You’ve seen it in our high school curriculum kits and on our website. But what is the Implications in Literature series really like? Hope is here to show you. Enjoy the tour!
Hi and welcome to Timberdoodle.
Today we’re going to look at Implications of Literature our high school literature program. Specifically, we are going to be looking at the Pioneer level. So let’s take a look inside.
Each of the Implications of Literature series comes with a wide variety of readings for your child to go through. From A Narrow Fellow in the Grass by Emily Dickinson, to Father Cures a Presidential Fever, to The Embarrassing Episode of Little Miss Muffet, to The Declaration of Independence, to I Have a Dream by Martin Luther King Jr.
Each of these readings comes with a strategically placed sidebars with questions or information that will help your child to understand more clearly what the passage is about. The teacher’s manual comes with, not only the a copy of what the student is reading, but also the answers to the questions.
There is often a check quiz that you can evaluate the mastery of textual content at the end of each literary work.
There is a Literary Critique and these can be used to generate discussion between yourself and your students or be assigned as homework.
After that there is the Writing Workshop at the end of each selection. The Writing Workshop presents challenging and thought-provoking topics to help your students develop clarity of thinking as well as precision in writing. For example, in this Writing Workshop, “Imagine that you’re an editorial writer for major news magazine. Your editorials tend to focus on social issues. You’re concerned about the increasing popularity of electronic homes. Write an editorial of four paragraphs that increases public awareness about the advantages and disadvantages of owning such a home. Use personal examples to which your readers will be able to relate.” That would be their writing assignment.
Now your favorite child who has very strong writing skills can then go even further and tackle the Journal Workshop. In the Journal Workshop your child is asked things such as, “Imagine that a house similar to the one in the story is put up for sale. However, this type of house is still new to the market and it’s quite expensive. Write the ad that would appear in the real estate listing. Include the features that make the house unique and desirable.”
Depending on your child’s talents and skills there are even further exercises that your child can do in this book that will further benefit them in this whole experience. But for your child who struggles with language arts, pare it down to what suits them best that will still enable them to read a rich and varied scope of literature without being overwhelmed.
That, in a nutshell, is Implications of Literature.
Do you have some subjects that you take the responsibility of teaching, and others that your child is directly responsible for finishing? Or perhaps your family, like ours, has multiple teachers who want to divide and conquer? If so, this feature is really going to help you out!
Deb: Today we’re going to look at another aspect of the scheduler, and that is when you’re trying to include multiple people on the same list.
For our situation we’re dealing with a lot of foster children. We all want to teach, but we all don’t want to be teaching the same thing. And so we have made a separate list for everybody who’s involved in teaching that particular child.
But it’s not just us. Sometimes families are going to have something that Mom wants to teach, and Dad wants to teach, and so then you will be printing separate lists for that. Or Mom might have an older teen who is trying to help and so they would print a list for the teenager to work with the child. Or Mom might have a situation where she is not real comfortable giving the entire list to a younger child but parts of it, so she will make a list that will say Mom and then a list of the child’s name and they’ll print two separate lists. You can make as many of these lists as you want and use it for multiple people.
You can change it anytime you want to. So if Dad says, “I want to teach Science,” and then all of a sudden he says, “but I also want to teach History,” you can go back and modify it, and add History onto Dad’s list.
Can you show us how that works?
Hope: Yes. Absolutely. Let’s take a look. Log onto timberdoodleschedules.com. Find the grade that you want to schedule and then use a unique name for your student. So this one will be named Walker: Mom’s List. Leave on everything that you want to do with Walker. Take off anything you want to save for Dad. So let’s save Math for Dad. Let’s leave him Smart Cookies. And let’s also leave him Science. Everything else will stay on. Then hit Create Schedule. Generate Schedule. And that’s Mom’s List.
So come back out here re-select the grade. And now let’s name it Walker: Dad’s List. Now take off everything from Dad’s List that is on Mom’s List and only leave on what is Dad’s. So Math, Smart Cookies, and Science. Everything else comes off. Create Schedule. Generate Schedule.
So let’s go back out to customize the schedule. Find our grade again. Now we have Walker: Mom’s List and Walker: Dad’s List. Anytime you can go in and edit them. You can delete items. You can go back and look at it and reprint it.
