G. Doing addition & subtraction using a number line or an illustration of stairs or steps. The number-line confused her for some reason. The “stairs” worked better, because they showed that some numbers represent larger quantities than others. We sometimes build “stairs” with Math U See blocks.

H. Math songs – we made up LOTS Of these and even made some Power Point presentations with animation for them. But they didn’t seem to help us learn our math facts. Once again, transferring knowledge from songs to the math pages didn’t happen.

I. Touch-Math. I invented doing this myself in school; they didn’t have a name for it then. It’s a way of count-adding and is, I know, sort of a last-ditch desperate attempt. I felt that I HAD to find a way to help her solve math problems that she didn’t know, and this worked (up to 5, anyway.) You simply imagine that every number from 1 to 5 has dots on it: 1 has 1 dot; 2 has 2 dots on the front points; 3 has 3 on the points, etc. Then, let’s say the problem is 7 + 3. The child touches the 7 with her pencil and says “7″ then touches the dots on the 3: 8, 9, 10, and gets the answer. It helps the child remember to start counting at the next number.

What’s worked best for learning facts? There hasn’t been a magic-fairy solution. We take a max of 3 math facts per day and work on them intensively. After a few days’ practice, we have a quiz. If those facts aren’t learned, then no cartoons. We have to write the facts we don’t know 5 times. (This gives incentive to learn.)

The next quiz a few days later involves those math facts and NEW ones.

Math Fact Families
In our house, just because we understand that 3 + 4 = 7. doesn’t mean we can always remember that 7 – 4 = 3. The light hasn’t gone on about this yet, although we’ve demonstrated how it works what seems like hundreds of times. We work all math fact families using both addition and subtraction, but I focus on learning the addition problems FIRST.

I pray that this information helps someone out there who is struggling to help their child. I’m NOT a mathematician. I don’t know mathematical concepts or advanced jargon. My husband IS, but because he’s so naturally good at math, he doesn’t even know where to begin to help someone to whom math isn’t instinctive.

The most naive thought I’ve ever had in my life (I think) is that in order to teach a child all you have to do is explain the subject in a suitably simple manner, or hand the child a workbook, and he or she would absorb the info like a little sponge and diligently work away.

Oh well.

We’ve been studying clocks now since Kindergarten, all right? You’d think we’d have gotten tell time sort-of-down by now. Nope. Have you ever tried to explain the concept of a.m. and p.m. to a child? Really, military time DOES make better sense. And why do clocks NOT have numbers for the minutes (other than them being so small.) ?

There’s another thing few people tell you. Just because you diligently teach a child something one day doesn’t mean that he or she will remember it tomorrow, or next month or next year. Even if you review it, they may still forget.

What’s worse is when they look at you with a blank stare, like you’re speaking Greek.

I think that’s why I have trouble with a lot of the great-looking, in-depth, intensive “lesson plans” I see posted on the internet for elementary school-children. Any teacher can probably tell that just because she teaches or lectures to children about a subject doesn’t mean that they really UNDERSTAND or LEARN the subject. It just doesn’t work that way. I know from my personal experience that sometimes you have to present a subject in many different ways and then review it over and over and over for even a single child to really comprehend it. Development, interest and even health have a lot to do with learning ability.

Except for swear-words. Someone should do a scientific study on that. We can work for months on math facts and pronouns and still draw a blank stare, but let a child hear a swear-word ONE TIME and it’s in his brain FOREVER.

It’s a mystery, I guess.

Over the past few weeks it’s been colder here than we’ve seen in a long time. In fact, it hasn’t been this cold since we moved here, although that was only 3 years ago.

Our pond froze for the first time. I won’t say you could ice-skate on it (Sarah tried, but that’s another story.) but even the big Great Pyr dogs could walk across it. The ducks and cats had a WONDERFUL time and I got to see an impromptu production of “Goats on Ice.” (Which is REALLY funny by the way.)

