A Creative Spelling Lesson

So it went like this:

Me: Divide the syllables, please.

Hero: The eruption goes.... here! Bwahahaha!!!

And there you have it! He's not wrong...

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A post shared by Baby Steps Blog (@ritsumei_babysteps) on Oct 31, 2018 at 8:12am PDT

K5 Learning {Crew Review}

K5 Learning is a supplementary program, intended to help kids build their reading, math, and spelling skills, whether they are homeschooled or attending a public school. We don't do a lot of computer-based instruction like this, but tried it out when we were given a six month subscription to the K5 online program for this review. You can have up to 4 kids on a single account; enrolling in the program and setting things up was easy. Not only do they have a log-in for me, but once I enroll them, each of the kids has their own log-in (and I can make the password easy) which was great. The dashboard is easy to use and very clear; everything I wanted to find, I was able to find quickly.

The program started with a pretest. They'd broken things up with cute little games after each set of questions, but the test is multiple guess and about thirty minutes long. That is a long time to sit at a computer and answer questions, many of which are deliberately too hard. I understand why they would need to include questions that are harder than the child is expected to know: some kids will need that material in order to be placed correctly. They need the incorrect answers to be certain of the child's placement. However. Peanut(4) is on the very youngest end of the intended age range, and she's not reading yet - but the reading test never seemed to realize that she got everything wrong except letter sounds. It just kept asking her questions that she had no idea about, and often no way of knowing, since she'd have to read to get the answer correct. It did not feel very responsive at all, which was frustrating, and made it hard not to skew the results by coaching and helping. Dragon(6)'s test was easier: he was aware that he was getting lots of questions wrong which was hard on him, but got through it with a lot of reassurance that it's ok not to know everything - the test is made that way on purpose, and it helps the test to know what kind of questions to give him in the lessons, which was an ok explanation. 

However. The test did not accurately assess where Dragon is at, at all. The program we use isn't strong on geometry at his age, and it uses only basic terms for the geometry he has had, so he didn't know the word "congruent". As a result he missed a number of questions on the test - the test looked at a very narrow selection of skills dealing with geometry, and often used advanced vocabulary with no explanations, which seems odd for a program that intends to supplement a wide variety of math curricula: there should be room for the different ways that different curricula teach. It placed my boy that's just finishing up 1st grade math into an early Kindergarten level: a full two years behind his actual level. He ended up with a lot of color and shape matching, and questions like this:

His reaction: "This math is pathetically easy."

He flew through four lessons the first day, with perfect or near-perfect scores, and after a single sitting his enthusiasm for the course was greatly diminished. Getting the level of the work adjusted is possible, but you can't just take care if it yourself: you have to send a message to K5, and they adjust it for you. Without being able to look at the material that you're moving your child into. They do have a one-page document that briefly summarizes what the various grades cover, which I used that to guess where he ought to be. Unfortunately, when I emailed support, they were also frustrating to deal with: it was not as simple as a quick email to say, "Would you please adjust the level." Although I had given them the user name for the student that needed to have their math level adjusted, they started out  looking at Peanut's account, rather than Dragon's, and the process of getting that figured out and then fixing things was a pain. However, we did get it adjusted, and once it was taken care of, Dragon's math activities went much more smoothly.

After that, one of the things that they had him doing was working on some addition using this cute 100s chart. Afterwards, I asked him how it was going, and he told me about it, including telling me about patterns that he'd been noticing in the work. Noticing patterns is what real mathematics is all about, and we spend a lot of time talking about patterns in our numbers, so I like that this is supporting that kind of thinking. For whatever reason, place value has been tough for him to wrap his head around completely. We haven't used a 100s chart in a while, and in addition to the work in the lesson, it also sparked some conversations about how the problems move around on the chart, and he was able to verbalize how it works, which I liked, and would probably not have thought to teach in this way without K5.
 

Peanut's reading test put her much closer to where she really belongs, but the questions were not structured very well for someone who is still learning letter sounds and first blends: rather than giving her simple words (I would have preferred individual CVC words to start) they gave her whole sentences, and asked her to find the I-sound, which appeared sometimes at the beginning and sometimes in the middle, with no cues as to which she should expect. They only introduced a lowercase i, but sometimes she needed to pick out a word that started with a capital I. And there was no hint function at all, which she would have really benefited from, which all means that she can't do these lessons at all independently, and that defeats the purpose of having her do practice on the computer: I like to use computer games primarily for practice and review, so that she can use it relatively independently.

