Week 4 - Tuesday, 8/28

I must learn to say, "No, I can't do that." This was just one of the many mistakes I made today.  Let me explain.

9:00 - I can hear Bear and Boo up and playing already, so I tell them to head on down to the schoolroom while I get my coffee and Bug. They swing through the kitchen, fill up their water bottles and grab some peanuts, and then head on down. Bug moans and groans about being tired and not wanting to rise. I bite my tongue and skip the "if you went to a brick & mortar school you would have been up hours ago" bit and just tell her that I understand mornings aren't her thing but I still need to see her body in the schoolroom soon.

Mistake #1: "Soon" is ambiguous and allows her to think that as long as it feels "too soon" she is being obedient.
What I Should Have Done: Gave her a set fifteen minutes, with lines as a consequence for every minute she ran over.

9:30 - Boo is plowing through her independent work and Bear is mastering the /sh/ sound on Time4Learning when Bug stumbles into the room and flops into her chair. There is a math assignment from yesterday, open and ready to go, and I tell her to finish that up and then start her independent work for the day. She then proceeds to pull an "Office Space" kinda morning while my attention is focused on Bear.

---

Bob Slydell: You see, what we're trying to do is get a feeling for how people spend their time at work so if you would, would you walk us through a typical day, for you?
Peter Gibbons: Yeah.
Bob Slydell: Great.
Peter Gibbons: Well, I generally come in at least fifteen minutes late, ah, I use the side door - that way Lumbergh can't see me, heh - after that I sorta space out for an hour.
Bob Porter: Da-uh? Space out?
Peter Gibbons: Yeah, I just stare at my desk, but it looks like I'm working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch too. I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.

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Mistake #2: Letting her sit and pace herself. I was trying to let go and allow her to work on her own timing, but she doesn't work and just gets a sore bum from sitting so long.
What I Should Have Done: Set a timer on my phone for fifteen minute check-ins and praised any forward movement, while giving goals for the next check-in.

11:00 - Bear is done with all of her school work, including a full chapter of The Apple and the Arrow. The schedule called for just a few pages, but she was so engaged in the story, and Boo was listening intently while finishing up her handwriting, that I kept on reading. By this point, Boo has completed all of her independent work. Bug has been working on the same math assignment that she started at 9:30. She is now at the half-way mark. We have plans to have lunch at a friend's house and I send them off to get dressed and pack their lunches. Bug will be bringing her math, and hopefully getting it done there.

12:15-1:30 - Lunch with friends.  The kids sat and ate in one room while I talked shop with my friend, comparing curriculums and school time.  The kids became incredibly rowdy after eating and took advantage of the lack of supervision to tackle each other.  I went in and calmed things down, told Bug to find a chair in the living room and work on her math, and then the remaining kids moved into bedrooms where the rough housing picked right back up.  Bear ended up walking into a door frame and came crying for me.  That was our cue to leave and head on over to the next play date.  Someday the kids will all be old enough to play calm and quiet games while their mother's chat.  Someday.

1:30-3:30 - Swimming at the community pool.  Most of the public schools here are back in session and the community pool was delightfully uncrowded.  We met some friends there and Bear reveled in her new identity as a fish.  Just two days ago she decided to try swimming under water and was surprised at how fun and easy it is.  I don't really know when she found time to breathe during the two hours, but she certainly improved her under water swimming skills.  Boo played a mermaid game with her friend and went off the diving board a few times.  Bug had to sit at a picnic table and finish up her math, but her friend joined her.  Since this friend uses the same math program she was able to be a help and encourager and Bug was soon ready to get in the pool.  Then she showed her budding maturity and hung by the wall talking to her helpful one and another friend who came a bit later.  No games.  No diving board even.  Just hung out and talked about clothes, nails, and plans for classes during the school year.

3:30-4:30 - We went home and the girls took showers to wash the pool water out of their hair and then got some snacks.  Swimming always makes them tired and hungry.

Mistake #3: Doing too much.  This is when I was wishing that we had either skipped the lunch or the swimming because they were ready to crash and yet still had a half of a day of school to get through. 
What I Should Have Done:  Understood that there is such a thing as too much fun and said no to swimming, as I had made the lunch plans first.

