Summer of Seventh Grade: That's a Wrap!

I had good intentions to keep blogging weekly progress, but August had entirely different plans for us.

Overall Progress Report
I decided the school couldn't realistically expect proficiency in Common Core standards which haven't been taught yet, so we spent a half hour together today reviewing the existing 7th grade State standards and clicking through to the performance expectations under each content area.

It ended up being a really great and rewarding discussion that showed that we didn't cover every single detail between our homeschooling summer and the end of 6th grade math, but enough that he has a very strong base to build on for the year of 8th grade math ahead. We both are feeling a lot more prepared and confident as a result and are celebrating with chocolate chip cookie ice cream sundaes tonight!

DragonBox app
I don't think he ever got to Chapter 5 and that's ok. I'll keep an eye with his algebra progress in the year ahead to support/practice these concepts.

Khan Academy 
In the middle of August they introduced the Learning Dashboard with Practice, Level 1, Level 2 & Mastery levels for the skill areas.

This is very helpful and appreciated, but it also resulted in my previous method of tracking math progress being thrown out the window. After about a week or so of flailing around trying to figure out what changed and understanding new results we got the hang of things, and currently he has 13 skills Practiced, 21 at Level 1, 24 at Level 2, and 76 Mastered - 134 total with 371 new skills to go including high school/college math concepts.

9 days ago he got another Earth badge which is now earned for mastery of 50 skills alongside his retired Earth badge which was earned for proficiency in 50 skills. He'll earn a Magellan Sun badge when he has 100 skills mastered.

Key to Algebra + Key to Fractions by Curriculum Press
In book 3 of algebra, he worked through page 16 covering the addition principle for equations (also known as the 'if a=b, then a+c=b+c' concept). Per Khan he has already mastered one-step equations but hasn't touched the other skills with linear equations, so I think this is the result of the new Math Pretest that the Learning Dashboard originally presents with - and affirmation that he understands them!

In book 4 of fractions he worked through page 25 which covers a variety of whole or mixed numbers problems. Per Khan he's got this area and most other areas of fractions down well now.

McDougal Littell Pre-Algebra textbook (2005)
We still haven't been using this all that often, although it will be a very helpful resource for the rest of middle school.

Reading 
If you have an opportunity and if your kids will benefit from it (you know them best) I highly recommend checking out the Institute for Reading Development's summer classes. I'm really glad I jumped at the chance to get him in the middle school class because he received the highest book level recommendation there from the start - by next summer I think he'd be bored - and ended up with an average 570 words per minute speed, better comprehension, and he particularly enjoyed learning the textbook study skills. He also never once complained about the 5 Fridays of 2.5 hour classes or the 4 1-hour homework assignments each week. I know the same will not be said for middle school, which starts tomorrow.

Summer of Seventh Grade: Week 7

Whew. Here's where things are.

DragonBox app
There ended up not being all that many 1-2 star areas in Chapter 3, but he revisited those levels in Chapter 4 and bumped the majority of them up to 3 star proficiency. Will consider Chapter 5 in the week ahead if the balance of other things seems right.

Khan Academy 
Fractions full speed ahead! With 10 achieved this week, his total is now up to 71 proficiency areas in math. A number of areas that were serious challenges before were faced head on and proficiency achieved, very proud of his hard work there. The week ahead will continue with dividing and all the operations of mixed/improper fractions, revisiting Decimals with multiplication/division then converting between fractions and decimals gets the best of both worlds.

Key to Algebra + Key to Fractions by Curriculum Press
In book 3 of algebra, some review of equivalent equations and I'm still on the fence about adding unlike term equations. He readily understands the concepts but there's still a lot of work ahead in fractions/decimals and I'm not sure what the 8th grade curriculum will cover. It's good to know we have these resources if it ends up being confusing.

Took a break on book 4 of fractions to focus on Khan Academy work and videos which was definitely beneficial. It's less about the speed and more about the depth of knowledge!

McDougal Littell Pre-Algebra textbook (2005)
Took a break on this for the week.

Reading & Writing
First day of class went great, he didn't know a single other kid in class but found out two of the other students will go to his middle school. He has 4 assignments per week so the math pace will probably slow down quite a bit. His reading speed is already pretty high and I'm not going to get into tracking that change week by week, but with better comprehension and study skills as part of the equation this is definitely worth it. He reread Sea of Monsters ahead of going to see the movie soon, his reading class is Banner in the Sky, and he's midway through rereading The Titan's Curse.