There was a sight words section, which could have been pretty valuable, but I didn't end up being very excited about it. The concept is nice, and the dinosaur delighted my kids -she's even purple, which is Peanut's favorite- but in the end, I felt the learning wasn't really happening. They'd introduce the sight word, and then there would be a sentence down there in the grass at the bottom of the screen, and the idea is for the child to pick the sight word out of the three or four words in the sentence. But they don't vary the sentences enough, and the sight words often ended up being in the same position in the sentence every time in a set of exercises. I thought she was doing great at first, until we had a set where the sentences did vary the position of the target word in the sentence. She got every one of them wrong: she'd been just clicking the same position, not really looking at the words. Given the age of the kids, it's a pretty predictable problem, and it's disappointing that the programmers and content designers didn't foresee it, or notice it in beta testing. Again, there was no hint function, and no help if she seems to be taking a long time: it just repeats the question a couple of times (and the repeat locks her out from giving a response, which caused some frustration), and then eventually it just tells her the answer.

Additionally, not all of the words are actually sight words -- words such as "am" and "at" are not only highly phonetic, but also great candidates for teaching as first blended words, since there's only two letters to manage, but they were both in the first set of five "sight" words that Peanut was given. With so many real sight words that do need to be memorized, I cannot understand why they are including basic phonetic words in the sight words section.


The kids loved this cool little dinosaur that would bounce onto the screen every so often and hatch. Lots of giggles when he was around. They only got to see him if the question was answered correctly, otherwise the dinosaur sings a little ditty. Which was another thing: I felt like the feedback was  unclear: there was nearly as much song and dance for the wrong answers as there was for the right ones. How is my child supposed to know that she got it wrong if there is as big a prize for wrong answers as there is if she's correct? One of the strengths of the video game format is the ability to give clear feedback that unambiguously differentiates between correct and incorrect answers, with bells and whistles for only correct answers, which ends up resulting in kids being highly motivated to figure it out -- but this program seems to be afraid to mark a wrong answer wrong, and that doesn't do anybody any favors, least of all the child who is trying to learn to read. These games might work better for an older child that is already more skilled at reading, but they were not a good fit for Peanut.



K5 Learning also has a spelling section. Neither of my kids have started spelling, so they didn't use it, but I had a look using my 1st grader's account. You can add custom words, but I just took a look at the ones they generate automatically. There is a spelling word section, and a vocabulary builder. In the spelling section the words are spoken, sometimes by a male voice, sometimes a female; the student then types the word. Most of the audio was clear, but some were very hard to understand, particularly the male voice. One of the words (be) I could not understand, even after the program showed me how to spell it -- it just didn't sound like anything, and was so quick that it was impossible to make out. This would have been very frustrating for my children. The vocabulary tutor gives the definition, and asks the student to type the word. Unfortunately, the definitions are not always distinct enough to know the exact word they want: the correct answer for "pronoun. - Belonging to a female" is "her" -- "hers" is marked incorrect, even though it also answers that definition. Dragon was given this clue, which I have copied and pasted just as they wrote it for the 6-year-olds; there was no visual cue:

---

Airtight sealed metal container for food or drink or paint etc..  Also:  To know how to; To have the ability to.

---

The word was "can". I posed this question to him verbally, as a "what's my secret word" question (he loves that kind of game), and he had no idea. Expecting that 6-year-olds will be able to divine what word they're looking for here doesn't seem very age-appropriate to me, particularly considering that at this age many kids are still emerging readers, and will struggle to even decipher this clue, which includes an abbreviation and several items of advanced punctuation.



K5 offers several reports to summarize how your child is doing. They are nice, as far as they go, but the math reports do not show you the types of problems that your child is missing: to know that he missed a couple of questions in "algebra" is less than useful, when, as I looked at the work he was doing, I would have said that he was learning place value and two-digit addition. Headings that relate to 1st grade work and samples of problems missed would have been more useful.

If you click "View Math Progress Report" there is a little more information, but the headings do not match up between the two sections of reports. There is no indication of how they deal with work that is not mastered: I don't know if it's brought back for him to work on in a different session. And there is no way to manually assign him a certain type of problem that I'd like to see him practice. Looking at the lessons completed/lessons mastered, I'm not sure how they come up with 6 of 7 lessons mastered: when we do our math at the kitchen table, all but one of the lessons under numbers and operations I would consider not mastered, and ask him to do some more of that type of question, but they have marked him as having mastered all but one of these sections. This appears to mean that one of the sections that he scored 30% on has been counted as "mastered"?? That seems... odd. And why did they move him from Addition Level 1 Volume 1 into Volume 2, when he was only scoring 73% in Volume 1? That low of a score indicates a need for more practice, not harder work, and the scores on Volume 2 are predictably low, reflecting the lack of mastery of the previous level.

The spelling reports are better. They give a pretty detailed break down of what the student has been working, how often, and how well they've been doing. The headings on the bottom section are all clickable, which allows you to organize the data from a number of different learning sessions in a variety of different ways, and if you click "details" on the lower right of the screen,  you can see the word list used in that set, which words they spelled correctly, and which ones they got wrong. The spelling section has nice reports.

