Critical Thinking Co https://www.modulo.app/all-resources/criticalthinkingco

Oak Meadow https://www.modulo.app/all-resources/oakmeadow

Time4Learning https://www.modulo.app/all-resources/time4learning

Moving Beyond the Page https://www.modulo.app/all-resources/moving-beyond-the-page

It's usually good to supplement with a math program, if your child is gifted or has special needs. Here is a review I wrote on what I consider to be the best math programs out there for parents doing learning from home. https://www.modulo.app/all-resources/the-best-math-programs-...

And here are my 50 favorites:) https://www.modulo.app/all-resources/50favorites

I would also be happy to give free advice to you (or any family reading this) for your particular situation. Feel free to reach out to me via my website if you'd like more personalized recommendations and we can find a time to chat:) https://www.modulo.app/

Have you reviewed this site, for learning piano:

https://app.hoffmanacademy.com/lessons/

I am currently teaching my 6 year old and my 3 year old how to play piano and guitar. We have gone through enough of his videos that I can honestly give his site two strong thumbs up.

As far as I can tell, all his videos are free. If the parent knows enough about music, they can use the free videos to supplement any beginner music curriculum.

I enjoyed his videos enough that I purchased his premium lifetime membership, which comes with workbooks and games. But my kids are young and I haven't made them work through workbooks yet. I'm trying to make it as fun as possible so far.

I have no affiliation with Hoffman Academy. I just think he's a great teacher.

Tons of free content on his site. Justin is a great teacher.

I'm confused by the current approach to schooling in the U.S. As functioning adults, society rewards people who can identify unanswered or poorly solved problems and come up with solutions. Meanwhile education focuses on drilling facts. In formal education, not including extra curriculars, the first time I see learners exposed to unanswered questions is graduate school.

I feel one of the best ways to learn is to practice the thing you are actually going to be doing. It's odd that we never practice answering novel questions. I.E. introducing the unanswered questions of the past, the context that lead us to asking them, and the approaches humans took to solving them. Do you know of any home-school programs that include something like this?

So instead of everyone of every age in the same class or a mentor system, you have everyone of the same age going though the same material every year.

Unfortunately what it tends not to work as well with are students behind their age curve or ahead of their age curve.

It's not plausible that they're all managing to keep it a secret. Someone would have spilled the beans, for example some early 20th century teacher writing a memoir, or something like that.

So, a fair guess is that if it's true, it's an example of a system that has evolved away from its original goals.

I don't think there is some grand conspiracy. I think educators are not willing to go totally against the grain and absolutely throw out everything we do right now and start from scratch. For instance, school time before 9am is insane. Kids need more sleep than that. How about kids can get up and leave the classroom and go to the bathroom or go and eat whenever they want? Do we really need classrooms? Do we need dedicated buildings for school? Do we need schedules? Do all kids really need math, science, history, etc.? Just because we have always done things one way doesn't mean we have to keep doing them that way.

We also don't need conspiracies to explain systems that are badly dysfunctional or have outcomes that are detrimental to society.

Edit: reference: I'm a 10x / unicorn at factory work environments, operating machines, metal fabrication, etc.

I'm going to check-out the Singapore math Live support. It's surprising how challenging it can be to diagnose why one of my kids is struggling with a concept.

Blossom and Root for a more nature-based/hands-on program https://blossomandroot.com/

Torchlight. https://www.modulo.app/all-resources/torchlight

Also Khan App Kids of course https://www.modulo.app/all-resources/khan-app-kids

I think that there are ways to do meaningful social interaction online, but not in the way it's being handled in most places. I think that for this to be successful academics and socialization need to be compartmentalized. We should use zoom for activities like cooking, give kids the opportunity to talk about their day, discuss current events and share feelings, but not for lectures on academic subjects - and these group zooms should be short. There's a big need for innovation in this space, but it's not impossible to create meaningful social interactions online for kids. Alexis Buckley (who is also our is doing incredible work fostering social interactions online with Early Childhood Matters and the Little School. Definitely check out her classes. http://www.earlychildhoodmatters.org/

As you said, there are so many great tools for learning and little evidence that leaning on academics in the early years is even that important (look at the Finnish education system that doesn't start until age 7).