4:30-6:00 - I checked over Bug's math and found that she had done almost half of the problems incorrectly.  I copied them out and had her redo them, watching all the while so that I could see where the errors came into play.  She did just fine with the multiplication, correctly working the four problems she had missed. The double digit long division was another story.  She really didn't get how to make a good initial guess, and was creating "fact dumps" along the sides of the page, but misnumbering them.  For example, if the problem read 147 ÷ 23, she would have running down the side of her paper 1-46, 2-69, 3-92, and so on.  All of her answers were one off because of this.    So while I talked Bug through some better strategies, Boo completed her math and practiced her spelling list with the Spelling City app on my iPhone.  When she was ready to take her test, I just gave her a test form and told her to use the Test Me function, but write her answers on the paper instead of typing them in.  This way I wouldn't take my eyes off Bug.  Then Boo moved on to her reading, covering two chapters of Freedom Train and answering the questions.

Bug did finally get her math done and started the independent work that she should have done in the morning while I moved on to history with Boo.  I'm reading from Lincoln: A Photobiography, a great book full of quotes from Lincoln and his friends that strives to give a factual accounting of his life, with the positives and negatives of his character fairly shown.  While I read, Boo works on coloring in items from her Civil War History Pockets activities.  Today she colored the North and South headings, and when I was done reading sorted the fact cards into the two categories.  She did this quickly and told me that she learned it all from You Wouldn't Want to Be a Civil War Soldier.  I had picked it up at the library and she read it on the way home, and again yesterday during some down time.  I guess my work here is done, she knows all she needs to know about the Civil War, and I can take off the next few weeks!  Ha ha!  If only...

6:00 - Boo and Bear got a surprise visit from the School Fairy because they were completely caught up.  Boo got a box of Nerds, and Bear got a bag of m&m's.  Bug suddenly wanted to keep going, but I told her that the school house has to shut down at six because the teacher has to get some laundry done, the dishwasher loaded, and dinner started.  I have random days marked on my calendar for School Fairy visits and hopefully we will get things to a place where Bug will be on pace and get her prizes.  Otherwise I may just hang it up and pack her off to public school.  :o)

No, not really.  I wouldn't do that.  But I will cut out tumbling, choir, clubs, and dance if necessary.  Four weeks in and still wondering how I'm going to get her through the next 32. *sigh*

 Linking up with the Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers' Weekly Wrap-Up.

Boo's Third Grade Curriculum

Boo heading on into third grade.

This year Boo will be completing the second half of Sonlight's Introduction to American History, starting with the Civil War and ending with modern times. She did a great job last year, enjoying the books and the additions of some lapbooks, history pockets, and a unit from Download N Go. The book basket approach was a hit, so I'm keeping it in place, with a new wrinkle. Now she will have to complete a question packet on the assigned books, but doesn't have to do any book reports on the basket books. This fills in my desire to know that she's grasping character development and plot constructs within the Sonlight readers. It also takes away the "book report for every book read" assignment, which actually just made her hide the books she had been reading in order to avoid the report.

Bible is done through Community Bible Study. This is a wonderful program where the mother and child study the same text side by side during the week, and then participate in small group discussions about the week's lesson on Friday morning. Boo loves it so much that she cried when she had to miss one because of a sick sister.

Boo will be back to Singapore Math this year, having taken a slight detour last year. She was never challenged with that program and I'm honestly not sure that she is as ready for 3A as I'd hoped. I'm steeling myself for more than one whiny math morning. She did the first four books of Life of Fred this summer and loved them, so finishing off the set of ten is my fall back plan.

The spelling program for Boo is taken from her home education program's reading resources. Sequential Spelling became too frustrating for her and she would cry when I pulled out the book. I finally ditched that plan and decided to use the spelling program that her "mentor teacher" had provided at the start is the school year. She loved it and we are sticking with it for this year. Boo reads aloud a story from the basal reader on Monday, does the worksheets for the corresponding spelling list on Tuesday and Wednesday, and tests on Thursday. I think it's the story on Monday that hooked her, and I'm happy that she enjoys spelling so it is one more curriculum change that I will happily make. :-)

The rest of her curriculum is complied from Evan Moor's Daily Series. She will be doing Daily Language Review, Daily Reading Comprehension, Daily 6 Trait Writing, Daily Geography, and Daily Science. I like these books because they are strait forward enough for the girls to do them independently, and yet comprehensive and the girls really learn the skills they need.