Summer of Seventh Grade: Week 6

How the stars align in part of Khan Academy

Summer Midterm Review
A transition to Common Core State Standards (CCSS) will happen during the 2014-2015 school year, so this week I finally took a look at them for seventh grade. Each school in the district is making the choice  to align with CCSS for the upcoming school year, stay with the current 2008 state standards, or who knows what middle ground there may be - and I have no idea where the new school falls on this spectrum. Thankfully not a whole lot is different between the two standards for 7th grade, and I'm rather glad to see that some concepts that seemed strangely out of sync with the rest of the 7th grade curriculum are left until 8th grade.

I've revisited the expectations of the new school expects for a base skill set for 7th grade math:

• Add, subtract, multiply and divide both positive and negative fractions, decimals and percents.
• Solve real world problems using simple expressions, equations and inequalities that include variables.
• Extend work with ratios to solve problems involving proportional relationships and percents, like those found in similar figures, discounts and tips. 

I realized that we have covered the ground for both current 2008 and CCSS well with the second bullet point involving variables - in fact I think we've gone a bit too far down that path! With 5 weeks left til school starts we're shifting gears and focusing on what else lies ahead with the other 7th grade math expectations.

DragonBox app
Took a break this week, may revisit some of the 1-2 star areas of Chapters 3 & 4.

Khan Academy 
Fractions were being a challenge area, but I realized we entirely skipped Factors and Multiples with my assumption this was solid core knowledge already so this weekend was a crash course in that. I encouraged a new strategy of watching at least some the videos first, even if he thought he knew the information already, and then taking the proficiency exams. He reported that while he already knew most of the information there were some new strategies covered and it was a good review that helped him.

With 11 this week, his total is now up to 61 proficiency areas in math and he'll dig into Fractions again in the week ahead.

Key to Algebra + Key to Fractions by Curriculum Press
In book 3 of algebra, he's covered equivalent equations and we'll cover various methods of adding unlike term equations very slowly. I doubt he'll finish this book because I think they'll cover the rest of this curriculum in the year ahead.

For book 4 of fractions, I turned things back to review pages 8-13 because although all of these are with denominators that are fairly easy to work it I think some core concepts needed strengthening. I'll continue to have this curriculum parallel the Khan Academy fractions work this week.

McDougal Littell Pre-Algebra textbook (2005)
Flipped through to review concepts through 2.3 with simplifying variable expressions.

Reading & Writing
Finished both The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Perilous Journey and Peter and the Starcatchers for 1,982 pages (!) of reading so far this summer. He narrated an awesome essay about his week at camp that I scribed, and his reading class starts this Friday. That apparently has 45 minutes to an hour of homework for 4 days a week but we'll see how it goes in reality to balance with math work and I'm assuming reading will be part of his class homework.    

Summer of Seventh Grade: Week 5

Even though he was at summer camp all last week, he crammed in a lot more learning and reading than I expected. While he was gone I enrolled in Stanford's EDUC115N : How To Learn Math and joined a local study group for the course which I'm really enjoying so far and can already see how it'll help as we go forward from here with math. This has a strong chance of being the first MOOC I actually complete!

DragonBox app
Cleared all levels in Chapter 4 of the DragonBox algebra app today, although some with fewer stars so I'll likely have him go back and revisit those levels in the week ahead.

Khan Academy 

No electronics at camp! 

Key to Algebra by Key Curriculum Press

Revisited the distributive property and found that both it and evaluating expressions with a combination of positive & negative numbers for the variables needs more review so we'll slow down that pace this week.

I also picked up the last (Book 4) of the Key to Fractions book for review and started in the middle with pages 18-19 with adding & subtracting mixed numbers with different denominators for more substantial hands-on work than Khan Academy can offer. I was reminded in my math class study group that students from the district are usually perceived as being weak on fractions so even though this isn't new material it does help to strengthen the concepts.

 

McDougal Littell Pre-Algebra textbook (2005)

Definitely none of this at summer camp, that thing weighs a ton!

Reading & Writing
He took The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Perilous Journey with him to summer camp because he left for it on a 50 nautical mile boat ride where he got to steer twice (really) and came home with 252 pages read. His days were completely packed with activities so my guess is he still woke up before everyone else, and he said he loved reading with his headlamp at night when he was supposed to be asleep sometimes too. That's our boy!

Summer of Seventh Grade: Week 4

This will be short & sweet since it was more of a 'wrapping things up before a fun week away at summer camp' type of week!

DragonBox app
Cleared all levels in Chapter 3 of the DragonBox algebra app.

Khan Academy 

Earned his Earth badge for proficiency in 50 areas of math, way to go!

Key to Algebra by Key Curriculum Press

Passed the end of workbook 2 test very well with some additional review needed of the distributive property.