I feel like this program has a lot of potential to be a fun way to practice and review important skills, but as it is now it misses the mark in some important ways.



To read about how other families used K-5 Learning in their homes, and see how it worked for them, please click on the banner below:

Spelling "Onion"

Hero(7) is closing in on the end of phonics. Nobody's in any particular hurry; Hero reads pretty well, though he still needs practice. But phonics isn't very exciting at this point, so we are just taking it slow. 

Interestingly, he's been having a vocabulary expansion. I can tell because suddenly he's asking for definitions again. 

Gargantuan. Resilient. Commandeer.

I've been pointing out root words and helping him see the connections. 

Tricycle. Triceratops. 

Automatic. Automobile. 

He's catching idioms and checking their meaning. 

Looking down the barrel of.

There's tons of growth going on, and it's fascinating to watch it unfold, like a bud coming to bloom, one petal, on bit at a time. When we finish phonics, the plan is to have a look at word families, using English from the Roots Up. I have a feeling that we won't use the book the way it says we ought to. 

I ran across this video. Fascinating stuff. I love language. It's so much fun to see my son become more sophisticated in its use. 

Which brings me to spelling. I don't love spelling. Spelling never made any sense; I knew nothing about phonics. Add that to the way I read -not just word, but whole phrases at a glance; I don't even see the letters most of the time- I was a very bad speller for a very long time. I sometimes leave whole syllables out, though not as much anymore; I've been working on it for a long time. 

This video brings it together for me. The phonics I've been learning alongside Hero (never was very good pronouncing things in my head, so I don't), the root words that I'm passingly familiar with, but I'm really looking forward to doing that in an explicit, organized way. Entomology has always been fun, but now I'm realizing it holds clues to the mystery of spelling. 

It's just all so interesting. 

P.S. I'm so glad you stopped by to read about the adventures at our house! If you want more, "Like" my blog on Facebook to get posts (and the articles n things I wish I had time to blog about) in your feed. Wanna see all the projects and ideas that I may or may not get around to? Follow me on Pinterest. Thanks for stopping by!

Weekly Wrap-up: a good week

It's been a busy week, but a good one. Our house is on the market, but nobody has come to look so far. On the one hand, that's a bummer; on the other, it lets us get more stuff done so that it should be more ready. And I get time to practice keeping things really clean. I don't love that practice, but it's good for me.

We're getting closer to being ready for the baby to come. I need some socks and a few long-sleeve onseis (the boys were both summer babies, so I don't have any with long sleeves), and we'll be set for newborn clothes. I don't have a dresser at this point, but if the house doesn't sell we have hatched a plan to have a bedroom for our baby. It'll mean that the kids are upstairs and we are downstairs, and I hate that, but if we can't sell then we'll have to do something. In the mean time, I'm starting to think about what needs to go into my bag for the hospital and onto my playlist for labor. And I need to decide on a going home outfit. Such a silly, unimportant thing, but I care anyway.

School has gone reasonably well too. Hero got cashed in his coupon for November's Book It! pizza early on this week (I didn't think to take pictures, but he was really happy with it), we made cookies, we did a bunch of math and finished off the Math Expressions 1st Grade vol. 1 book and started the second volume. I gave him the unit test as a pretest for the next unit and he tested out of about half of it. Happily I have the Grade 2 books on hand and ready to go. It'll be a bit, but if he continues to test out of half the materials it won't be that long.

We have been reading from Beowulf, and the boys both love it. I think that Dragon likes the rhythm of the words, but Hero is able to follow the story with a little explanation of some of the big words. We also have this narration to show for the rest of the week's history:

 

 

One of the reasons that school was such a success this week is that we actually managed to do both History and Science... in the same week. So we've got a really nice narration from Science as well. We've been working our way through Seymour Simon's book, The Solar System, and I'm having Hero narrate on each object that they cover. We'll continue to work on this narration next week. The pictures are ones that he's selected from the internet.

 

 

Hero is suddenly flying through the lessons in All About Spelling, and while the writing is still challenging, the words are spelled correctly.

We're still working on writing, and it's getting better. I keep reading that reversals are perfectly normal for six years old, so I am carefully not worrying about them. All the drawing that he's been doing is helping the fine motor skills, but I can see from the spelling work that we need to do more handwriting practice. And that's fine. Once we finish this trip through the alphabet my plan is to do a combination of copywork and more focused practice on problem letters. We'll continue like that for as long as it takes to get the letters solid.

Of course, what the big guy does, the little guy needs to do as well, so he had a spider paper that he worked on too. I was really quite surprised at how well he did. Dragon watched carefully to see what Hero was doing, and then he tried to do the same. He didn't quite manage to make an S, but he did make something that looked very much like a 6. He then colored in and around it, but you can still kind of see it. I was impressed.

