![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Quick update on nieceling's academics
Dec. 7th, 2011 12:22 pm
Parent teacher night was, like, a month ago, but it took me this long to post about it! (Jenn did it, being their mom, so really, I should make her post. Whatever.)
Evangeline's teacher said she gets distracted easily in class, and of course she needs to work on her reading. As it happens, Evangeline's been working on her reading, and now can pretty much retell any story she likes with aplomb, although she still has a little trouble using pronouns without first using the noun that tells us who the pronoun is. Also, she hates and loathes having to retell stories. For any reason. Her retellings are peppered with "Can I just skip ahead?" I'm not entirely sure this is the goal, and I'd still love to see how it all goes in class, which is kinda where it counts.
Ana's teacher said she basically could ace the 3rd grade reading test right now, and she's doing fine in math although she needs some help on word problems. We've been working on problems, and I've identified the problems:
1. She's been taught to look for words that indicate what sort of problem it is. However, either she's been taught badly or she didn't understand, because this trips her up when, say, she sees the word "more" and assumes addition but actually the question is "how much more is the doll than the book?" I'm working on retraining her to look for the sense of the question first instead of going for shortcuts. This is something that's so obvious to me, I'm not sure how to help her out.
2. In multi-step problems, even when she identifies all the steps in advance (because she's expected to explain her thinking afterwards, I'm having her do so before even starting the problem) she often gets confused or bored halfway through and either leaves the problem unfinished or melds all the steps into one.
3. When she's done with a problem, she doesn't check her work. At all. She doesn't even do a glance back to see if her answer makes sense. Cookies that cost $100? Children who are 10 inches tall? It says A is the tallest, but when I did the math I got an answer that made him the shortest? Whatever, I did the math, right? Wrong.
In the extra math we're doing at home (which, ha, comes with its own book of word problems to work from!) she has trouble doing mental math. We get her old math textbook every year in June, and I don't think they emphasize or even teach mental math at all, so this isn't a surprise. But it's something we're working on.
However, there are plusses. Remember how Evangeline was working through her book much faster than Ana was working through hers? Well, now they're about even. Why? Not because Evangeline slowed down, but because we hit the section on money in Ana's book about two weeks after they covered money in her class. Which means I've just gone ahead and skipped most of the section, only doing the word problems and mental math parts of it :) And now Ana's class is doing time to the minute, but this book is doing time to the five minutes, so we'll skip most of that as well. Woo-hoo! (Also, Ana finally seems to have her basic addition facts memorized. She hasn't mentioned it, but it goes much faster now that she's not counting.)
Comparing Evangeline's school math to her afterschool math, in school they're doing single-digit addition... and Evangeline is working on double digit subtraction at home. But I don't mind this at all, it's good for her to get more review and grounding in this.
In other news, I want to get them doing some history at home soon to inoculate them against the history that's taught in schools. (I went to these schools. Truly, the history classes are teh suck.) I've found a few online curricula that seem to focus largely on primary documents, but they're all American history, nothing for world history at all. Seriously, do I have to make this all up myself? I'm too lazy for that.
Evangeline's teacher said she gets distracted easily in class, and of course she needs to work on her reading. As it happens, Evangeline's been working on her reading, and now can pretty much retell any story she likes with aplomb, although she still has a little trouble using pronouns without first using the noun that tells us who the pronoun is. Also, she hates and loathes having to retell stories. For any reason. Her retellings are peppered with "Can I just skip ahead?" I'm not entirely sure this is the goal, and I'd still love to see how it all goes in class, which is kinda where it counts.
Ana's teacher said she basically could ace the 3rd grade reading test right now, and she's doing fine in math although she needs some help on word problems. We've been working on problems, and I've identified the problems:
1. She's been taught to look for words that indicate what sort of problem it is. However, either she's been taught badly or she didn't understand, because this trips her up when, say, she sees the word "more" and assumes addition but actually the question is "how much more is the doll than the book?" I'm working on retraining her to look for the sense of the question first instead of going for shortcuts. This is something that's so obvious to me, I'm not sure how to help her out.
2. In multi-step problems, even when she identifies all the steps in advance (because she's expected to explain her thinking afterwards, I'm having her do so before even starting the problem) she often gets confused or bored halfway through and either leaves the problem unfinished or melds all the steps into one.
3. When she's done with a problem, she doesn't check her work. At all. She doesn't even do a glance back to see if her answer makes sense. Cookies that cost $100? Children who are 10 inches tall? It says A is the tallest, but when I did the math I got an answer that made him the shortest? Whatever, I did the math, right? Wrong.
In the extra math we're doing at home (which, ha, comes with its own book of word problems to work from!) she has trouble doing mental math. We get her old math textbook every year in June, and I don't think they emphasize or even teach mental math at all, so this isn't a surprise. But it's something we're working on.
However, there are plusses. Remember how Evangeline was working through her book much faster than Ana was working through hers? Well, now they're about even. Why? Not because Evangeline slowed down, but because we hit the section on money in Ana's book about two weeks after they covered money in her class. Which means I've just gone ahead and skipped most of the section, only doing the word problems and mental math parts of it :) And now Ana's class is doing time to the minute, but this book is doing time to the five minutes, so we'll skip most of that as well. Woo-hoo! (Also, Ana finally seems to have her basic addition facts memorized. She hasn't mentioned it, but it goes much faster now that she's not counting.)
Comparing Evangeline's school math to her afterschool math, in school they're doing single-digit addition... and Evangeline is working on double digit subtraction at home. But I don't mind this at all, it's good for her to get more review and grounding in this.
In other news, I want to get them doing some history at home soon to inoculate them against the history that's taught in schools. (I went to these schools. Truly, the history classes are teh suck.) I've found a few online curricula that seem to focus largely on primary documents, but they're all American history, nothing for world history at all. Seriously, do I have to make this all up myself? I'm too lazy for that.