Come back out here. There’s Mom’s List. Again, hit Edit and if you come back and look at the view of the generated schedule, you can see the list that you have made and reprint.
Deb: Well, Hope, that really does help. I know for our family it’s been a real blessing to have multiple lists, and I’m sure it’s going to help a lot of families who haven’t even considered this option.
Hi I’m Sarah and we are just starting out homeschooling. I have 2 children. Bell is 12 months and Sam is nearly 4.
We are living overseas at the moment and the cost of education in a private international school is really high so we are starting homeschooling and I am super excited.
Our Morning:
My son is doing Pre-K but I find doing many activities too hard with his baby sister around as she wants to eat everything at the moment (Play-Doh included). So generally in the morning, we wake up, have breakfast and play together.
Then when the baby goes to sleep around 9:00 a.m. we do school. We try to spend 30-60 minutes doing activities together which is a mix of fun book activities as well as Play-Doh, Mad Mattr, games, etc.
We are excited to be using the Timberdoodle custom Pre-k kit this year which arrives soon. We started before the kit arrived purely because my son is so eager and we are enjoying some one-on-one focused time together. We started in June this year and will have a few small breaks throughout the year with a longer 5 week break at Christmas when we travel back home.
Our Afternoon:
In the afternoons during the baby’s second nap we have sometimes done cooking together, art or a board game.
Because it is so hot at the moment we have done water play every day this week in the afternoon and this is great as the 1-year-old can join in too.
Our Evening:
We generally eat between 5:00 – 5:30 p.m. and tonight it was pasta which is always a favorite with the kids!
By the time dinner/showers are done the night seems to be nearly over but my son loves books so we usually spend 30 minutes reading books together before his bedtime.
More About Our Family:
We live in Cambodia in an apartment in the city so outside time isn’t really an option here due to heat and no parks to go to. We try to go to indoor playgrounds twice a week so my son can run around and play with friends. We also have a shared roof top that we use for bike riding and water play.
We are often asked how our curriculum will work for a child with autism. This is a subject near and dear to our hearts, as you’ll hear in the video.
A Helpful Overview
Today we are going to discuss using Timberdoodle curriculum with your child with autism. While this is just a quick overview of a couple highlighted topics pertaining to working with children with autism, we know that every child with autism is unique and each one is gifted and challenged in unique ways, and they do not often fit into an easy generalization. Yet we still wanted to spark your imagination on how to use some of these products with your child, and hopefully point you in some helpful directions. We hope you enjoy this discussion.
Deb: Today we’re going to look at the question of how Timberdoodle’s curriculum works with children with autism.
Our experience with autism goes back in number of years. We have a good family friend who had a daughter who was eight. They were looking for respite care for her. She has severe autism. She came and lived with us for approximately a year. We started off with trying to get some basic language skills. She had very little. She couldn’t even say no or yes to request from our family if she wanted more orange juice or whatever. Tell us how we did that, Hope.
Hope: Basically, we found it was, in essence, really intensive parenting. We worked through an ABA therapy course that trained us how to train her. But when we boiled it all down, we really felt like essentially, this is very intensive parenting.
Deb: Exactly. I was looking at what you guys were doing, because you were the primary teachers of Krissy, and I was saying, “Yeah, that’s how I worked with you,” but it was a lot more intense, lots more repetitions. So that was one of the insights that we got from this whole thing. The other was there are two problem areas that children with autism face. What are they?
Hope: One that we noticed for Krissy was the auditory processing. You could be talking to her and if she could focus on what you were saying she would be able to understand it, breaking through, so that she could auditorily process what was going on. That was really difficult for her.
Video Clip of Hope working with Krissy.
Hope: Krissy, I have something that you wear on your head. Do you have something that you wear on your head? (Waits. Touches Krissy.) Do you have something that you wear on your head?
Krissy responds and chooses appropriate picture.
Hope: There it is! Good job!
Deb: Another thing that we noticed, particularly with children at the high-functioning end of the autism spectrum, was opinions are very difficult for them. So if you were to say to them, “What is your favorite ice cream?” they ulcerated over that and they couldn’t decide. Generalizations were very hard for them to make. They couldn’t get simple jokes.
