Transitioning from 9 to 10

I have a 10 yo boy who just finished 4th grade, prepared for 5th grade. I can let you know what we used, as I think he will be ready for the jump in academics next year. New for 5th, he will have 2 dictations per week using Spelling Wisdom book 1 (picking up where we left off), start a book of mottoes with one entry per week required and more encouraged, start his own Book Of Time (or Book Of Centuries) with one entry per week required and more encouraged, written narration, and have an extra book to read independently each day. I will write more later about what we used this past year.

For math, we used RightStart. We played a lot of sum = 10 games like Go To the Dump. But what really helped him know his math facts was daily drill at xtramath.org. It is free and only 5-10 min. per day. But he really made progress when I finally got him to understand that it was more important to get the right answer than to be so fast. Then naturally he got faster, mastering addition facts in a few months with 3 second recall.

Reading and oral narration – My son no longer needed reading instruction and I bumped up his reading to 2 books per day on his own.  He is to come to me afterwords to give an oral narration.  He is very detailed.  Some day we are busier and he does not give me the narration.  But most days he does.  I know some who have the child narrate into a recorder for mom to play back later.  I have “go tell mom what you read about” on his individual schedule.  So he has some responsibility for it too.  Next year I will give him 3 books to read in each day.  For science, I will assign him independent reading and give him more responsibility to read through the experiment and get the supplies and work through it, with me nearby to help if needed.  Tristan gave this advice on the science thread.

Dictation – we started on Spelling Wisdom 1.  We did only one passage per week.  Day 1 we talked about grammar in it.  Capitalizations, punctuations, vocabulary, meaning of passage, etc.  He picked out several words to work on spelling correctly.  He used a notebook to copy the whole passage word for word (transcription) on the left side of a 2-page spread, with correct capitalization and punctuation.  Halfway down the page I wrote the spelling words he picked to work on more and he wrote those three times each.  Day 2 he pulled it out to study it over.  Day 3 he studied it again and then gave me the Spelling Wisdom book to dictate from.  He folded is notebook back and wrote on the right side of the 2-page spread.  He did well with this and he really liked the passages.  We got through about 25 of these this past year.  Next year he will not have the day 2 review in between and we will do 2 passages per week.

Writing – He has great penmanship for manuscript and still prefers it to cursive.  Besides Spelling Wisdom, I gave him daily copywork in cursive.  We used mostly Presidential Penmanship.  Length varies by grade.  We also used some copywork I got at Currclick.  Length was an average of about 6 lines.  But he was not making correct form so I ended up having him do a cursive penmanship book the last half of the year.  I used Christian Liberty Press Writing with Power.  The first half of the book focused on each cursive lowercase letter.  His cursive penmanship got much better.  The last half of the year I also gave him one passage per week to write in cursive from reading in manuscript.  He has an alphabet card I printed for his reference.   And once per week, I gave him Draw and Write Through History to do cursive copywork with.  I felt he was just barely ready for the length of these longer passages.  They are Zaner-Bloser.  So I was working on getting him used to writing longer passages in good cursive writing.  Next year I will have him do one written narration per week.  At first I will help by having him dictate it to me to write.  Then He will start to write it and I will finish it.  Finally, he will get to a point of writing it all himself.

BOC and BOM – I will help him get started with finding a passage to write in his book of mottoes each week at first.  We are starting back at Ancient History, so I am giving him his own timeline book.  I had him look at several available and let him choose the one he liked best.  I figured he would be more likely to do it if it was in a format he liked best.  We have done a family wall timeline together so that should have helped prepare him for his own book of centuries/timeline.

Grammar – We have not done a lot of grammar.  When he was in 2nd grade, he did the Queens Language Lessons book, but he did not seem to retain any of the grammar.  In 3rd grade, we did some Writing Tales, which we liked much better.  It had him writing on his own some in it, which was the first he had done.  I was pleased with that and he did retain most of it.  We did not do anything for grammar in 4th grade other than review grammer in Spelling Wisdom.  This is all I plan to do for 5th grade too, but some use Junior Analytical Grammar, Simply Grammar, Intermediate Language Lessons by Emma Searle, English for the Thoughtful Child 2 or Rod and Staff English 5.  If your state requires it, you could use one of those.  I have Simply Grammar and it is for 4th – 8th grade.  We may pull it out and work through some of it for part of the year.  You could also do Madlibs and Silly Sentences games.

He turned 10 in the spring of 4th grade, which is the school year just finished. So he was age 9 most of the school year.

A good rule of thumb is to teach the child, not the curriculum. So what we used will probably be different than what you will use. I looked for signs of readiness when I gave more challenging work. If I found that I assigned too much, I put some assignments on hold until he was ready.

Daily he read in a history book, from the modern times history period of books I have like The Story of the Wright Brothers and their Sister, Snow Treasure, Who Was Anne Frank?, etc. He read 1-2 chapters per day, depending on how short the chapters were. History is his favorite subject. He also read a chapter in either Christian Liberty Press Nature Reader book 5 or a literature book from the Sonlight grade 4 readers list like The Whipping Boy, Frindle, Henry and Ribsy. Next year for 5th grade (turns 11 in Spring), I will try giving him 3 books, but not to read all at one sitting. If he was reading more of these books on his own, I would not assign them. You have to know your child and decide how much reading is best to assign. In 4th grade, he did his readings from the two books during afternoon quiet time or he took them with us to read in the van on days we had errands in town. This summer he is reading 2-3 hours on his own, mostly the Happy Hollisters series. This is unusual for him to read so much.

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