Older Beginner Workbook Workload

[hiddenjewel]

Is the workload in the Older Beginner workbook almost too much for days 2 and 3 or are we doing something wrong? My 8th grader is well up to doing the tasks so it isn't an issue of understanding the material. We are only on week 7 and she is past maxed on days 2 and 3. It seems like the workload will only continue to increase as the steps are cumulative. She isn't a student that is usually bogged down by longer lessons but she is being stretched too far.

Examples:

Day two:

Dictation
Parsing
Imitation (Copia)
Vocab
Writing Project: Theon's or outline


Day three:

Six sentence shuffle
Writing Project: Write draft (day gets really long if the passage is long)


It's all really good material, and I don't want her to be so worn out that she doesn't do her best work on each part. I am planning to spread it out longer than a week from now on. But I was just checking if we are going about it wrong.

Thanks.

[greengables]

Like any curriculum, you should only use what serves your student, and set up your schedule to accomodate your students' needs. For example, though we may provide 3 sentences to parse, if your student is "getting it", you might only assign one sentence.

For dictation, I have found it works well to have my daughter do 1-2 vocabulary words each day on days 1-4 instead of doing them all in one day. Or, you could just reduce the number and only do 2 a week on Day 2.

I also personally found I needed to do things like dictation on Day 4 (or on Day 5 - unscheduled day). Also, we usually go ahead and do Theon's table or outline on Day 1 right after we do the analysis work, and then there are usually 2 days to do a draft.

And a biggie - if you haven't done so yet, get your student typing asap! That really speeds up the writing process.

You definitely don't want to overwhelm her and make her hate writing! Feel free to shorten or skip any assignment that seems repetitive or just too long.

I hope this helps. If not, please keep asking!

Kathy