DD8 chose to do an online class this summer, in lieu of camp:
http://www.ctd.northwestern.edu/docs/ctd/Intro_to_Adv_Grammar_Syllabus.pdf It technically runs June 15 - August 17, but is self-paced; she finished last night, and while she was likely one of the first kids to finish, the instructor said there were other kids on the same pace.
This class has been kind of a bumpy road. Two or three weeks ago, I was pretty sure that the class was a bad decision, and that I should have waited a year before giving her the option of doing it. But she learned an astonishing, enormous amount of grammar - and *really* learned it, rather than just being able to follow a pattern.
Mistake 1: expectation mismatch as to the manner in which a class would replace summer camp. I don't work full-time in the summer, but I do have work that I need to get done. I anticipated a summer of me getting a couple hours a day of work done, while DD worked on something structured enough that she could be successful without my assistance. DD anticipated something somewhere between "I will do something purely fun on the computer" and "I will just stop doing the class if I don't love it, and then Mom will spend all day catering to my whims."
Mistake 2: expectation mismatch as to the essential nature of this particular class. The program offered about 30 different courses for 3rd-5th graders, and DD and I looked through the descriptions and syllabi for almost all of them. She picked two classes, Intro to Advanced Grammar and Watch Your Pennies, a personal finance class. I said to start off with one, and she opted for Grammar. She's never had any particular interest in Grammar; in retrospect, I wonder if she picked it because it had the least-detailed syllabus, and she conflated "least detailed syllabus" with "least demanding courseload." (DD agrees that that's likely, but she's suggestible.)
Mistake 3: more expectation mismatch as to the essential nature of this particular class. The program as a whole is Blackboard-based, and courses are pitched as involving phone and video interaction with the instructors, as well as message board and video interaction with the other students. The new student orientation was a hugely chaotic and enjoyable web conference, and she excitedly logged on to Blackboard the next day - to discover that her class doesn't use Blackboard for anything except downloading the assignment list, that there was no interaction with other students, and that her instructor had a full page of nitpicky rules for communicating with him by email (including an exacting format for email subject lines, and a "no contractions" rule). IMHO, those differences should have been incorporated into the syllabus, so she'd know what to expect.
So after all those expectations were unmet, she was no longer excited about the class, and it was really rough getting her started. Her course consists of a book to read, and a series of questions to answer by email. The assignment list contains 10 sections, each with 9 questions. Once you successfully answered 5 questions from each section, you're done. She decided to do one a day - except that it took her 4 days to do the second question once she'd done the first. And then the third question she didn't get right on the first try, and it took her 3 days to get back on the horse. And then she was 2 weeks in to a 9 week course and she'd only done 6 of 50 questions, and I had visions of entering August with 20 or 30 problems left to go. Fortunately, her Mama (who is much better at that kind of thing than I am) had a come-to-Jesus talk with her, and she agreed to suck it up and get it done.
Mistake 4: I think she is too young (or inexperienced in life?) for this class. The program classes rising 4th graders as 3rd graders, so the youngest kids in this particular class had finished 3rd grade, and the oldest were going into 6th in the fall). Between the skip and having a May birthday, she's way at the young end. Plus, the program requires 95th percentile on a standardized test for admission, so just being smart wasn't enough to make up for it. Particularly when she's not very interested in the topic (back to Mistake 2). She has needed a lot of parent support to be successful in this class, and it's not clear to me whether it's more than the program is intended to permit.
What's worked for us:
- Discussing the textbook together. I'll read a section aloud, and ask her questions, or to do the exercises in the text. Or she'll read a section (aloud or silently), then we'll talk about it. I'll also tell her which section she needs to read before working on the next set of problems.
- Me handling the administrivia. I set up her emails as drafts, with the subject in the proper exacting format (which involves copy-pasting and changing the problem number), and the text of that email's problem (copy-pasted from the assignment sheet) in the body.
- We started with her typing her own answers, but she had so much difficulty juggling coming up with the answer, holding it in her mind, and finding the right keys that I agreed to transcribe answers she wrote longhand, complete with any spelling / grammar / punctuation / factual errors.
- For the more complex, open-ended questions at the end of the class, we have a discussion, with me taking notes about her answers. Then she looks back at the notes and turns them into complete thoughts.
Things she's still struggling with:
- The transition from spoken answers to written answers. She can talk fairly extensively and knowledgeably about the questions she's being asked. But when I say, "that sounds great; write it down," she invariably asks me what she just said.
- Figuring out what the question is asking. ("He wants you to copy the sentence out of the book that talks about that," is not an uncommon hint. Or when the instructor's followup question was "What does the word CONJUNCTION have to do with all this?," she needed me to say "Just say what the conjunctions in the initial assignment were." Which IMHO is not what the question actually asked - but was exactly what he wanted her to do.) I think she's overthinking - I remember in college having an exam question along the lines of "What two things need to happen for ChemicalA to have an effect in the brain," and I asked the professor afterwards what on earth he was going for. The answer was "it needs to be released, and it needs to be taken up," which I'd taken for granted so much that it never occurred to me.
Things this class gets wholeheartedly right:
- She's learned a huge amount. If you give her a relatively straightforward sentence (like "We went around the crater, but Romulus chose a different route"), she can identify the part of speech and part of sentence of each word, and can identify the prepositional phrase and the clauses. She knows the eight parts of speech by heart (and can spell interjection and conjunction). She can distinguish when she's referring to a word itself, or to the concept that word represents. She knows the difference between action verbs and linking verbs, and can explain when a sentence contains a subject complement (for those of you like me, who may have forgotten they'd ever even learned that one, it's the noun or adjective that comes after the linking verb "is," that tells more about the subject).
- There is enough choice in the assignments that she can find an appropriate level of challenge. There hasn't been a section for which she's been incapable of finding five answerable questions. (Although the "come up with a sentence with characteristics X and Y" has been a surprising stumper.) But each section also has questions that could challenge much older kids - "Why do you think that Mark Twain said, �If you see an adjective, kill it�? Why is it a bad idea to use too many adjectives?" for instance).
Review in her own words: "In this class I learned about the parts of speech, parts of sentence, phrases and clauses. You don't need to know anything about grammar to be in this class. I wish I knew before I entered that you did not talk to the other students. I recommend this course to all that like grammar."