However, the in-person social interaction is the tricky part. We're generally recommending that families focus on building healthy social attachments with their own kids. That's the first and most important bond. And if you have a good relationship with your child, a healthy attachment, that will extend to a group setting. This kind of socialization can also be done by buddying with one other family that's rigorously practicing social distancing. Socialization does not have to happen in a huge group to be impactful.

Happy to chat with you more if I can be of any help whatsoever.

The sight might look dated, but it's a curriculum written by one teacher who you can actually reach via email. My wife and I have looked at a bunch of different math options and this one seems like the best option:

- Mastery-based, with minimal repetition - All instruction is written for students, with no separate materials for parents, so older students can self-teach - Materials are organized by grade level or topic, it's your choice which you use - Can buy printed books (including spiral bound!) or PDFs - Companion instructional videos by the author - Dirt-cheap, probably because it's self-published with a single author

Here's a direct link to one of the sample PDFs for 1st grade: https://www.mathmammoth.com/preview/Math_Mammoth_Grade1A_Sam...

(There's no kinder materials because all they're typically expected to do in is be able to count, identify shapes, etc.)

This also looked interesting, but it's definitely a more involved curriculum with lesson separate scripted lesson plans:

https://rightstartmath.com/our-curriculum/the-rightstart-dif...

The plus for this one is that it's heavy on manipulation (using playing cards and an abacus) and light on counting and repetition.

Took a quick glance and I wonder why you have Beast Academy under Autistic kids and not for generic Math curriculum.

You best believe I just bookmarked your site. I can't wait to show my wife

But during my research I came across the idea of "Computational Math/Thinking" which throws away the entire concept of learning Math/Science in the normal order

Pre Algebra > Algebra I > Geometry > Algebra II > Trig > etc

It takes more of a real life problem solving approach, which I understand isn't exactly innovative in and of itself but prioritizes using the computer for the calculation part of math.

Of course the process of using a pencil and paper to calculate an equation in probably 90% of the work in traditional curriculum. When you outsource this tedious part to software (like you would in real life) that leaves room for setting up bigger problems that literally cannot be calculated by hand.

https://www.computerbasedmath.org/ is a great resource for more info on this "computational" education

I'm forgiving of typos and such things, but as you are marketing a school, you might want to check your spelling.

My daughter uses ixl.com at school and it covers all the way up to 12th grade. Its is essentially adaptive learning. So this is good for doing practice problems. All the topics listed there are ones kids are expected to know for the respective grade level. So you could use this as a map.

I have also been supplementing her education with workbooks. I have a few other ideas to make some practical learning lessons with electronics and chemistry. We already do Scratch programming.

1. Much (all?) of the content covers topics that are useful to know, imho.

2. The whole idea of just spamming content is an incredibly reductionist approach to education. There is much more to learn out there.

3. Hirsch’s approaches to cultural literacy are tough for some folks to follow. On the surface, it sounds very oppressive. A slightly deeper look would say that it is a realist approach. A deep academic look would say that it misses a lot of what is probably possible in education and is focused on looking back rather than looking forward.

I do recommend folks check out his books and see if it floats your boat, but I also recommend that they don’t assume that they are complete as is in terms of what kids actually need to learn and know.

My opinion is that a "complete" education through 8th grade is a nebulous goal. Reading, writing, math, history, art, life experiences, etc. are important.

I try to make sure all aspects of the person are engaged:

- Creativity

- Intelligence

- Athleticism

- Philosophizing

- Failing well (edit: aka encouraging ambitious goals)

- Exposure to novel things

Kids direct themselves, I help them find resources and help them stay on track.

For example, to think (philosophize) well, you need history. But not just the history from the perspective of the victors. Not just what is "accepted" truth.

We read history books that are not really covered in curriculum (Mongols, Islam, China, India). We cover religions. We watch Ancient Aliens and talk about what obvious explanations they are missing.

But I would have never gone down this path for them had I not stopped going to high school myself, because it was a fucking nightmare.