 

 

 

Find out what other families have been up to: 



 

Classical Homeschool Carnival #4

Welcome to the December 3, 2009 edition of the Classical Homeschooling Carnival! Around here Thanksgiving is just behind us, and Christmas just ahead, and it's a good time for a bit of inspiration to get through the holidays.


Paige at Elemental Science presents History Project: Building a Castle, in which she shares how they added a hands-on element to their study of medieval castles.


Molly shares her hands-on, kinesthetic methods of teaching spelling with File Folder Spelling posted at Counter-cultural School.


Ritsumei shares a few thoughts on learning Latin and other languages in Learning Latin, Among Other Things at Baby Steps. She also is hosting a giveaway for SpellQuizzer software, with entries due by Dec. 11.


Kristiana shares the accomplishments they had in spite of sickness in Weekly Report 15 « La Scuola d'Argento posted at La Scuola d'Argento. In spite of not feeling well, it looks like their family had a great time with some cranberry activities in connection with their reading of Cranberry Thanksgiving.

That concludes this edition. Submit your blog article to the next edition of
Classical Homeschooling Carnival using our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.

Giveaway and Review: SpellQuizzer

The Review

SpellQuizzer is a downloadable spelling program that helps kids (and adults!) learn their spelling and vocabulary words. They contacted me last month and asked if I would be interested in reviewing their product, and gave me a complementary copy to look over. This is the first time that somebody came to me for this sort of thing! As it turns out, I really like SpellQuizzer, and think it'd be a fabulous addition to either a public or homeschool education.

So, the idea with SpellQuizzer is that you take an inexpensive microphone and automate the spelling practice. You make your list, which doesn't take long. Then you practice. It's easy and quick and painless. When I finish the list, it offers to re-do the ones I missed, and when I finally get them all right, it offers to scramble them up and let me have another go at the list. It's very efficient. In addition, each word on all the lists go into a database, with their recordings and hints, and you can create new lists from that database.

I don't actually have a microphone, which turns out to be just fine too, though it's not quite as easy. You, the list maker, have to think harder about the print "hints" you give, rather than just saying the word into your microphone. However, I was able to download a Latin-based word list designed for spelling bee preparation, and it had the recordings. It worked out very nicely, because although nearly all the words on the spelling bee list were ones I thought it would be good to practice, there was 144 of them on the list and it took too long to get through. 15-20 is much more workable, and it's not hard to break it into that size of chunks. (Though it did take a minute to figure out how to do it.) So I can use that database to create new lists using the words, with their recordings, after I download.

In addition to doing spelling lists, this program is flexible enough to do a couple of other things too: one the website talks about is vocabulary learning. You put in the definition, the student gives the word. I didn't test extensively, but it looks like SpellQuizzer also can handle special characters, so you could probably use it for foreign language study as well, as long as it uses a Latin alphabet. It didn't like the Japanese I put in, but the little bit of Spanish I tried went just fine.

The SpellQuizzer web site has pre-made downloadable spelling lists that you can download and use with the program. They've got message boards, though those look pretty new, but given time they may develop into a nice list-swapping resource.

The Giveaway

The gentleman that developed the software, Dan Hite, has graciously offered a free SpellQuizzer registration key for one lucky winner! Here's how you qualify:

1. Post to your blog about this giveaway and review. Do this before Dec. 11, 2009.
2. Come back and leave me a link to your post in the comments.

If you would like, you can use the following code for your post. Just copy and paste.


<a href="http://ritsumeithoughts.blogspot.com/2009/12/giveaway-and-review-spell-quizzer.html" target="_blank"><img border="0" alt="Visit Baby Steps" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-beZNMWcCmmyUXp_jSLDOPnqhWp9jg7-uXhLZKe7ZltKYu0DYu608clpausU2xPs12ZG7LQi64rwwR43DLB6SCcSt82POZaRXkOQvsCGqyuNsk5Hw_mIgTLvY5fWYA0konPOUYw/s144/badge.jpg"/></a><br>SpellQuizzer software works with any spelling program, whether homeschool or public. Click to enter Ritsumei's giveaway on Baby Steps for a chance to win SpellQuizzer!

It will look like this:


SpellQuizzer software works with any spelling program, whether homeschool or public. Click to enter Ritsumei's giveaway on Baby Steps for a chance to win SpellQuizzer!

Blog Hopping

I've been having a look at the Charlotte Mason blog carnival this evening, and there are some interesting things in this issue.

Jessica, at Established Work, has some really interesting ideas on how to teach spelling. It sounds like it ought to work, though it'll be a while before I can test it out. Has anyone else tried this sort of spelling work?

Barb has some great thoughts on high school. I should fighure out a way to freeze them so I can read them again in about 10 years.

It's totally a detour, because she's not doing the CM Carnival, but I loved these thoughts on imagination.