Fall Term 2009

We are going to ease back into our formal "school" routine over the next few weeks/months.

Priorities of adding subjects back in:
1. Literature (still part of the routine)
2. Bible Time (Read-aloud stories, Big Picture Story Bible)
3. Reading
4. Science - Nature Journal
5. Penmanship
6. Math (table time games)
7. Bible Time (scripture memory)
8. History
9. Science (over-winter garden, seeds)
10. Culture

Reading	Finish More New Friends - Grade 3-2 Begin Building Our Lives - Grade 4
Literature	Continue with Read-Aloud list
Penmanship	Continue in Handwriting without Tears - Letters and Numbers for Me
Memorization	Begin Scripture Memory system during Bible Time Continue Poetry Memory - The Swing and The Land of Counterpane
Science	Continue with Nature Journal Over-winter garden, store seeds
Culture	Music Theory - continue with lesson list Picture Study - continue with Van Gogh Poetry Reading - continue with RLS - Child's Garden of Verses Arts & Crafts - continue with crafts list
History	Pick back up 50 Famous Stories
Bible	Read-aloud Bible Stories Vol 1-4, Scripture Memory
Math	Begin K5 Math Deliverables list

TO-DO List:

• Organize kitchen pantry and file cabinet
  
• Make needed Math games
• Check 50 Famous Stories stuff for errors
• Determine December crafts
  

Progress Report

We are coming to the end of our first scheduled "term" of the 2009-2010 school year. It is a good time for me to sit down and review how things have gone.

Reading: I had originally scheduled the Pathway readers for Grades 2 and 3. Next week he will be finished with the last 3rd grade reader. We already have the 4th grade reader, Building Our Lives, and we will probably start on that one. However, I am concerned because the type is smaller and I don't want to overstrain his eyes. He's probably already read the book on his own, so I may be concerned about nothing. My husband and I talked about getting a magnification page to put over the book, but I think that would be aggravating to my K5-son. Maybe I need to look at other publisher's grade-level readers. A friend lent me some Bob Jones and Abeka readers and he has been reading those on his own. However, I do still want him to be challenged with harder material.

As far as his reading goes, he's doing great sounding out words and getting them from context. One area he's particularly shining in is his inflection and really making the text "come alive" as he's reading.

Literature: Between both me and my husband reading aloud, we've pretty much already read through all of the Simply Charlotte Mason's Year 1 reading list - plus some. I think we're set for the next few weeks, but after that I have to come up with something else. It seems that we are blowing through what I had planned at the first of the school year. This is good though, as it is showing me how fast we are moving through stuff and how I should plan for next year. Somehow, I don't think the world will run out of books. :-)

Penmanship: I've noticed a vast improvement in his handwriting as well as his diligence and patience in going slowly so as to write the letters just right. While we are further in the Handwriting without Tears curriculum than I thought we'd be, we aren't finished with capital letters yet.

Memorization: We've not really done anything with Scripture memory since beginning the "year" in July. He's doing well with the one poem we've worked on from Robert Louis Stevenson. I'm making it my goal for this to be more of a priority come January.

Science: This part of his education is going really well. He loves observing things outside and his garden has been one of his favorite things to work in. Now we're getting ready to package some seeds we harvested and share them with friends. He doesn't think this part is "school" (and I'm glad), so if you asked him his favorite part of "school" he probably wouldn't say "nature study" or "science". However, based on his enthusiasm, I think this is probably his favorite part.

Fine Art: We were really doing well with our study of Van Gogh's work, but that has tapered off in the last weeks. Still I'm pleased with where we are and how he has grown in observation and remembering the names of the works and some of the elements.

History: We've taken a break from the 50 Famous Stories for a while. He was very excited about it at first, but here lately I have not been too involved with it and I think that has affected his interest. We will start back up next term.

Music: The last few weeks have been hit or miss, but prior to that this study was going really well. He's retaining the theory information and incorporating words like "rythym" and "beat" and other musical terms into everyday talk.

Bible: Last night we were reviewing some of the men in 1 and 2 Samuel and he shocked both my husband and I in how much detail he remembered. I could barely remember some of the names and he remembered what the person had done and how they had interacted with King David. Of course, for our Bible time/Family Worship we want much more than head knowledge, but we are trusting God with the heart and taking every opportunity to point back to heart issues in the characters we read about and in ourselves and our children.

