Piney Woods Homeschool

Chess for Juniors , by Robert M. Snyder, covers basic and intermediate chess concepts for young people.  We are using the book with our 6yo dd, who started learning chess when she was 4 or 5.  She’s been reading kids chess books since she learned to read over a year ago, and she’s been playing chess against the computer for over a year as well.  However, I am not qualified to teach her anything more than just how the pieces move, and without instruction she becomes discouraged as the computer repeatedly wins their games because she is not using strategy.  So we bought this book to work through together so that she would have a better foundation in chess.  I am working through it with her, about one chapter or half of a chapter each week.  We get the chess board out so that we can set it up to match the illustrations in the book.  So far (we are just on chapter 6), I have found the presentation very clear and easy to follow, and the topi...

Parenting with Love and Logic , by Jim Fay and Foster Cline, presents many of the same parenting concepts recommended by Charlotte Mason 100 years ago.  The first half of the book covers the philosophy while the second half provides specific examples of the philosophy in action.  The relatively simple philosophy centers on natural consequences, allowing children to learn from their own mistakes.  The book clearly lays out principles to follow and provides guidelines for knowing how to use natural consequences (or logical consequences if natural consequences are not appropriate).  I found a great deal of resonance between this book and Charlotte Mason’s principles for child training.  If you have read Charlotte Mason but need to see her principles in action or if you needed more explanation of her principles from a modern perspective, this book can help.  The book does not really deal with habit training, which is a key component of Charlotte...

Our formal math lessons are still working through addition and subtraction.  We’ve covered up through the 7′s, I think.  I don’t present more advanced math concepts usually because I want to make sure we follow an orderly progression that helps develop strong numeracy.  Sometimes, though, dd figures things out on her own (which is fine). A week or so ago she told me that she really preferred numbers that had two in them, like 4, which had two 2′s, or 6, which had 4 and 2.  After we talked about this a bit, I told her about even and odd numbers.  She was able to explain the difference in the result when you add two even numbers versus two odd numbers or one of each. Another night in the car she asked me what half of 2 was.  We talked about that and how to figure it, and she went on to tell me what half was for all the even numbers up through twenty.  Then she asked about half of 9, so we talked about why we couldn’t do half of 9 wi...