New to CM

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  • July 9, 2010 at 9:42 am
    kcoard
    Participant

    HI,

    I have been homeschooling for just over a year and next term will be starting to implement CM into our homeschool.

    I have Dd 8 who has sensory processing disorder and Ds 5 who is on the autism spectrum. I was lent the SCM DVD and was encouraged when Sonja shared her experience of using this method with her daughter.

    We have been using SOTW for History and I add in other books or use other books in place of some chapters.

    My main problem is tweaking LLATL Yellow for Dd to fit our new plan.  I have already bought the Orange for next year and after looking through it I think I will have to cut some parts as DD dislikes English and I think it will be too heavy for her.

    Any hints would be appreciated as I don’t really want to ditch something I have just bought .

     

    Edited to add, I am British married to an Aussie and live in Australia.

    July 10, 2010 at 2:22 pm
    Sonya Shafer
    Moderator

    Just bumping this one back to the top to see if anybody has experience with LLATL (Learning Language Arts through Literature).

    July 10, 2010 at 2:45 pm
    fivestones
    Member

    Hello kcoard,

    I am sorry that I did not see this before.  

    We use LLATL and have for the last  5 years.  My kids really enjoy it and I have tried to change to something else.  They always balked to come back.  We changed our school to a CM school about 4 years ago.

    I do not however have experience with processing disorder or autism spectrum.

    The way we do LLATL in our house is to do 1 part daily.  So, if you were looking at your book, we do #1 on Monday, #2 on Tues. and so on.  We never spend more then 20 min. most time with my younger one he can be done in 15.  The only time things take longer is if we are on a research area.  Then I just stop after 20 min. regardless if we are finished with that section or not.  Then we come back to it the next day.  Depending on how long we’ve taken in a day I will also skip the extras.  Those little enrichment things.  We also use the dictation throughout the week, instead of just once on Monday.  So I schedule this under our copywork time.  I have my children use it as copywork on Monday, Tues, we will finish up if needed on the copywork (if it was a long one for example), focus on punctuation, difficult words, etc. then by Wednesday we start dictation. We continue until Friday.  If they did dictation without any mistakes, we do not continue on Thurs and Fri.

    If you have any other questions feel free to ask.  

    Blessings,

    Vanessa

    July 10, 2010 at 10:01 pm
    kcoard
    Participant

    Thanks for bumping this Sonya and thanks for that Vanessa.

     I plan to use a timer and do no more than 15 minutes and then build Dd up to 20 for Ds 10 minutes building up to 15 will be the aim. I was thinking of using the copywork, leaving ictation until next year and really get DD happy with doing the copywork and then just working through each days activites. Ds is till at the learning to read stage so not a concern for him.

    Dd is working through yellow this year and I have bought Orange for her for next year. Do you do all the book studies using the whole book or just the extracts they have?  I was thinking of only doing 1 or 2 of the complete books and spending longer on them . Dd does not enjoy reading (yet Wink) so I don’t want to overwhelm her.

    Also do those special units like research etc only take a week, at first glance they look like they take longer.

     

    Thanks again for the respnse.

    July 11, 2010 at 2:41 pm
    fivestones
    Member

    It sounds to me like you have a very workable plan.  

    Each LLATL year has a focus on 4 book studies.  However the excerpts through out the book are from many books.  We do all 4 book studies.  I have found that the books are not long or hard for my children. I believe for the orange book the first one is the boxcar children.  My daughter read this in about two days, my son took about a week. However because we school with the CM way, my children are reading in many areas and have plenty of challenging books going.

    But I think your “1 or 2” idea is just fine!  They give you alternatives in the book and summarize up the stories for you.  These are very easy to skip.

    I am not looking at any of my books, but my daughter just finished up the green one (7th grade) and I believe her research took 2 weeks.

    Again, just keep to your time and know that it’s ok if it takes you longer then the time they allot.  Small bites are good, especially when you know they understand, then big bites and totally losing them.Smile

    Need to get the family up for church.

    Blessings,

    Vanessa

    July 11, 2010 at 9:22 pm
    kcoard
    Participant

    Thankyou Vanessa.

    good to know LLATL can be adapted to CM methods.

     

    I am really looking forward to introducing some of  the CM methods.

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