Hope: If it was factual they thrived. If it wasn’t facts, if it was, “What would you suppose?” or, “What could happen?” or, “What do you think about…?” that was harder for them to be able to answer.
Deb: Now let’s come back to the question, “Will Timberdoodle’s curriculum work with those children?” and the simple answer is, “Yes and no.” Yes, for all the factual things. The math, they’re going to thrive on that. That’s a no-brainer. The reading, again, it’s going to follow a pattern that’s going to be familiar to them. There will be problem areas, particularly as they get into the higher reading programs, such as Mosdos, where they’re going to have to infer some things or speculate, and that’s going to be very difficult for them. Do you not then use that?
Hope: No, you do. If you have a child with autism you will be best served by contacting us and saying, “Here’s what my specifics are,” because it’s going to depend a lot on their age and their skills. For Krissy, working through the Building Thinking Skills books, we would get stuck with things like, “Which one is behind?” or, “Which one is under?”
Deb: If you have a child like that, then Bunny Peek-a-Boo works for them, regardless of the age, because Bunny Peek-a-Boo is going to work on those ideas of put the bunny inside or put it behind or put it on top. It’s going to work with those. So knowing where your child is at will help us help you put together a curriculum that will work for them.
Hope: And once they have those skills, then ultimately they’ll be able to use the Beginning Thinking Skills, and then Critical Thinking Skills and so on. Those books will still be the foundation for which you will grow, but you may have to take the skills that they are working on in there and spend some extra time outside of it, using some of the other resources to drill this into them.
Deb: Those books will flag to you, “This is a problem! What do I do about that?” We can help you try to formulate an idea.
The other problem area is going to be addressed in our doodle books. It can be addressed in a number of different ways, but our doodle books provide a great way for them to practice thinking skills. “What is the man pushing?” Now they’ve got to think about, what does that mean to push something? What is it? It’s going to be hard for them to do that. Does that mean you don’t do the things that are hard? No, we think you do, but you try to gauge it to their age. So if this is going to be difficult, don’t give them an 8th grade doodle book. Dial it back to something that is more user-friendly for them. It’s just a matter of knowing your child, knowing their strengths and their weaknesses, and keeping them on that trajectory for typical learning.
Hope: Yes, and so back to, will Timberdoodle curriculum work? Yes. You probably will want to pare it down to the essentials. You don’t want to get bogged down trying to get through everything.
We also focus really highly on the emotional intelligence. In the world of autism, this is a huge deal. It’s a huge deal in a typically functioning child, but in the world of autism we’re going to need to be more intentional about it. Resources that we have like the Stages Emotions cards are ideal in the world of autism.
Deb: Exactly. It will show you a card of a situation and you’re going to ask your child, “What is the man feeling? What is the woman feeling? Why are they feeling that way? What is going on in this picture?” They’re going to have to use their thinking to get to there and I think the more practice they have the easier it will be. Will it be difficult for him? Yes. It’s going to stretch them, but there is going to be stretching in a way that’s going to give them the skills that they will need to progress through their schooling.
Hope: With a typically functioning child you may be able to start with “What’s this person feeling and why?” For the child with autism you’re going to start out with maybe just labeling it. “Show me the one that’s sad, show me the one that’s disappointed.” And then go to “Can you find somebody that disappointed that they didn’t get their homework done?”
Deb: So then laying out all of the cards and say, “Who looks disappointed?” It’s back to that intense parenting where it’s not going to be a once-through. You’re going to have to belabor that point, but the results are going to be outstanding.
Hope: I also want to throw in, motivating your child with autism can sometimes be difficult. That doesn’t mean that the curriculum won’t work for them. And it doesn’t mean that they can’t learn. It just means that you’re going to have to figure out, knowing your child, how to motivate them to learn. That can be the ABA therapy. It can be of a number of different things. Find their carrots that they really want and have them work. “You need to do this and then you get that,” or whatever it’s going to be. I think some parents think if my child doesn’t want to do it then it’s not going to work. The answer is no, you just need to figure out a way to motivate them into completing what the assignment is. And keep it short.
