We're finally here!

[Tricia O]

We finally made it to Beyond FIAR with Elizabeth! Katie will sit in some on the lessons (lightly) as she's doing volume 2 with Michael right now. We started with the Boxcar children this week and the lessons look great. In case you missed my previous post, the very first lesson in the BYFIAR Christian Character supplement helped us lead Katie to Christ this week! :hop:
We are aiming for 2 chapters a week. Does this seem reasonable? Do you do most of the lessons or just pick & choose? And do you still call it "rowing" even though it's not technicallly "rowing" anymore? :D
I have decided I better only give one written assignment a day. The first day, I showed Elizabeth how to find the entry about vitamins in our children's encyclopedia set, and asked her to write a brief sentence about each vitamin and what it does for us. I also asked her to write out a short paragraph to begin a mystery story. I think it was a bit much to expect from someone who hasn't had much formal writing yet, other than Queen's Language Lessons, as she unfortunately had a meltdown. :eyes: She did finally get the vitamin assignment done. She ended up doing the mystery assignment the next day, and it's amazing that knowing that Grandma was on the way to take her to spend a couple of days at Grandma's house was able to inspire her to finish that assignment in only 10 minutes. :lol:
Here is what she wrote. Do these sound okay for a newly beginning fifth grader (who turned 10 in March)?

Vitamins
Vitamin A helps your teeth, skin, and bones.

Vitamin B. prervents: Beriberi, and Pellaga.

Vitamin C you can find it in citrus, giunea pigs need this.

Vitamin D prervents deformed bones.

Vitamin E helps your skin.

Vitamin K helps your blood clot.

Oh, at the bottom of the page I found this:

*complex of vitamins b

So I guess the little dot after "Vitamin B" above was supposed to be an asterisk and not a period. :unsure: Oh, she did erase that colon when I told her it wasn't necessary (but not very well). She does know how to spell guinea, but was just careless this time. We will be adding the word prevents to her spelling list this week though. We haven't touched much on correct comma usage yet. And the Vitamin C sentence needs work. :unsure:

Here is her mystery paragraph (complete with stick figure illustration :lol: ):

Case of the missing guinea pig.

One day a person was going to hold a guinea pig. But when the person counted the pigs one was missing
the person looked all around the house but couldn't find it.

She forgot a period at the end of one of her sentences, and a bit of capitalization, so we will definitely have to help with that.

So what do you think?

[Melinda]

Welcome to BY! :clap:

We shoot for 2-3 chapters a week. Most weeks it's 2, though some we've done as many as 4 (we were able to study 3-4 chapters/week towards the end of GWC).

As far as E's writing, I think you have a great place to start. She sounds a lot like my 5th grader. Even though Cayli likes to write, she hasn't fine tuned her writing, thus resulting in frustration over a simple assignment. I can't assign more than one/day. I have found that lapbook pieces work well for some of the smaller, fact gathering assignments. That way it doesn't feel like writing and is more appealing to the child.

One thing I did for GWC that I will do again, is have my girls write a brief (1-2 sentence) summary of each chapter. This worked well for GWC because at the end of the book, they had a nice collection of facts about his life.

Hope you enjoy this leg of your journey!

(I still can't believe our girls are 5th graders! :eek:)

[CINDY LB OH]

Welcome to Beyond!!

We just started our Beyond studies this year and have been enjoying them.

I think your dd did fine with her writing assignments. We loved the mystery story lesson. My ds "wrote" a whole story; he talked, I dictated. We had a great time with that.

I tried to do 3 chapters per week, just to keep it moving, and didn't do all the lessons. I chose lessons I thought would interest him, and many we did conversationally. My ds has some LD issues though, so I have to adapt the lessons for him. Many others go at a slower pace, but you'll soon be able to figure out the right pace for your students.

This year we did Boxcar, Thomas Edison (then rabbit trailing to Buffalo Bill, the wild west, and the Gold Rush), and are trying to finish up Homer Price.

Keep up the good work!!