My attitude is that I am entitled to ruthlessly �strip-mine� workbooks and textbooks: i.e., use whatever I think serves my kids� best interests whenever and however we think is appropriate and ignore anything that we find does not serve our purposes.
I think the central principle is to have your kid do as much work as he needs to do in order to master something� and no more. The goal is understanding and mastery, not work for the sake of work.
The workbooks/textbooks exist for us � we are not servants of the books.
Parents, especially when we�re homeschooling, should be able to figure out what the kid knows � if he needs more problems from another book in order to master the stuff, have him do them. If not, don�t.
I like your attitude. That's a very good advice. I hope I can follow it. I'll at least try. I can see myself making him do more than needed in subjects which are not my favorite. I think I could manage to do it with math, but LA could be a very different story.
My kids are just getting to the age when I myself was reading good kids� books about math (such as Adler�s �Giant Golden Book of Mathematics� that I mentioned earlier), and I have not quite figured out how to get them to read them as I did � should I assign reading, just make the books available or what?
I would just make the book available and see if they like it. Or make it an option "Today you can work from Fred's book or this one." or find corresponding chapters for whatever you are doing.
Funny thing, since you mentioned the book for the 2nd time, I decided that I really have to check it out. As a matter of fact we have one of Adler's books at home! It belongs to a friend of us who thought it may be a good reading for our son. I briefly checked and decided that it would be too much for DS. DH looked quite excited when he saw the book. He had exactly the same one when he was a kid and loved it. The book we have is translated, the English original is called Learning with Colour Mathematics. I am not sure how it compares to the one you mentioned. I need to have a better look at it.
You know of E. D. Hirsch�s espousal of developmentally *inappropriate* teaching? Hirsch argues that instead of spoon-feeding them each tiny next logical step, kids deserve to hear about the stuff that is actually interesting. Black holes and supernovae are more interesting than pulleys and levers (we�ve read and talked about all of those) and infinity is more interesting than dividing fractions (we�ve worked more seriously on fractions, but we have discussed infinity).
This is really interesting. It makes sense they should get the feel for all the exciting things not only those they can really understand. The bigger picture is always more interesting.
I think the important point is to not be afraid of trying out stuff even though it may turn out to be beyond your kid�s understanding (or your ability to explain). Try it out and see what happens. That, after all, is what we adults do with each other. If the child ends up not understanding, well, he will have a shot again when he is a little older.
I hope it�s clear that I�m not advocating in any way skimping on the core material that really must be mastered in grade school � the four arithmetic operations for whole numbers and for the various sorts of fractions and some basic ideas of measurement. But the nice thing about dealing with bright kids is that you can cover that more rapidly than the public schools do, and still have some fun exploring other things.
It's quite clear and it makes complete sense. It's quite eye opening to have it explained like this.
Thanks