Deb: Or even if you can’t figure out the motivation if you are convinced that this is a trajectory that child should be on, reading and writing…
Hope: You know they need to eat, you know they need to sleep, and you know they need to continue to progress with their education so they can become functioning, happy members of society.
Deb: Give me some examples of motivators for Krissy.
Hope: For Krissy, for auditory processing, we would work with her on, “Do you want this or do you want this?” Or the answer of this or that. The reward for listening was always food.
Deb: Another motivator I remember is we were working on asking questions. She didn’t have the vocabulary when she first came to us. Once her vocabulary began to grow we wanted her to learn how to ask questions. So we would put a pot on the table. If she would ask us, “What’s in the pot?” then we would let her open it and find out. It was generally food-related.
Hope: We found something she liked, her sweet spots. We knew she had her favorite things and we were trying to teach her the word “where” and so we would set up the situation so that when she would come around the corner looking for her thing we would have it squirreled away somewhere and would prompt her through asking “Where?” I remember how exciting it was when she finally walked into the room one day and voluntarily asked, “Where’s my blanket?” or whatever it was. It was really exciting.
Deb: Yeah, that was great.
Hope: Contact us with your details because we would love to help you figure out what are the holes, and a lot of things are what is the foundation? Yhere might be a couple of key holes in their foundation that once you can cover them, will then enable them to waltz into a curriculum much easier.
Deb: Which reminds me, we had a 16-year-old with severe autism with us for a while who could not read. He was attending public school at the time, had a number of different programs tried and none of them worked. We had just heard about this whole thing of foundational learning and so we took him back to the very basics of putting together a puzzle, which was one of the things they recommended, and he spent the weekend putting together puzzles. By the end of the weekend, he was reading some beginning words. We had phenomenal success just by taking him back to that foundation. Whereas, at the school they didn’t.
I think if we work with you, if we know the particulars of your child we could try to pull something together. What I want to emphasize is not just getting things for your child’s strengths. I think sometimes people try to do that. “Well, he’s good in math. I’ll just get a math program.” Or, “He only wants facts, so I’ll only get a history program.” You’re missing the opportunity to grow that child in ways that will be beneficial when he’s out working, and in society, or interacting with people in a social way. So try to be sure that you don’t just cover his strengths but work on the weaknesses as well.
Hope: Yes. One thing I would put a little plug in for is ABA therapy and how huge that was in our work with Krissy that gave us the skills. Little things like you don’t give them questions, you give them statements, and you don’t always end your answers with the one that they want. So, “Do you want a carrot or a cupcake?” and they say, “Cupcake,” that’s not an answer. That was an echoing of the word “cupcake.” So little things like that that are actually really big things in the world of autism.
Another resource that I would put a plug-in would be for would be Dr. Partington’s ABLLS-R test. It takes you to the very little incremental steps and what it would take to become a functioning kindergartener, I believe. This is for all ages. You may find that your child can zip and unzip their shirt, they can pull their arms out of their sweatshirt, but they may be unable to ask a “where” question or unable to ask a “why” question, or maybe they can’t even form any words at all. It will take you from the very simplest infant all the way up to what they believe a functioning kindergartener can do.
Deb: You map this out. You may have these higher skills and you can’t seem to go any further. You realize they never got the basic skills below.
We’re going to put a link to a couple videos we did of Krissy way back in the day and show you her perfect day. We’ll also show you her singing. She was an amazing singer.
Studies show that when you cultivate your child’s social/emotional skills, not only do they have less anxiety and less aggression, you also are cultivating their ability to solve interpersonal/social-emotional problems.
Honestly, this is an area that took us a little bit by surprise – how few emotions our children were able to name.
This set of Feelings Flashcards will work with your child in a colorful and fun way to learn to identify and name different feelings. Once they have that ability you can use it in your home and out in public to say, “What are you feeling right now?” or “Do you see how that person is feeling? What should we do? How could we solve this?” and so on.
Let’s take a quick look at the cards.
Each card has two opposing feelings… lonely opposed to cuddly… or busy opposed to bored… sad opposed to happy. Not only are they attractive but you’ll be able to say, “Why do you think he is disappointed? What do you think happened? How does he feel? He feels disappointed.”
