A piece of advice: it sounds so obvious, but every child learns differently and has different features that will fit will with some styles and not others. Be nimble and adaptable. Don't immediately invest in an expensive set of math instruction manuals (classic rookie HS parent mistake) or commit to an opinionated learning plan without evaluating it in practice w/ your kids first.
For content, the consistent thing that has set well prepared homeschooled students (or any kind of student in my experience) apart from their less prepared peers is outstanding reading and math skills. There are lots of other things that are really important, but if you have great reading and math skills then you have the fundamental tools to learn and do well in pretty much any career. Don't worry too much about the book you use to teach math. I mostly used Saxon - it was good for some things, not others. The most important thing for a kid is spending time doing math, practicing math, getting math problems wrong and working through why they were wrong.
For reading, read. Encourage and praise any reading. Have lots of books of all kinds available. Most importantly, READ YOURSELF. Your kids need to see you read.
I also recommend looking into the math ed twittersphere. A few people to start with:
Matt Enlow, high school math teacher who knows how to have fun with math. Don't know if it is too advanced for your kid's age. https://twitter.com/CmonMattTHINK
James Stanton:
https://twitter.com/jamestanton
Mike Lawler, former math prof who homeschools his kids: https://twitter.com/mikeandallie
Then she wanted to start experimenting with stuff within other activities, like taking what she learned from our experiments and trying to apply them to her toys and outdoor activities. So I realized it's fun for her to learn about science and experiments but I was running out of ideas for other ways to spend time with her and the experiments were beginning to get almost too formal.
So I made a simple app that picks out a list of activities to do with kids, which still includes some science experiments in addition to other things like games, scavenger hunts, etc. Note: the activities content could use some improvement and there's a form for people to submit their own activities.
http://activitiesforkids.netlify.app
If anyone has had any particular success entertaining kids, you can submit your activity ideas to the app here: https://activitiesforkids.netlify.app/submit
I have been teaching it to my daughter and I also taught some lessons at her school.
I put up my intro lessons, link in my profile.
Math U See https://mathusee.com/
Comes with DVD's or Online video where a teacher teaches the lessons in front of real students. It's a great curriculum my kids are learning math much faster and easier than any other curriculum we've tried. Also, the videos take the pressure off as we don't have to learn everything our kids are learning. Although we do sometimes go and watch the videos with our kids if they get stuck.
Explode the Code https://eps.schoolspecialty.com/products/literacy/phonics-wo...
Very similar to the previous recommendation but no video lessons. It breaks down the process of learning to read in easy to follow chunks and doesn't overwhelm the kids. It makes teaching kids reading easy and fairly fast.
A few minor tips:
1. Children are human beings some days they won't be prepared to learn, take advantage of home school, and do something else. Nature walks, read a book, educational movie, etc.
2. Parents are human beings see above
3. Learning to read involves a lot of time spent reading. When our kids have the basics we incentivize them by allowing them to stay up late but only for reading. At first, they just stare at the pictures or pretend to read but after a while, they get bored enough to force themselves to learn the words.
4. Kids like other people, take them to see other people often. We are part of a co-op and the kids love it. My kids aren't even interested in going to a public school as their public school friends spend way more time at school and doing homework and get similar results.
let me know if you have any other questions
This is a creative writing site with a free basic tier. The free tier has a curated library of short stories as well as moderated forums. Plus, there is a bookshelf to keep track of your reading in general.
For middle school and high school students, I would recommend the writer level. Subscribing offers a safe space for self expression through writing, including monitored social interaction / collaboration. This level also comes with self-paced courses with live office hours and workshops. The courses consist of video lessons, exercises and story templates integrated into one builder.
(There is an advanced level, geared more toward adults, with live writing groups, one-on-one coaching and a scaffolded author website.)
> Dyson engineers have designed these challenges specifically for children. Ideal for home or in the classroom, they encourage inquisitive young minds to get excited about engineering.
https://www.jamesdysonfoundation.com/content/dam/pdf/US%20ch...?
https://www.jamesdysonfoundation.com/resources/challenge-car...
One piece of advice, is to help your kids research problems and find answers and check them. The world doesn’t result in something as simple as a story problem, or get summarized as easily as a history textbook. Let them use critical thinking.
Therefore I'd advise to let your kids have fun and educate them around whatever that fun thing is, like how Montessori does it.
At those ages, you are still laying so much foundation and cultivating curiosity. Keep it fun, keep it widely integrated: science is history is art is math is science.
What’s great about them is they’re built around a browser based JavaScript sandbox. There’s tons of games and things people have coded. It reminds me of when I had an Apple IIe and you could inspect a lot of games AppleBASIC code. I remember being baffled by what “FOR” did in that code for the longest time!
He does the lessons and builds all kinds of goofy animations with some help. But he also explores other people’s code/work trying to understand how/why things work.
We also allow targeted education interest YouTube.
Finally, we use www.amy.app
It’s an AI math tutor(disclosure, our kids get so much out of it we invested in it).
Saxon math seems to be good from homeschooling parents reviews.
Montessori, Charlotte Mason, great books, etc have all stood the test of time when it comes to educational approaches.
Many homeschooling parents pick and choose what they find helpful for their kids.
Pretty much everything has been tried in the field of education. It’s a matter of execution and attention not innovation.
OTOH many teachers have been exceptional despite the difficult circumstances, and have earned renewed/increased respect.
I can't offer a ideas at the moment, but I am also looking to perhaps take more control next year, as I'm sure are many others.
https://momath.org/home/transformations/momath-online-studen...
https://7billionideas.com/homehack
Feedback welcomed!
