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For most of Sara’s second grade experience, her teacher noted on her weekly goals to use “more interesting language.”  I’m not exactly sure what exercises she was supposed to do but I didn’t see much progress in her vocabulary during the year.  So this summer we are working on dynamic and impressive words.  Unfortunately, vocabulary is not one of my strengths.

Oh, what to do?

One night, as I read a book to the girls titled “Consider Love” by one by one of my favorite children’s authors, Sandra Boynton, I realized that she was using beautiful, interesting words to describe love.  Viola!  Here is my vocabulary list for this summer.  We have words like: frivolous, mysterious, despairing, unbounded, etc.  I love when I seek an answer and it simply appears.

So I made a list of the words that we are going to study this summer.  The trick then, was how to incorporate our vocabulary words with all of the other English lessons I want to teach.  After five failed attempts, I finally got the answer.  The exercise sheet looks something like this:

• Write a definition of the word.  Yes, we have to pull out a paper-based dictionary and flip through pages..how retro!
• What part of speech is it?  We are learning nouns, verbs and adjectives
• Name four things that are {insert vocabulary word here}.  Trying to broaden our understanding of nouns
• Name four things that {insert vocabulary word here} things do.  Trying to broaden our understanding of verbs
• Write a sentence that uses the vocabulary word, a noun and a verb from the lists.

We are having a hard time coming up with the list of nouns and verbs but I guess that’s what exercises are all about.  My goal is that this exercise can help Sara understand how an interesting adjective and verb can really add flavor to her writing.

I’m not sure how much Sara is learning but I can tell you that I’m learning scads!

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test everything; hold fast what is good. (Thessalonians 5:22)

Ask any teacher who follows the common core (CC) curriculum and they will tell you that the old fashioned “algorithm” of borrowing and carrying is too prone to mistakes, no one understands it and it doesn’t teach placement value of numbers. For full disclosure, I haven’t interviewed every teacher of CC, but the teachers I’ve interacted with and websites I visit say the same thing.

Granted, borrowing and carrying is difficult to understand but the CC answer borders on insanity, here’s a video describing their methods: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVqqPwhZRDs. On the video they missed the CC strategy of having a kid count on their fingers and toes (and for really big numbers, their neighbors fingers and toes)!

While I understand all of the methods and what they are trying to teach, I’ve also seen the effects of teaching a second grade kid three, four or five different methods to solve an equation; they don’t really understand any of them. Confusion, frustration, anger, hopelessness…and those are just my emotions when forced to solve a simple equation with multiple CC methods, you should see Sara’s list of emotions!

Plus it’s simple statistics, the more calculations they do, the more prone to error the calculation becomes. As you saw in the video, some of the methods have exponentially more calculations than the “old fashioned” way.

What’s a summer homeschooling dad to do?
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Yesterday Sara and I signed the summer contract for 2.5 months of summer learning, two lessons per day, in exchange for the grand prize of $50.  My little Sara made me very proud in two ways:  First, the contract was written in cursive and she read every word, second, she negotiated the terms about how she would lose the $50.  While I was proud of her for negotiating, she unfortunately didn’t gain any ground. 

Today was the second day of summer learning and we picked up right where we left off last year.  Sara got right into the groove and I had the lessons ready to go….easy!  

Last year at this time was very stressful because there was so much for Sara to learn and I wasn’t sure how I was going to pull it off in such a short time.  This year Sara is about where she needs to be academically so we can spend this summer getting ahead of the curve.  In math Sara is doing really well, I expect to get through +, –  and x up to 10’s and begin some division.  

I want to focus our efforts this summer in vocabulary, spelling and writing (in cursive); unfortunately some of my least favorite/competent subjects.  How do we make this fun and educational?  I’m not quite sure…but I’ll keep you posted.

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“But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness,” (Galatians 5:22)