“How do you think they feel? Why do you think they’re happy? Probably they’re having a party or celebration. They feel excited.”
Serious versus silly. Disgusted versus delighted and so on.
Forty different emotions here for you to work on with your child. Even at this very young age to be able to start them on the journey of identifying their own emotions, identifying them in somebody else. Then you’re able to start working with them on, “If you feel this way how do we help? If I feel this way what can I do?” And it’s okay to feel these feelings too. Now we can name it. You can know what you’re feeling. With our kids– I know you feel really sad about this right now, but it’s not okay to be angry about it. Help them navigate the deep world of emotions.
Looking for all the nitty-gritty details? Check out our earlier blog post about our Payment Plan Options.
Deb: Hope, we often get questions here at Timberdoodle about “How can I afford your curriculum?” “Do you offer payment plans? “Are there any other ways to cut costs?”
We’ve covered how to cut costs in a previous video, but why are people concerned about payment plans? What what is the driving issue here?
Hope: Well, if you think about it, families as a whole don’t have to afford their whole year’s worth of fuel from the get-go. We don’t have to afford all our taxes from the get-go. To have to afford your child’s whole year of school from the get-go is kind of staggering if you’ve not been planning for it since they were babies. If you’ve not been budgeting for it, and especially if you have multiple children, this can feel like a huge hit to your budget to all of a sudden have to afford the whole year’s worth of education for your children.
Deb: Exactly. Because you’ve been paying the taxes on the public school and now all of a sudden you’re going to have to cough up something to teach your own children. This hits particularly hard if you’ve made that transition to homeschooling from the public school fairly recently. So if you’ve been planning for years that this is what you’re going to do you may have socked away the money. But if you’ve suddenly made that decision, it’s going to hurt! So what are some of the options that we have for people?
Hope: Well, we have a couple options. We have a payment plan, basically a loan program, that we work through: Klarna. And we also have PayPal. Do you want to go into the different details?
Deb: Let’s back up a little bit. If you were to send your child to a private school locally, you would be out about $4,500 and that’s here in podunk Shelton. You know, there’s just not much here! You go a little bit further to Olympia and costs go up another $2,000. So obviously even if you choose a private school route it’s going to be expensive.
So now dial it back and look realistically. What are we looking at for a typical curriculum? I’m just air-picking a Kindergarten kit, and it’s about $800. So you have a couple of options. How are you going to afford $800? You’ve got PayPal. Now, these are for qualifying people…
Hope: We’re presuming you as a customer qualify.
Deb: Exactly. So PayPal has a six month, no interest loan. So if you take that curriculum, the $800 curriculum, and do it through PayPal you’ve got six months to pay. It would be about $135 a month, which is a lot more reasonable than the $800 all at once.
But let’s say that doesn’t appeal to you. There is another financing option through Timberdoodle. Now, we are not financing it. That’s not our skill level! We do curriculum. We don’t do financing, but we’ve partnered with a finance company, Klarna, who does do the financing. And they can finance it for whatever you decide. So you’re saying, “I would rather pay this off not in six months, but in a year…”
The problem with Klarna that you need to know and have a heads-up on, is you are going to pay interest on that versus PayPal with no interest. But with Klarna, you can set it up to pay in a year, or you could set it up to pay in eight months or whatever works for your family. So using the same figure, $800 for the kindergarten curriculum, and let’s say you set it up to pay in a year. I don’t know what their interest rate is. They’re going to make that decision based on your credit score, and obviously, I don’t know what that’s going to be. But if you have a great credit score, it could be as low as 5% in which case you’re paying $68 a month – much more doable. But if, say, you don’t have that great of a credit score then their interest rate could be as high as 19%. Which sounds staggering, but is going to be comparable to any credit card. And even at 19% you’re paying $74 a month. Not that big of a difference.
Klarna gives you the freedom to spread this out over a distance or add more curriculum. Obviously, it gets more expensive. But again, this is much more doable than coughing up $1,000 right from the get-go.
That covers what financing Timberdoodle has available. So Hope, are there any other questions?
