I’m pretty happy with how this past week went on KA, although — surprise, surprise — I didn’t get as much done as I was hoping to. I made it through two units in Grade 5 ELA and probably spent 7-8 hours working on KA, overall. All the content I worked through was pretty easy, but I did learn a few interesting things so it wasn’t a complete snooze-fest. 😴 I’m a bit bummed out that it’s taking me so long to get through ELA. At this rate, I think it’ll probably take me 1-2 years to get through all of it. Part of me is glad to be going back and really wrapping my head around the things I was taught back in elementary school (when I definitely wasn’t paying attention) and I know that understanding grammar, syntax, vocabulary, etc. is going to help with my communication, but I also feel like I want to move onto bigger and better things. 😭 I know that in the big picture it’s going to help me, but I also don’t want to be 97 years old by the time I get through all of this. 👴🏼 So, to sum up, it was a good week for me on KA, but I’m still hoping I can pick up the pace and get through ELA sooner rather than later! 🙏🏼
At the start of the week, I was reading through the first article in the first lesson of Unit 3 and there was sentence that said, “Thick, pull-down shades block out most of the light, but sunshine sneaks into the room, spilling over, under, and around the shades’ edges.” I’ve never been 100% confident whether to put the apostrophe before or after the s in this type of sentence, so I asked Google and this happened:
You can see that I initially just asked for examples and then, surprisingly, Google asked if I wanted to take a quiz. 🤯 This was the first time I’ve ever seen this happen on Google and it made pause for minute and think about how things are changing. The quiz was AI generated and quite reminiscent of KA. The screenshots above don’t show the questions that came up in the quiz, but they were pretty simple yet effective in helping me learn. Maybe I’m making a bigger deal of this than I should, but part of me thinks that this may be a watershed moment for learning, education, AI, the internet, etc.
ANYWAYS… Here’s what I made notes on this week:
ENGLISH LANGUAGE ARTS
5th Grade Reading, Grammar, and Vocab
Unit 3 – Reading: Key Ideas and Details | Long Passage Practice
Lesson 3 – Reading Argumentative Texts
Exercise 1 – Five Epic Disasters
Question 1
This question was from the second last exercise in Unit 3. I finished the entire unit in about an hour. There were only three lessons in this unit, each of which had only one article and two exercises. The question above was the same format as all the other questions in the other exercises. Of the six exercises I worked through, I only ready the story/passages of text in two of them. You can see from the question above that it wasn’t difficult to guess the correct solutions given the phrasing of the question and the four solution options. Once again, I don’t feel great about “cheating” like this, but I also feel like it’s a better use of my time for me to get through this easier stuff quickly so I can move onto more challenging grades sooner.
Unit 4 – Grammar: Nouns
Lesson 1 – Building Knowledge
Video 1 – Introduction to Nouns
Thinking back to grade school, I always remembered being told/taught that nouns were people, places, and things. In this video, you can see that David also explains that nouns can include ideas. You can see in the second screenshot above that he uses the example sentence, “Raul has big dreams” where ‘dreams’ is a noun. After a quick Google search (which, by the way, is not really a Google search anymore but a Google query given that I straight up asked Google to give me nouns that are ideas — it’s interesting how it’s changing from a search engine to a query engine!) and it told me that other noun ides include emotions (love, anger, fear), mental states (belief, thought, wisdom, patience, honesty), social concepts (freedom, democracy, justice, independence), time and existence (time, life, memory, hope, chance), and intellectual concepts (theory, philosophy, education, knowledge). Pretty interesting! 🤓
Article 1 – Glossary: Nouns
The first article of Unit 4 just covered the definitions for the different kinds of nouns. I’m not going to lie, I was a bit surprised at how many different kinds of nouns there are. I’m guessing I would have learned about all of the different kinds of nouns in the past, and all of them make sense to me, but I there’s 0% chance I would have been able to tell you the names for the different types of nouns on my own if you’d asked me before reading this article.
Lesson 2 – Types of Nouns
Video 1 / Article 1 – Common and Proper Nouns
I remember learning about common VS proper nouns in elementary school, but it’s been so long since I learned about them that I couldn’t really remember the definitions of either. One thing I learned from the article was that in the sentence, “My dad made dinner,” you wouldn’t capitalize ‘dad’ but in the sentence, “Did you make dinner, Dad?” you would capitalize ‘Dad’ because it’s being used in place of his name. Similarly, in the sentence, “Is Luna the president?” you wouldn’t capitalize ‘president’, but in the sentence, “Meet President Luna,” you would capitalize ‘President’ because it’s a part of her title.
Video 2 / Article 2 – Concrete and Abstract Nouns
David went on to talk about the difference between concrete VS abstract nouns. He went into some detail about the differences between the two, but I thought he summed it up best when he said, “A concrete noun is physical. An Abstract noun is not.” However, the article made it even more clear by stating that if you can detect the noun in question with one of your five senses (for example, music) it’s a concrete noun.
Article 3 – Collective Nouns
This article talked about collective nouns which are when a group of nouns get packaged up into a singular word. This is the type of thing that after 36 years of speaking English (or at least attempting to), I intuitively “know” what a collective noun is and how to use it properly in a sentence (i.e. referring to it as a singular but knowing that it represents more than one), but I nonetheless appreciated reading through this article and reviewing specifically what collective nouns are and how they work. (I also think I have a totally different appreciation for words, their meaning, and language, in general, now as an adult than I did when I was a kid.)
Lesson 3 – Plural Nouns
Article 1 – Regular and Irregular Plural Nouns
This article talked about plural nouns which essentially are created by adding an s to the end of a noun. There are a lot more rules than that which the article explained, but adding s was the gist of how it’s most often done. I wasn’t actually going to make any notes on this article but I just thought the info in the screenshot above was interesting: there are only seven circumstances in ALL of English when you change the vowel sound when going from the singular to the plural. (And also, what the heck is a louse? 🤔)
Lesson 4 – Possessive Nouns
Exercise 1 – Possessive Nouns
Question 2
This exercise wasn’t too hard, although I did get question wrong on my first attempt and had to do it a second time. I also watched a video and read and article from this lesson that talked about possessive nouns and how/where to use the apostrophe. It was helpful, and funny that it related to the Google “query” I was talking about at the very beginning of this post.
Unit Test
Question 3
I did this Unit Test in about three minutes. All of the questions were about as difficult as the one above. The possessive noun questions took me two seconds longer to answer, but overall it was super easy.
And that was it for this week. Like I said, overall I’m pleased with the effort I put on and how much work I was able to make it through. Looking ahead to next week, I’d LOVE if I could get through three units, but the upcoming two units look like they have about 15 articles and videos in them each, and around 10 exercises, so I don’t think it’s likely I will get through more than two units. 👎🏼 I think it’s possible I could get through half a unit each day and make it happen, but I also could have done that every week and it hasn’t happened so far, so we’ll see.
Regardless, I’m as fired up as ever to get through this all so, as always, fingers crossed I can have a productive upcoming week and finish this before I turn 97! 🤞🏼