 

McDougal Littell Pre-Algebra textbook (2005)

Took a break on the textbook to focus more on completing the Key to Algebra workbook before summer camp.

Reading & Writing
In honor of taking a week off for summer camp, even though it was easy he read Alvin Ho: Allergic to Camping, Hiking and Other Natural Disasters and made it up to chapter 60 of Peter and the Starcatchers. Took a break on writing! 

Summer of Seventh Grade: Week 3

 Dislike button by Sean MacEntee

Whew! Epic progress made this week including a tool I wasn't planning on but immediately knew was a must-have. The image is not what you think but you'll understand why it's perfect for this week's review.

New and Exciting: DragonBox
On Friday night I read a Forbes article about the DragonBox algebra app and how it was being used for the Washington State Algebra Challenge, which I hadn't heard about. Hopefully our school district does for next year? Anyway, after poking around reviews and videos I was instantly sold on the recently updated $10 Algebra 12+ app (and I don't pay for anything app related if I can help it) because it really does hone in on practicing algebra concepts and we're already covering the pencil-and-paper practice route. 

I handed my phone to our son with the explanation that it was an algebra concepts game and asked every once in a while if he was doing ok with it. The answer was always yes, and in his first 45 minutes he got up to level 7 (so far there's 20 levels per chapter) of chapter 3 (out of 10 chapters). The app setup is much like Angry Birds levels with a maximum of 3 stars possible for each level and he's mostly gotten them all with some gap areas.

I created my own profile on the app in order to understand the approach, see what needs review in those 1-star gap areas, and have made it through the first two chapters. Real variables start being tossed in around 1-13 and by the end of chapter 2 my head was starting to hurt with properties of equality. I think there may be hope that more advanced algebra concepts will kick in for me on more than a theoretical level. Now if only something could be done about the permanent mental image of my 7th grade math teacher throwing the textbook & hollering ADD OPPOSITE!!! every time I see or (worse) have to say that phrase...

Khan Academy 

Plowed through 10 (!) levels this week including more work with negative numbers for a total of 46 proficiency areas. For the week ahead we'll focus more on strengthening decimals along with factors & multiples before getting to more advanced fractions work. I really appreciate how the Knowledge Map makes it easy to see if we're getting too much of a specialized focus without a sufficiently broad base first.

Key to Algebra by Key Curriculum Press

This week went through some rather dense pages 15-24 of Workbook 2 covering areas of rectangles, like and unlike terms, combining like terms in equations (and not combining those that are close but not quite), adding & subtracting expressions, then some advanced expressions combining all of that with an eye for simplification opportunities. There were a couple of times I had to have him pause and review answers (since his 0ab or 1x³ should be simplified to 0 and x³) but it's very clear he understands even though these are mostly new concepts.

When I explained what like and unlike terms were he smirked then started laughing. I had I hunch I knew what was coming next, and sure enough he kept the smirk and asked, "If these terms were on Facebook, could I like a like term or like an unlike term? Or maybe then unlike it, then like it again? Where is 'unlike' on Facebook anyway?" 

 

McDougal Littell Pre-Algebra textbook (2005)

Reviewed the textbook to make sure he could explain concepts back to me through chapter 2.2.

Reading & Writing
Finished writing his NASCAR party essay with some struggles, we'll step up focusing on idea development for writing since I know the expectations will increase a lot from where elementary school left off. The week ahead we'll take it easy with an acrostic poem though. For reading he wrapped up The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles and is up to chapter 25 of Peter and the Starcatchers.

Looking forward to a productive week ahead! 

Summer of Seventh Grade: Week 2

Ingalls Creek by Justin Garland

This week was much more about summer and less about 7th grade, as it should be since there's plenty of time ahead for studying! The challenge with having everything as evening-based work is that when there's something happening at night nothing academic gets done. It's not every week you turn 11 years old, join a new youth group, then plan for, pack, and go on a 12 mile overnight backpacking trip in the mountains with Scouts.

Life is much more important than proficiency stats.  That said,

Khan Academy 

Just some videos watched, no new proficiency areas so the tally remains 36.

Key to Algebra by Key Curriculum Press

Here's where great progress was made with variables and expressions, exponents, equivalent expressions and multiplying terms up through page 14. My guess is that he won't get to the test starting on page 36 because there's a lot going on this week too.  

McDougal Littell Pre-Algebra textbook (2005)

Meh. Maybe next week.

Reading & Writing

Done with Chomp, 7 chapters in on Peter and the Starcatchers. Taking a break from writing since that takes sustained attention and time that wasn't available last week.