Aimee Crawford

Grammar is one of those subjects that people either love or hate. Like math, it can intimidate parents who doubt their own grasp of the subject, let alone their ability to teach it to their children. We’ve been drilled on “THE RULES” for years and most of us have very little to show for it. How can we possibly teach our kids?

While not all of us can solve for x, or use the point-slope formula to find the equation for a line (what?), we all know grammar. If you speak a language, you know the gra

Does this sound like your spelling instruction, either from your own experience or with your kids?

Monday: Receive list of about twenty words; take pre-test.

Tuesday-Thursday: Interact with words on list through various activities (writing them ten times, sentences, word searches).

Friday: Take final test. And then, maybe even if you got 100% on the test…

Following Monday: Need to use one of the words in a sentence. Spell it wrong.

So what’s wrong with this traditional, time-honored method?

This is a story about how a proud non-math user, who would have sworn she had no use for algebra, had an eye-opening encounter with upper-level math in the real world through knitting and lived to brag about it.

When I was homeschooling my twins and we were learning about skip counting (covered in the Primer through Gamma levels of Math-U-See), I mentioned to the kids that, as a knitter, I use skip counting all the time on every project. As an experienced and fairly advanced knitter, it’s not u