Wednesday, April 20, 2011

It worked!

Just had to share a homeschool success story tonight....

I've been having Violet study Latin off and on, and doing a program from The Critical Thinking Company called Word Roots, in an effort to learn vocabulary and how to figure out meanings of words with standardized tests in mind. Word Roots teaches the Latin and Greek prefixes, suffixes and roots.

This afternoon she was working on a page in the workbook that had her matching words with their definitions. There were 10 choices. She was able to match up "nomism" to "conduct based on moral law" because she could remember that the prefix "nom" means "law."

Okay, the full word association she went through is that over the summer the Food Network had a show about food trucks and one was called the NomNom truck. She liked that truck because the LOL Cats say nom, nom, nom when eating. And they say it because it is the sound Cookie Monster makes. So when we learned "nom" she said the food truck was the "law law truck."

But she remembered it and used it when needed! Shouts of joy!

I did tell her that was exactly what I'd been hoping she'd learn and that I was so happy that it worked. She hadn't gotten it before, why she needed to do that workbook. If she can just identify parts of words on standardized tests, she can deduce their meanings.

In other news, we skipped Pond Study today. I did let them know she wasn't coming. It was 37 degrees today. It had been raining for days (not today though) and everything is flooded. The wind chill lowered the temp another 10 degrees. That wasn't what I had in mind on the 65 degree day I signed her up for the class. I pictured myself lounging at a picnic table in the forest preserve reading a book while she was in the class merrily looking at life in the pond. Bundled up in a winter coat, long underwear, hat, scarf, mittens, and snow boots freezing her bippy off, wasn't what I envisioned. She would have been so miserable she wouldn't have learned anything anyway. She was all for cancelling. I hate signing up for stuff and not doing it, but this time, it seemed like the best move.

She's in a salamander class in a couple of weeks. Hopefully the weather will be more pleasant for that one.

1 comment:

Mel said...

Interesting! That is a cute story. B has a workbook via K12 that is called something like Vocabulary from Classical Roots and she really finds it sooo boring but it's encouraging to know it may come in handy someday. LOL