Hope: I just wanted to let people know, if you’re trying to make the decision between PayPal and Klarna, you can go to our checkout system and select Another Option and try to go see Klarna’s rates. You can go apply and they will tell you, “We don’t have any options for you,” if you don’t qualify. Or if you do qualify, “Here’s what your rate will be.” At that point you can bail out and come back and say “No, I don’t want to do that. I’m going to do PayPal or I want to find some other way to finance this…”
Deb: A garage sale!
Hope: Exactly. Or if you want to go through with it then you just continue on.
Deb: That’s a really good point because you don’t want to get sucked into something where you’re saying, “I can’t afford this or I don’t want that commitment.”
I think that covers what Timberdoodle does. Again, we aren’t financing it. We are going to a professional who finances it and we do what we do best.
My name is Rosemarie. I am homeschooling 4 children: ages 15, 12, and 5 and 3. We have a 5-year-old lab who needs lots of love and attention throughout our day.
Dad is at work during the day so I take care of most of the homeschooling and daily tasks of the household. The two oldest boys are big helpers with the chores, cooking and watching the little ones occasionally.
Our Morning:
I wake up around 6:30 with the two youngest. We snuggle for a bit and then Daddy comes in to say his good-byes.
We then do our “morning books.” We read poems, a story, some type of non-fiction and recite finger plays. Depending on the day we do our yoga poses then get dressed and I may go for a walk while the two little ones play.
The two oldest are awake by now, but read in their beds for awhile. They like to wake up slowly.
After I am done exercising and showering (some days) we have breakfast and do morning chores.
Then my 15-year-old does most of his work on his own while I work with my 12-year-old and the two little ones play. Once done I try to have an activity planned for the two little ones. Then everyone heads outside for a bit before lunch.
Our Afternoon:
I usually make lunch for everyone. Then we clean up and do a few chores.
We read aloud together and then the two little ones rest for a bit in their rooms while the big boys read independently or finish some of their work or work on projects.
After quiet time I will do an activity with my 5- and 3-year-old.
Then we usually just play inside or out until dinnertime.
Our Evening:
We eat dinner around 5:30 and then clean up and play for a bit, do baths for the little ones and then up to bed to read, do journals and go to sleep.
My big boys can have soccer in the evenings so they are not home on some nights. The nights they are home they usually read, or sometimes play a game after dinner.
Hope: Hi! It’s summertime here at Timberdoodle. We’ve been getting questions about what can we do with our children to reinforce the math concepts they’ve learned all year without getting the math books out during the summer time? So we have brought out some of our math games that we recommend. Let’s walk through them really quick. Pearl, do you want to lead off with Mobi?
Pearl: Sure. Mobi is sort of a Scrabble-type game where each player is creating their own crossword using math equations. There’s a Mobi Max and Mobi Kids. Mobi Max includes addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. It’s a little bit more challenging, for maybe eight and up, or the child who is getting somewhat comfortable with multiplication and division. Mobi Kids is better for maybe say five or six and up, for a child who’s really comfortable doing addition and subtraction. Mobi Kids is best for either two players or two teams of players, whereas Mobi Max is good for a very flexible number of players. Especially if you have a variety of ages in your family, Mobi Max is perfect, because we’ve included, exclusive to us, extra addition and subtraction tiles. So it’s good both for the older or more advanced child and for a younger child who wants to play at the same time.
Hope: Perfect. Another product we have is Tenzi. It’s four colors of dice, 10 dice in each color. Let me show you that. Tenzi can be played in a number of different ways. We actually sell the Tenzi Card Deck in case you run out of ideas of how to play it. The main concept is you can use these dice to reinforce addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division from the very basic of having your child roll and count how many dots are on each side of the dice to adding with it. For example: everyone roll until you can add up to 8, or everyone roll until you can add up to 12. You can also roll for numbers that divide by 3. So I’ve got 12 can be divided by 3 and so on. There’s many ways to play Tenzi. Again, you can look at the deck if you run out of ideas, or take all your math concepts and put turn them into competition. It’s really a very addictive game. Pearl, do you want to look at Tiny Polka Dot?