Boo loves to play basketball, and we are looking forward to the coming Upward basketball season when her dad will coach her team for the second year in a row.  She will also take swim lessons through the Y as she felt that she was becoming a strong swimmer during the summer and wanted to keep going.  And then there are the Spanish, art, and science classes that she will take through our local home education program. Oh, and she has requested that she begin violin lessons through a program that is geared toward homeschoolers.  They take lessons during the day (a bonus because "after school" stuff fills up fast) and there are concerts twice a year where the entire group comes together to play as a "full orchestra."  That should keep her busy enough.  :o)

See what a strong swimmer she is?  :o)

As I mentioned in last year's curriculum post, Boo keeps me guessing. I think that I have a way to make Sonlight work for us, and 6 Trait Writing has brought out the writer in my daughter so language arts seems to be well in hand. Math is still a question mark, and we will see if Boo can build the perseverance she will need to complete the assignments.  It should be an interesting year.  :o)

 

I'm linking up with Kris at Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers for her annual Curriculum Wrap-Up.  I have also linked up with the Not Back to School Blog Hop.  So many curriculum choices, so little time...  :o)

 

Bug's 5th Grade Curriculum

I'm so excited to be starting a new school year!  There is something about new workbooks, filled in lesson plans, and freshly sharpened pencils that shouts purpose, plan, and order to me.  After these past two chaotic months, with every day different from the last and so many people and activities coming and going, I'm craving order and a schedule.  My girls...  Well, not so much.  But they have had "the summer of fun" so they don't have anything to complain about.

Bug's curriculum has me the most excited, to tell the truth.  She will be embarking on Sonlight's Eastern Hemisphere History.  Since my history education has been largely American and Western Hemisphere, I'm sure that I will learn much of the material right alongside her.  We can share in the joy of discovering new things, and marvel at events and places together.  I'm also looking forward to the personal growth that this study will bring, as there will be daily research assignments that she will be expected to complete on her own.  I know that she will need some hand holding at the start, but I trust that she will become competent with using internet research tools, as well as library systems and indexes.  Quality research skills will be invaluable in practically any career she will go into and I'm thrilled that she will be developing them at an early age.  Sonlight will also cover reading, with read alouds and vocabulary work as well as great comprehension questions for the individual readers.

A very happy Bug doing her research.

Bug will be entering 5th grade and the state standard is to study US History through looking at individual state histories.  Since Sonlight clearly won't be touching on that, I'm looking to My Father's World Adventures workbook for the state history notebook pages.  Written for a second and third grade level they should be easy enough for her to complete on her own, one or two a week.  She will also participate in a US History Club through our local home education program.  My plan is for her to do Sonlight four days a week, and MFW on Fridays.

If you are wondering why I'm combining the two, here is the simple explanation:  We have chosen to participate in a home education program for the free classes and numerous field trips, seasonal parties, and choir.  It is a great program and I barely scratched the surface of all it has to offer last year.  The cost of the program is that I am required to meet state standards and I need to submit monthly reports of what learning took place along with samples of their work.  This is why Bug needs the state reports.  I could just use their history curriculum and call it a day, but I chose to homeschool in part to provide a richer education than the schools would provide.  For me that mean Christian values, literature based, great discussions, and learning above and beyond the state standards.  This is why I went with Sonlight.  Now, I suppose I could do Sonlight's condensed American history, but Bug did Cores 3 and 4 in second and third grade and will do their higher level American history in eighth grade (SL's schedule nicely joining with state standards that year.)  I don't want her education to be as one sided as mine, learning all about the West and barely touching upon the East.  So I'm going to stick with Sonlight's schedule and toss in really simple work and a fun club to meet the minimum state and program requirements.  Does that make sense to anyone, or am I crazy?