Math: This is the biggie. We've been faithfully plugging away with Miquon Math until a few weeks ago I noticed a definite drudgery in his step when it came time to work on our Math Lab sheets. Albeit, they are getting more difficult...definitely more abstract. I put them aside for a day or two and just played some games to make sure he was getting the concepts of addition and subtraction instead of just learning how to compute and get the right answer. I don't think he has a firm grasp of the concepts. Without certain tools and things written in a certain way, he's very unsure of himself. So, we are going to change things up a bit. The materials we were using are for First Grade anyway, so I'm O.K. to just wait a year before continuing if that's what we need to do. I didn't want to take the time to figure out activities to do on my own, so I looked at Ray's Arithmetic. Their "scope and sequence" for First Grade looked very doable. Right now, I'm planning on using their suggestions as a track to run on. I'm getting rid of the worksheets and going to hands-on games with manipulatives etc. I've made a list that I plan to use in my weekly planning so that I don't have to scramble for something every day. I need to make some of the games...and I don't know if that will get done right now. It helps to have a list of "objectives" as I can incorporate what we already have in teaching that concept. We'll see how it goes.

I've also started to chill out about the whole "180 days" thing. That was really stressing me out, especially as I do not feel like doing much nowadays and our schedule is about to be turned upside-down. After much reading from the Home Life Academy site and talking with my husband, I think/hope I've come to a settled place on how I feel about the school "year". I definitely want our home to be a learning environment all the time, but I was feeling pressed to really "schedule" something on "school" days and then if we didn't get x-y-z done felt like I couldn't count it - even if we had spent 8 hours learning something that wasn't on the schedule. This year is definitely a learning experience. I hope to keep on learning. It will be interesting to me to compare next year and this year and see how I'm handling things.

arts & crafts

This is the part of our week that is hands-down both my children's favorite and the most challenging for me. I can come up with science experiments and music instruction all day long, but ask me to come up with a craft and I usually reach for some colors and a blank sheet of paper.

I'm in the process of building a list of Arts & Crafts projects that fit the season. I've found some helpful online sites as well as using magazines and catalogs that I get in the mail.

Lesson Plans from Blick Art Materials

Family Fun Arts & Crafts (good magazine too)

Oriental Trading Craft Projects (Most items have a PDF instructions link. You can use their ideas without purchasing their supplies.)

Michael's The Knack (lots of craft ideas and printables)

memorization

The Bluedorn's at Trivium Pursuit list memorization as one of the "Ten Things to do with Your Child Before the Age of Ten." We agree. We have already seen so much fruit in having our children memorize passages from the Bible - both in their lives and ours.

During Family Worship, we've been working through the book of Proverbs and memorizing passages that Daddy chooses. During morning Bible time, I am using the Truth and Grace Memory Books our church endorses as a guide. It is helpful because many times the kids are working on the same verses and catechism questions in Sunday School.

We were really moving along in the area of memorization and then something happened and we kind of got off track. I read about the Scripture Memory System explained at Simply Charlotte Mason and we're going to give that a try. We've got the index card box and the dividers, but actually making the scripture cards is still on the to-do-list.

During our weekly poetry readings, we are working on memorizing some of Robert Louis Stevenson's poems (since we are concentrating on his works this year). Right now, we are working on "The Swing". I've been mostly working with my K5-son in memorizing it, but it brought a smile to my face when I heard my K3-daughter playing alone the other day and swinging one of her dolls and quoting, "How do you like to go up in a swing? Up in the air so blue?"

Geography

We do not have a formal slot for Geography, but rather incorporate it into our life flow. We purchased two large laminated wall maps from Costco (a world map and United States map) and hung them on the office wall. It is amazing how much time even my husband and I spend looking at them. (We had a service person in our home the other day and I think most of his time was spent looking at the maps, so needless to say, they definitely draw your attention!) We also have a hand-me-down globe that is hopelessly outdated (maybe from the 70's?), but still helpful in illustrating how the world is round, etc.

At least once a day some question arises as to where so-and-so lives or where is a certain place that was mentioned in reading. We take those questions "to the map." As my husband has read The Chronicles of Narnia to our K5-son this year, it is helpful to show him where "real" places "in our world" are in relation to us. From his history lessons, he often wants to know "is Rome in our world or a make-believe world?"

I'd like to to pin-point on the maps where different friends and relatives live and missionaries for whom we pray, but we haven't gotten there yet.

History

For History in this inaugural year, I've chosen to follow Ambleside Online's suggestion to use Fifty Famous Stories Retold by James Baldwin. Available in a number of online formats, this work tells, you guessed it, 50 stories spanning world history from the 600's BC through the 19th century AD. It includes stories from many world powers including Rome, Greece, England and America.

Instead of purchasing a hard-copy of the book or printing out the stories from an online source, I chose to download an audio version from Librivox.org. LibriVox is an online repository of free audio books where "volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain and release the audio files back onto the net." Each chapter of the 50 Famous Stories was in a separate MP3 file which I added to an iTunes playlist, listened to them, then copied them to an audio CD for my K5-son to use.

Using a helpful list of the stories from the Ambleside Online as a starting point, I organized the stories in chronological order (I found discrepancies with some of the Ambleside list) and found images in the public domain (no copyright) to use with each story.