I think the low here was somewhere in the upper teens, but that doesn’t include the wind-chill. I know that it was cold enough to convince me even further that I don’t want to live ANY further north. Even Sarah, our little Russian Devooshka, says it’s too cold to go outside.

Sarah’s been doing her normal schoolwork, plus sewing a little on an 18th century costume for one of her dolls. She likes to sew on the machine, but of course I have to be right there with her. We’re just starting in the Revolutionary Period in history and we’re reading some of the American Girl Felicity books. In math, she started learning about Roman Numerals today, and we’re still studying pronouns in English.

Today Sarah also had a lot of questions about twins, so I tried to find answers for her.

We’ve just started fostering a King Charles Spaniel (a mix, I think). He’s doing very well and Sarah loves him. He’s very playful, unlike Mr. Claus, who prefers to be outside with the Pyrs. The Danes, of course, would rather sleep.

That’s it. No new goat kids yet, but some are certainly on the way. Poor Nina looks like she might have quads again; the poor thing looks like she swallowed a watermelon.

That’s all for now.

It’s really a sad thing when people are mourning wild “horse families being torn apart,” yet at the same time we have thousands of children who need permanent homes. Yet the roadblocks to adopting children (in this country and otherwise) are so prohibitive.

The diet is really working. I wish I’d weighed before starting it, but I’m more interested in losing inches. I can now have fruit, which is good.

We had a delicious Tilapia last night. I browned it a little in Canola oil, then baked it in the oven with a little cheese and some tomato bullion on top. It was really very good with a salad.

One thing about this diet is that you don’t eat as much. I eat about 1/2 of what I used to. Of course I have snacks, but on the whole I feel full and am loosing weight.

I respect some animals rights groups because some of them have really brought the welfare of animals to the public’s attention. I DON’T like it when they humanize animals in an attempt to pull people’s heartstrings or manipulate them. Sometimes the results of this are downright funny when you really look at them.

I just read this [excerpt below] from a Yahoo News article about wild horses.

[Elliot Katz, president of California-based In Defense of Animals, said Obama should grant the Nevada horses a holiday reprieve until the legality of long-term holding facilities is determined.

"While the president is enjoying the holidays ... (we) ask him to think of the horse families who are about to be torn apart forever in the BLM roundup," Katz said. "With the stroke of a pen, he can stop the terror that is about to befall the majestic wild horses of the Calico Mountains in Nevada."]

Wild horse families “torn apart forever?” Give me a break! What do they think happens to young stud colts: they’re usually driven from the herd when they mature. If they stayed, then they’d be breeding their mothers, aunts and sisters, so it works better that way. Female horses may still be in the same herd, but Mama is going to run Sister off a little when the new foal is born. Horse “families” aren’t human “families.”

Then there’s the matter of the “terror”. Certainly being put into a pen is probably terrifying for these feral horses. But so is a violent thunderstorm or a predator. BLM roundups aren’t the only “terror” in these animals’ lives. I once saw a disturbing video where a herd stud killed a defective newborn foal. These animals aren’t gentle “Bambis.”

The BLM probably DOES need to have a better plan. Apparently they don’t have a good plan for these horses. Also, too many people adopt these horses without knowing what they’re getting into. I often see them offered for sale, many times having been too much for their idealistic [young] owners to handle.

We had a horrible storm yesterday with lots of rain and tornadoes in the area. Strong winds ripped part of the roof off a house in Longview. The poor animals had to go without their supper; it was raining too hard to feed them (the goats would rather go without feed than get wet anyway.)

As for our diet, it’s still going well. I had a very bad spell a few days ago and had to modify the diet. I had gotten to where I couldn’t sleep anymore. I had to start adding 1/2 an apple. I felt like I was going crazy. It may have something to do with low blood sugar or something.

Christmas is now upon us. We’ve already had one big meal (here at home, and we were able to stay on the diet) and we’ll have another one tomorrow. Sarah is so excited she can hardly stand it.