Bible will be done through Community Bible Study.  This is a terrific program that we have participated in for the last three years.  The older kids (2nd - 8th grade) study the same book as their mother, reading the same passages and memorizing the same verses.  Our group meets on Fridays.  I love the time to meet with other Christian women, and the girls enjoy their classes.  It is the highlight of our week and we turn down any classes, field trips, or activities that conflict with CBS.

The rest of her curriculum is pretty standard fare.  Singapore Math has been a great fit for Bug, and she rocks state testing year after year, so we are sticking with it.  She will be doing 5A&B.  I decided that for my own sanity it would be worth it to purchase the answer keys, but I will probably still do the reviews along side her as it becomes a fun competition and they don't seem so long.  Spelling is taken from the home education program's provided resource, Pearson's Reading Street.  Bug will read aloud a story from the basal reader on Monday, complete the worksheets for the correlating spelling list on Tuesday and Wednesday, and test on Thursday.  This plan worked so well last year that I'm keeping it in place.

Everything else is covered by Evan Moor's Daily books.  Bug will be doing Daily Language Review, Daily Reading Comprehension, Daily 6 Trait Writing, Daily Geography, and Daily Science.  I clearly like these books, and the reason is that they are simple in their format so she can work independently, and yet the content is solid and she is learning what she needs to know.  The writing book in particular has helped her become a very strong and confident writer by giving her a clear set of guidelines and tools to use to craft a solid essay.

Bug will also be taking Spanish, art, choir, and computers through the home education program.  She will continue to grow as a dancer, a true passion for her, and will pick up three more classes.  She will qualify for a locker at the studio.  :)  She wants to join the performance troupe, but I'm going to wait another year on that to let her maturity and skills develop a bit more, and to delay the hit my checking account and sanity will take when she does join.

I really feel at this point that I know what works and what doesn't work with Bug and I'm anticipating a great school year!  I have linked up with Kris at Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers for her her annual Curriculum Wrap-Up.  I have also linked up with the Not Back to School Blog Hop.  So many curriculum choices, so little time...  :o)

 

Curriculum Choices for Bug, Grade 4, 2011-2012

After going on and on about Sonlight, I'm finally ready to share the rest of my choices for this year, and provide a brief explanation for why I went with each one. My girls are all very different in personalities along with learning styles, so you will see some overlap, but not much. Yes, this keeps me hopping, but that's homeschooling, right? :) In order to keep posts within a reasonable size, I'll break them down by girls. I'll start with the oldest, Bug, who just turned 9 and is in 4th grade.

Math:
Singapore 4A&B, textbook and workbook. I don't purchase the teacher's guide because I won't use it. I know that there is a ton of great stuff in there. I'm just one of those, "Less can be more," kind of people and as long as she's doing well with just the textbook and workbook, I'm counting my blessings and running with that. :) Math was a challenge during first grade. The content wasn't hard. Getting her to sit relatively still and complete the page without me losing my cool was. She would sing and dance around the room, run over and write and answer, and then dance away. I had a few friends of mine were using Singapore and I decided to give it a try for second grade. The simple directions, black and white workbook pages, and absolute void of manipulatives (aka: complete and utter distractions) made math time enjoyable! Bug was calm, focused, and began to really understand what she was doing. I really think the colorful and busy pages were just too much visual stimulation for her. Simpler = better for Bug. This year she has already finished Chapter 1 and I'm constantly impressed with how much mental math she can do, and how quickly and effortlessly she can think outside the box to figure out an answer.