I made my K5-son a "Fifty Famous Stories" timeline book using the "accordian fold format" shown at Homeschool in the Woods.

He listens to a story from the CD and narrates it back to me. He then finds the image that goes with the story, colors and cuts it out and pastes it in the appropriate place in his timeline book.

Not only is he becoming familiar with places like Rome and Greece and important historical figures, it has also opened up a helpful dialogue about the fallen nature of man. For instance, this from the story on Julius Cæsar:

At another time, Cæsar was crossing a narrow sea in a boat. Before he was halfway to the farther shore, a storm overtook him. The wind blew hard; the waves clashed high; the lightning flashed; the thunder rolled.

It seemed every minute as though the boat would sink. The captain was in great fright. He had crossed the sea many times, but never in such a storm as this. He trembled with fear; he could not guide the boat; he fell down upon his knees; he moaned, "All is lost! all is lost!"

But Cæsar was not afraid. He bade the man get up and take his oars again.

"Why should you be afraid?" he said. "The boat will not be lost; for you have Cæsar on board."

math in the elementary years

In the years prior to "officially" starting Kindergarten, we talked a lot about numbers. We concentrated on mathematical concepts in concrete form - measuring flour for making cookies, each person gets one fork at the table, counting everything, etc.

The Bluedorn's article Research on the Teaching of Math definitely gave some food for thought on whether to buy math curriculum for this year. I really waffled on the decision for a long time.

In Pre-K, I had scoured many recommended curricula as well as a few states' standards for and made a list of concepts to cover (At some point I may get around to posting those!). As I mentioned above, we incorporated these into daily living as well as playing games etc. Basically, I was coming up with my own no-worksheet, hands-on curriculum for math. When I realized in June of this year that I was required by law to report 180 days of instruction per year, I wanted to quickly get started. Time was the issue. How could I research enough to create a new hands-on math curriculum for Kindergarten? When I looked at most of the Kindergarten math materials and our state's standards, we had already covered almost all the concepts and I felt fairly confident that my K5-son had a good understanding of them.

As I wrote to a friend from whom I was requesting advice,

"(My 'problem', and I use that term loosely, seems to be that I spend 4x amount of time figuring out what to teach him and he learns it in x time. So then, I'm back to figuring out what to do next.) The reason I have been just looking at the standards and teaching him those is because I lean more to hands-on learning at this age instead of filling out a worksheet. Also, my K5-son's penmanship is definitely K or Pre-K level and when I look at most curriculums that would be challenging for him mathematically they require a lot of writing which I'm thinking I'm not ready to put on him yet."

She recommended Miquon Math. She wrote:

"I really love Miquon Math. I used it with (my oldest), and then I re-reviewed all the Math Curricula before (the next child) started and again chose Miquon. When (my youngest)'s turn came, I bought Miquon again .... For my children, who always have asked "Why?" these are great books because they help the children understand why 3x5=15, rather than stating this as a fact and then having them memorize it. (I'm not against memorizing math facts - we do that, too, but only after they understand the concepts.) ... In every case, the problems lead the child to understand the concepts (a Socratic approach - the "teacher" asks questions to help the student discover the answers rather than giving answers) Like (your son), my (children) hated to write and another benefit of Miquon was that they did not have too much on a page ... As real life comes at you..., it is nice to have a curriculum to give you a track to run on. I like Miquon for that purpose."

So, we settled on Miquon Math Grade One for this year. So far, I've been pleased. We are just now getting to end of addition and subtraction in the Orange Book. Sometimes he writes his answers on a worksheet and other times we just experiment or make up games to practice the concept.

Today, we created a Barnyard Animals game where some animals were in the pen and others in the barnyard and we made up math sentences to illustrate the scenario. For instance, we started with 10 in the barnyard and put 3 in the pen. Now how many are left in the barnyard. Using number cards, my K5-son would create the math sentence "10-3=7". I would also challenge him to create an addition sentence instead of a subtraction sentence etc. He loved it! He asked if we could play the game with Daddy tomorrow (Saturday).

We're definitely not tied to using every worksheet in the Miquon books. If he's got the concept down, why bore him with more of the same? So we move on or slow down as needed - ah, the benefits of home educating!

I feel like Miquon has provided a good balance between "giving us a track to run on" while using hands-on manipulatives and concrete objects for understanding abstract mathematical concepts.

Another plus - I found the Miquon Math workbooks at CurrClick.com for $6.50 each. This price is the going price, or a little cheaper, than most places. The added advantage, in my opinion, is that you download the workbooks in electronic format! They each come in a PDF file which you can print as many times as you need. So, instead of purchasing a workbook for each child, we'll use the PDF to print the worksheets as we need them for each one. That's a substantial savings. If you prefer the printed workbook, their are usually some available on PaperBackSwap or you can buy them from Amazon.