Pearl:Tiny Polka Dot has just so much variety to the game for a wide range of ages. Lots of different games that you can play with helpful recommendations on them. For example, let’s look at one game that you can play with Tiny Polka Dot with probably about a four- or five-year-old. You lay out numbers with dots from 0 to 5 on it and you are looking for pairs that add up to 5. It might be a 0 and a 5. It might be a and a 3. It might be a 4 and a 1. This can be quite challenging for a young player. But when it gets a little too easy, you just flip the cards over and now it’s a memory challenge. That’s just two examples of the myriad games that can be played with Tiny Polka Dot.
Hope: Awesome. The last one we want to look at is called Wrap-Ups. This is not a math game, but it does allow your child to practice their math facts very quickly, easily, and hands-on approach and keeps you from having to break out the books. Let me walk you through it here. This is the multiplication one. You are going to be using this string here. Basically, you’re solving for the problem. This is all times 1. 4 times 1 is 4. 2 times 1 is 2. Starting on one side, wrapping to the answer on the other side. 12 times 1 is 12 and so on. The beauty of Wrap-Ups is you can self correct. I don’t know if you can see, on the back there are ridges that your child will be able to be able to see. If the string is on top of the ridge you got the answer correct. If the string is not on the ridge then he’s going to know that that answer was not correct. Again, a real quick way for your child to practice whatever math facts you want them to keep sharp on during the summer and get it done in just a real fun way.
That about covers it for math for us. Thanks for joining us.
The stunning Mosdos textbooks are massive, so “How do we schedule this?” is a fair question!
Hope: Our question for today is about the Mosdos literature program. You guys have given us feedback that it looks like in an amazing program, and it really is, but it looks a little bit overwhelming. So the question is, what would a day look like in Mosdos? What would it look like to do it daily? How do we actually implement all this wonderful information?
Pearl: Well, I think there are a lot of different ways to do it because Mosdos has so many different components. There could be a lot of different ways to do it. Here’s how I would tackle it if I was handling a given week. I would do it as a weekly schedule, not a daily schedule, to give the kids a little bit of freedom in how they want to do that.
For example, let’s look at a 3rd grade course. This is about halfway through the third grade year.
You’re going to start by reading the Lesson in Literature. That’s a brief story with some questions just to give you an idea of the literary concept you’re covering. This one, for example, is about different settings in literature. Then you have your main story. It will give you a little heads-up on what the story is about, followed by the story. This one is about a town that moved. Then there will sometimes be a related poem. And then some follow-up Studying the Selection questions.
Different families will have different approaches to this, but here is what I would do. I would go through all of these questions and answer them orally. Then I would choose probably one of the written activities and have the student complete that. In this one, for example, maybe you would choose to create a flyer trying to get people from across America to come move out to your town out in the American West.
In addition, you will also have some workbook pages that go along with it. For this particular activity there are two vocabulary pages. There’s a brief writing exercise, an exercise in determining cause and effect, some drawing exercises, and that’s it. That is how I would schedule a 3rd grade Mosdos student. Now some families will want to do every written activity possible. Some will want to do things a little differently.
Hope: In your week I probably would start the week with the reading. Maybe answer the questions orally while it’s fresh, and then each day after that have them do something else. So the next day have them complete two of the workbook pages or all the workbook pages. And the last day have them do whatever activity you guys chose out of it. So you kind of break it up throughout the week. They can always reference the story again if they need to but you’re not trying to cram all of that into one day. Just kind of freshen it up as you go through the week.
Pearl: For some grades you will be doing two or three weeks, very similar though. You’ll be reading it, maybe on a different day doing the workbook activities, on a different day doing a writing assignment. It’s very similar throughout the grades, but with slight variations depending on which grade level your child is in.
Hope: You know your child best. For some of your children to read it will be more than enough for one day. For other children, to read it and get through some of the questions on the first day will be easy enough. So kind of base it off your child, but knowing at glance– “Okay, I’ve got reading. I’ve got activity questions and I’ve got some questions to answer with an additional activity.” –kind of tells you maybe you’ve got four days worth of things to split up. If your child’s easily overwhelmed with literature, cut some of those out. If they’re not, add more in. That should give you a running start on the literature program.
Pearl: Yes, and know your child, know your family. There are a lot of hands-on activities that correlate. There’s a ton you can do with it, but you don’t have to do everything with it either, so decide what is best for your family and implement it that way.
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