I would think that the hacker news community would not have particular expertise in this field, and indeed, be desperately afflicted by whatever one calls the specific variety of Dunning-Kruger where a person believes that their own subject-matter is complicated and worthy of intense study, but subjects outside of it may be adequately understood with surface-level effort.
You can make a schedule for our children's day, including study, exercise and free times. For the study time, you may choose some subjects in these three areas:
1. A couple of (or maybe just one if obvious) subjects, that your child is good at, or really likes. Find resources and make a program to ensure your child progresses in this subject. If there are contests, or certifications in this subject you may aim them. If your child gets a chance to experience the rewards of their work, this will motivate them. He/she will also meet with tutors/peers this way, further resulting in more progress and also joy.
2. Determine the subjects that your child is weak, or not especially interested, but has to develop because they are very basic, like math or writing.
3. Find some enrichment areas, like a subject that you or a family member knows well, or find resources easily. This may actually not need to be a certain subject/area. This may include watching a certain YouTube channel everyday.
When it comes to resources, there are tons of. But it may take some time to spot one that your child needs at that specific progress/interest level. They may get bored at times, but you may always find a new book/web site/videos/etc that work. We re-schedule, try easier/more difficult resources, make a rewarding system for a true bottle-neck. As long as you don't get bored and completely give-up, there will be progress.
We do many things to help them study more efficiently, but we always vary when it comes to changing subjects for the first two areas, of course it is sometimes the right thing to do, but not easy to determine.
I'm adding some of the resources that I can't end my comment without mentioning:
- Duolingo for learning many languages
- Khan Academy
- Scholastic books for English (not for ESL, but for fine tuning academical English)
- https://www.ixl.com/ for American curriculum practice
- Youtube channels: TED Ed, Crash Course, CGP Grey
- Anton for German (1-10th grade) https://anton.app/de/ (a recent find via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22596290)
- Math Olympiads for a really advanced math learner. There are lots of books, contests. You can begin with https://artofproblemsolving.com/community
The system is a database of "topics". A topic is a very bite sized element of training. If you're teaching kindergartners math, it'd be something like "adding 0 to a number just gives back the same number". It's almost just a sentence's worth of definition.
Each topic has a handful of prerequisites. This is not some kind of taxonomy a la the Dewey Decimal System. The prerequisites are just a rough curriculum outline. For example you can't learn about adding zero to a number, unless you have already learned single digit counting up to 10 or 20. I am not an educator so exactly what is a prerequisite for what is not my forte. And this doesn't have to be super complicated. Just a nice smooth progression from simpler lower level concepts, up through more complicated higher level concepts.
Each topic is accompanied by videos. These videos are very short, because the topics are very short. Think 5min or less. For K and 1st grade they might even be just 1min or 2min. Each topic has many of them. They could be crowd sourced or produced like something you'd get from an education company, whatever. The point is: there is a back log of videos that teach each topic. So if you're topic is "adding 0 to a number just gives that same number" there would be at least 1 but maybe multiple videos in the system that teach that topic.
Each topic has a series of questions, each question has correct answers, and incorrect answers. As much as humanly possible we have a catalog of multiple choice questions for each topic. The questions can be written in a variety of ways, the correct and incorrect answers can be written in a variety of ways. For example one question might have a few ways it can be written such as "1+0=?" or "one plus zero is what?" or "one + zero" etc. The point is you can randomly select a series of questions, and you can randomly select one of the correct answers, and a few of the incorrect answers, or construct "all of the above" or "none of the above" and even if two people have the same questions in the same order, their experience and what they see might be totally different.
Finally, each student account has a list of the topics they have "mastered". So your account is like a tree of the topics you've mastered, which adjacent or peer topics you haven't mastered yet, and which topics you have mastered all the prerequisites for. I could randomly select a topic, and by walking the tree of prerequisites a little bit, find a topic quickly that is appropriate for you.
Okay those are all the nouns. Now for the verbs. How does this work? Basically the experience is a loop. A student comes in to the system. The tool randomly selects a topic that the student has mastered all the prerequisites for. They are presented with one of the videos for that topic randomly. Then they're presented with a short quiz randomly built from the questions for that topic. If they get a 100% correct on all the questions, they've mastered that topic. Wash rinse repeat until they've graduated from college.
If you get a quiz wrong, all the prerequisites for that topic are no longer mastered. In essence we "back up" one node in the prerequisite tree. Over time a student will repeat some topics more than once, as they push the outer boundary of the leaf nodes of the topic tree they've mastered. This is to be expected.
Since we are randomly selecting topics, randomly selecting videos on those topics, randomly building quizzes, and each topic is only a few minutes long, we should be able to keep this up for a hour without getting too bogged down in any one topic or any one quiz or any one subject. It should flow smoothly, quickly, without friction, without complication. I'd estimate my 1st grader could plow through 3 or 4 topics in an hour. My 4th grader should be able to easily handle 5 or 6 no problem.
The system has hardly any user interface at all. There might be a single button to say "I'm ready for the next topic". While the video plays there might be a single button to back up 30 seconds. Then the quiz begins and there is only 1 button for each of the 4 multiple choice answers, and then back to the beginning. The fidelity of the user interface is comically minimal.
The system does not have any obvious grades, percentage completion, progress reports, awards, kudos, etc. The loop of video, quiz, repeat, is all there is. If you wanted to do reporting on student's progress you could do so, outside of the system, but within it the experience is on rails. The student is not alerted to wrong answers, correct answers, whether or not they've "mastered" a topic, what the upcoming topics are, etc. None of that is presented to them.
Okay that's enough of a description. Each of these design elements is backed up by my experience being Mr. Teacher and has specific reasons for being there. I'm avoid giving all my back story because this was probably boring enough as it is. I thank the OP "plafl" because this thing has been in my head for weeks, and writing it all out has helped me get it out of my system.