That students are struggling to engage with digital content during home quarantine is expected. The good news is that students will adapt to digital content with time (within twelve months as a simple estimate), as unlike adults, they are more likely to normalize their behavior towards this environment and make it the routine for their education. The bad news is that no digital curriculum alone can replicate the classroom learning environment (even with its obvious systematic flaws) because mastery of learning content is a function of the learning environment as much as individual student motivation (until these students become independent learners). So parents homeschooling their children need to become more active role models for their children. The positive of this situation is that educated and empathetic parents can do a much better job of developing a secure environment for children than a classroom with thirty students and a cacophony of technology. The long-term mission for homeschooling parents is to develop “self-directed learners”, and the first step is understanding, practicing, and celebrating “metacognition”.

I will share this link, for core science experiential learning lessons, primarily for middle school students, which may complement textbook content, associated with the concepts: https://science60.com/homeschooling

Good teachers and motivated parents can make any learning content work, from traditional textbooks to Khan Academy lessons.

Then, visit OpenUpResources. Same theme.

EdReports.org has curriculum reviewed to align with Common Core.

The above are mostly limited to ELA and Math, for Science, there is OpenSciEd, SCALE/SFUSD Middle School Curriculum, and Mystery Science, for Civics there is Annenberg Classroom, and rest of the social studies, I know some effort is going on, but can't quite remember where the curriculum might be.

The reason I know these is because I run opencurriculum.org (YC W14), and we are trying to bring this information under one roof.

And I'll just leave this here because at work we were all laughing our heads off about it. We joked about hiring the author to write practice problems for us. ;-)

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/the-broken-lives-behind-....

For language arts: Michael Clay Thompson (we are using this), Brave Writer, IEW. For maths, Beast Academy or Art of Problem Solving for your kids (we are also using this, huge fan, great for full-time homeschooling or after school supplements in my opinion), Saxon Maths (mixed reviews). Science takes more sifting since quite a few are religious.

I noted all the programs I came across (mostly through mentions in homeschooling groups) in a list in case it's interesting to anyone (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/132lzqsfGzUvo7iPGrvBN...), do filter for subject and age to get the relevant entries. It's work in progress so excuse the mess.

Computing Curricula 2020 (ACM, IEEE,) http://www.cc2020.net/

Official SAT Practice (College Board, Khan Academy) https://www.khanacademy.org/sat

http://wrdrd.github.io/docs/consulting/software-development#... (TODO: add link to cc2020 draft)

Programmer Competency Matrix: http://sijinjoseph.com/programmer-competency-matrix/ , https://competency-checklist.appspot.com/ , https://github.com/hltbra/programmer-competency-checklist

Re: Computational thinking https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#comment-15454421

Coding Interview University: https://github.com/jwasham/coding-interview-university

Open-answer questions rarely specify the answer format, and will thus accept only one of 0.5, 0.50, .5, 1/2, 4/8 ... etc while rejecting all the rest. Then the next question will not keep the same format.

Points for correct answers add to your score, but not linearly; points for incorrect answers subtract from your score, but not linearly.

Endlessly frustrating.

IXL is absolute garbage, as should be expected from any Pearson product. And the morons at Seattle Public Schools are dumping money into that dumpster fire like it's going out of style.

We don't try to be unfair; we're trying to make math fun. Please send a note to help@ixl.com if you run into questions that silently require a too-specific answer format, and we'll fix it.

Your product is terrible and anyone who likes math could have told you it was terrible from using it for 30 minutes.

It's designed to keep kids and parents busy for ~8 hours a day, because their customers are online charter schools, not homeschooling parents.

These online charters get paid based on attendance, so it's in their interest to have kids occupied all day every day.

Please, do not ever use K12. It's terrible.

We never tried K12, but I recommend that the kids be involved in selecting what tools to use, as they are the ones who have to use it every day.

https://www.edx.org

Feel free to suggest more ideas to make it a vibrant learning community.

This is supposed to refer to "courses" which are structured, project-based peer groups where mentors spend time to evaluate your projects and answer your questions. By compensating them for their time, we can get really high-quality mentors for 1-1 feedback on your learning projects.

The unstructured peer groups (in the Slack channel) are and will remain completely free.

https://qvault.io

The question I would have for you is what state are you looking for? Thanks.