It was a pretty bad week for me on KA. 😒 I likely only studied for 3-4 hours. My week got off to a good start as I finished the Course Challenge in 4th Grade Reading and Vocab on Tuesday, but after that I only made it through two videos, one article, and two exercises. I need to commit more time each week to getting through ELA, but it’s been difficult as I’ve had a lot more on my plate these past few weeks. One of my New Year’s Resolutions was to make a weekly CodaKaizen IG post which usually takes me 3-4 hours per week. Plus, I’ve also been spending a lot of time thinking about how I can reformat the program for kids. This past week I also started reading and watching videos about EdTech, AI, mastery learning, and the future of education as I want to write an essay about how these things seem to be coming together in modern education. My hope is that I can somehow bring everything I’ve been working on in KA and CK together which is why I’d like to become more knowledgeable in how these topics seem to be converging. I’ve also been a lot more social lately, which is good but it has led to me have much less time available on weekends. And finally, I’m still struggling with the same health issues I’ve been dealing with over the past three years which makes being productive that much harder. 👎🏼 So, this past week was challenging to say the least, but the bottom line is I need to stop making excuses and find more time to put into KA going forward.
Here’s everything I made notes on this week:
ENGLISH LANGUAGE ARTS
4th Grade Reading and Vocab
Couse Challenge
Question 1
Question 2
I finished this Course Challenge on Tuesday afternoon. I think it took me less than an hour. None of the questions were very hard, but I was feeling the pressure of it being a Course Challenge and not wanting to get any of the 30 questions wrong, so that made it a bit harder than usual. In the end I got 30/30 questions correct and was happy to get it done early in the week and move on to Grade 5.
5th Grade Reading, Grammar, and Vocab
Unit 1 – Vocabulary
Lesson 1 – Roots, Prefixes, and Suffixes
Article – Common roots, prefixes, and suffixes
These roots, prefixes, and suffixes were listed in the first article in the Grade 5 course. I could have just taken screenshots of them, but I figured it would help me to memorize them by actually writing them out by hand. I’ve mentioned this in my last few posts, but better understanding word parts is the part of ELA that I love. I think understanding how roots, prefixes, and suffixes come together to create meaningful words is so interesting and informative. It really helps me to understand the depth of a word’s definition. If you don’t know the OG definitions of the roots, prefixes, and suffixes, the word’s meaning is essentially hidden in plain sight.
Exercise -– Roots, Prefixes, and Suffixes
Question 3
This exercise was super easy, and so I wasn’t planning on adding any notes about it here, but I found the question above somewhat interesting so I figured I’d add it for funsies. I just thought it was interesting that “port” was used in each word but the prefix and suffixes were used to change the definitions of the three words.
Lesson 2 – Context Clues
Exercise – Context Clues
Question 4
Once again, this exercise was quite easy. (I think I’ll be saying that a lot over the next few weeks/months.) The question above was the hardest one I was given. On two of the other questions, I didn’t even read the passages of text, I just guessed the answers and got them correct. (The questions asked me what the definitions of a given word was based on the context clues in the passage of text, but the solutions KA gave made the answers quite obvious.) The question above, however, actually required me to read the text and figure out which phrase was the best context clue for the definition of the word ‘complicated’. Clearly this question wasn’t hard, but I decided to add it here mainly because I just wanted to have something to talk about in this blog post…
Embarrassingly, that was it for this week… 😔 I want to get through Grade 5 as quickly as possible, but I think it’s going to take me much longer than I anticipated. Here’s are screenshots of what’s included in the Grade 4 course versus what’s included in the Grade 5 course:
Clearly there’s quite a bit more content in this Grade 5 course than there was in Grade 4. Part of me is actually happy about this and think it’s a good thing that there’s so much more content, but it obviously means that it’s going to take me much longer to get through Grade 5 than it did getting through Grade 4. In the screenshot above, you can see that there are 16 units in the Grade 5 course. I would pumped if I could get through 4 units a week, but I’m pretty sure that’s not going to happen. Nonetheless, I’m going to set that as my goal and see what happens. (Wish me luck. 😬)
The main reason why I’m so fired up to get through ELA as fast possible is because I recently had an idea that I’d like to set up a tutoring program at the squash club I work at that uses KA to tutor the kids. I need to spend some time thinking through how I could put this program together, but I think it has potential to work. I have a lot of thoughts about this idea which I don’t want to get into right now, but my point is that I want to get through the ELA as quickly as possible so that 1) I can say that I’ve actually done the work myself, and 2) so that I better understand the strengths and weaknesses of studying ELA on KA and be able to communicate them to other people.
So, as always — but maybe more than ever — fingers crossed I can have a productive week on KA and somehow figure out a way to bring everything I’ve been doing over the past seven years together! 🤞🏼🤞🏼🤞🏼