My eighth year using KA got off to a decent start but, as often is the case, it also could have been better.I’m guessing I only studied for 3.5 hours, which is pretty disappointing. I managed to get through a decent amount of videos, articles, etc., but it was all incredibly easy given that the course I’m start with is 4^th Grade Reading and Vocab… Because it was so easy to get through, in a weird way it actually made it more difficult because I didn’t really want to sit down and watch a bunch of videos on words that I knew the definitions for… But nonetheless, I did learn a few interesting things which I’ll talk about below, so it wasn’t completely a waste of time! And to be honest, even though this is way too easy right now, I think I still find it more interesting that CS, so I’ve got that going for me which is nice. All in all, it was another one of those could-have-been-better, could-have-been-worse type of weeks. 🤷🏻‍♂️

When I started the week, my plan was to do all the exercises in 4^th grade ELA and read through the articles. I want to get 100% M.P. in all the ELA courses, so I’ll need to do all the exercises and unit tests, but I assumed I wouldn’t watch all the videos. As the week progressed, the plan changed in that I did end up watching all the videos since they were all so short (around 3 mins), although I did stop a bunch of them half way through. I’m not sure if I’m going to continue watching all the videos going forward but, regardless, here’s everything I made notes on this week:

English Language Arts

Course – Fourth Grade Reading and Vocab

Unit 1 – Vocabulary

Lesson 1 – Fourth Grade Vocabulary Words | List 1

Exercise – List 1 Vocab Quiz

Question 1

Question 2

This was the first exercise I did and I absolutely CRUSHED it. /s I didn’t really think I needed to say anything about this exercise considering how simple and obvious the answers were, but I figured I should make add it to this post simply because it was the first exercise and questions I did on ELA. As I worked through this exercise, I was also thinking that maybe it would be best for me to just skip ahead to Grade 6 or 8, but I figure that working through stuff like this will get me primed for the format and types of questions that I’ll come across in those later courses.

Lesson 2 – Fourth Grade Vocabulary Words | List 2

Video – Experiment, Invention, Discovery | Vocabulary

At this point in the unit, the way the videos had been formatted was that they started by breaking a few words a part into their syllables, then the presenter (David Rheinstrom) would tell you what parts of speech they were (noun, verb, etc.), and then gave a brief definition of the word. After that, he sometimes would break down a word into its different parts and talk about its etymology, which is the part that I really like! In this video, he talked about how ‘dis-’ in discovery means ‘not’ or ‘opposite’. So, when pairing it with the word “cover” the word discovered means ‘not-covered’. I never made the connection that the word “cover” is even in the word “discovered”. There’s something about understanding the depth and breakdown of words that I find very interesting. 

Video – Engineer, Device | Vocabulary

In this video I learned that the suffix ‘-eer’ means ‘person who does a thing’, ex mountaineer, puppeteer, engineer. 

Video – Research, Solution, Recognize | Vocabulary

I learned in this video that the suffix ‘-tion’ is used to turn verbs into nouns, such as “solution” which relates to the word “solve” which is a verb. Another example could be “action” where “act” is a verb, or “pollute” changing to “pollution”.

Lesson 3 – Fourth Grade Vocabulary Words | List 3

Video – Diverse, Similar | Vocabulary

In this video I learned that the suffix ‘-ity’ turns adjectives into nouns, such as “similar” to “similarity”, or “diverse” to “diversity”, “real” to “reality”, and “pure” to “purity”. 

Unit Test

Question 3

Question 4

Question 5

These questions were from the first unit test. As you can see, all the questions were pretty easy, but I wanted to add a few of them to this post to keep a record of my first unit test in ELA, and also to say that it was SO nice to get back to doing unit tests! 😭 And I also realized ELA has Course Challenges! I’m very happy about this considering that for 349 weeks, unit tests and Course Challenges were a regular part of my life, so not having them part of my daily/weekly routines felt like something was missing. (Clearly I’m addicted to KA at this point…)

Unit 2 – Key Ideas and Details

Lesson 1 – Referring to Text Details

Exercise – Text Details

Question 6

The exercise was simple, but I thought I’d take a screenshot of this question to show not only example of what the questions from the exercises are currently like, but also because I thought the info in the text was fascinating and relates to CodaKaizen and the things I’ve been think about a lot lately. 🤯

Lesson 4 – Determining Theme and Summarizing a Story 

Article – Finding the Theme of a Story | Guided Practice

The reason why I made a note about this article was because I didn’t realize the nuance in the definition of the word ‘theme’. In the photo above (which is the definition of ‘theme’ that I copied from KA), I would have thought ‘friendship’ could be considered a ‘theme’. The article then went on to give this example:

I actually found it fairly difficult to come up with the theme of the text before looking at the solutions. When I looked at the answers, it was pretty clear that (B) was the correct choice, but I don’t think I would have been able to come up with the words to describe the theme as succinctly or in the same way that KA did… I find this a bit concerning considering that this is supposed to be meant for kids in grade 4… 🫤 But, I do think I’ll probably get better at all of this as I continue working through each course.

And that was it for this week. Like I said, not a terrible start but not the best either. I’m now in the second of seven units in this Grade 4 course. I’m guessing I should be able to get through the entire course before the end of the month. I’m quite sure none of the things that are taught will be too difficult but, based on what I’ve seen so far, I do think there could be some interesting things I learn that have to do with suffixes, prefixes, and etymology! So, as boring as I think it might be to work through things I did 27 years ago when I was in Grade 4 in Mr. Harold’s class — shout out to Mr. Harold 🤙🏼— I still think it could be interesting and worthwhile to spend the next few weeks getting through it all.

So, as always, fingers crossed I can have a productive upcoming week so I can get get past Grade 4 and move on to Grade 5! 🥳🤞🏼