Language Arts:
I use Evan Moor's Daily Language Review for Bug's grammar. That's it. Again, less can be more, and DLR is getting the job done. She corrects two sentences and we talk about the mistakes that were made and explain why she made the corrections she did. Then there are three to four more questions that deal with anything from identifying the adjective in a sentence to completing an analogy. I feel that having to remember various grammar rules and terms in a variety of settings and with no forewarning works better than spending a few days in each topic and then moving on.
After trying and flaming out with Sonlight's Language Arts, I switched to Evan Moor's Daily 6 Trait Writing. It breaks writing down to definable skills and then focuses on each skill, building to a complete finished product by the end of the year. Bug loves to write on her own, but getting her to do it for school was often difficult. I realized that it was all because she didn't like the editing and rewriting process. She would shy away from larger words, stress over sentence formation, and work to keep her essay as short as possible. To try to keep writing enjoyable, and still work on the skills, I decided that the first four writing assignments for each skill would just be for fun. I read them over for content, but don't say a thing about spelling or minor improvements. After the fifth, and final, week for each trait she will spend a week on the writing assignment, breaking the essay down into its components and doing some serious editing, followed by a rewrite in her best handwriting. As I hoped, she's loving the free writing days. We will see how the final unit essay goes in a few weeks.
Spelling workbooks weren't working for Bug. She would memorize the ten words just fine, but there was no carry over to writing, and she wasn't learning how to take her knowledge of how one word was spelled and apply it to others. I found Sequential Spelling and absolutely love this program. It teaches spelling patterns, so once a pattern is learned it can be applied to a variety of words. There are lists every day, knocking out the busy work of playing around with the words and such. It's simply, "Here's the pattern. Use it." This week, for example, used the "fer" pattern. It started with "confer" on Monday, moving up to "conferring" and "conference" by Thursday. Big words are no longer scary because she knows how to break them down and then spell the sounds.
Reading is done with a two pronged approach. Bug has to read a short story and do the accompanying worksheet in her Spectrum Reading book each day. That covers vocabulary, word skills (prefixes, compound words, possessives), comprehension, and study skill (graphs, alphabetical order, using an index). Then she gets to move on to reading whatever she wants, for how long she wants to. There are book lists provided by Evan Moor's How to Report on Books program, and along with books that relate to what she's studying in history and science, there are a lot for her to choose from. I fill up a square laundry basket with books and she is free to pick from there. When she's done for the day she comes and tells me about what she read, and when she finishes the book she does a book report. I use for the forms and themes from HWBR. Our library lets you check out books for three weeks at a time, so our themes go in three week stretches. We just finished focusing on use of setting in a story and have moved on to character development.

Social Studies:
I felt that I was dropping the ball when it came to geography, but I didn't have the time to do a comprehensive, literature inclusive, program. Instead I've settled for Evan Moor's Daily Geography. It's sufficient. I'm not blown away by it, but it gets the job done. Bug finds it enjoyable and will do the whole week on Monday, freeing up time in the rest of the week.
This year Bug is studying CA history. I love Sonlight and so I went looking for a literature based program similar to Sonlight that would cover CA history and found it in Beautiful Feet. The questions that go along with the stories are wonderful, and there are great writing and drawing assignments. Bug is going to have a wonderful journal at the end to use to review all she has learned. I love the timeline characters too. They are so big that when we are done I can hang it on the wall and we won't have any trouble reading it. There are some gaps in it though, as there will be in any completely literature program. There just aren't enough historical fiction books for every detail. Sonlight uses textbooks as spines to fill in the gap, and I decided to use the 4th grade textbook provided by the home ed. program we go through. There is a lesson a day and then a corresponding workbook page. Bug is able to do this part independently. When we come to the end of a unit we switch over to BF for their lesson on that time period. It matched up amazingly well and fit perfectly into 40 weeks.

Science:
This has been my Waterloo. I just can't pull off experiments/activities consistently during the school year. Two years ago science fell out of my lesson plan book completely in December and never made its way back in. I spent the summer catching up and realized that I had found something that worked for me. :) I decided I would use a bare minimum, make sure they are getting some knowledge, program for the school year and then really delve into something during the summer. Last year we used Evan Moor's Daily Science and it fit the bill. It was simple, covered state standards, and threw in an experiment every five weeks. Then we did Sonlight's Science 2 over the summer, doing a week's worth of lessons in a day. This year we are back to Evan Moor, but I'm planning on using Apologia's Astronomy for the summer. As much as the girls love Professor Justin, I'm ready to really sink my teeth into a field and Sonlight jumps around too much for me. Apologia looks substantial, and yet approachable, and I'm hoping they'll love it.

If you made it through all that, my hat's off to you. You must be a fellow curriculum junkie. :) And yes, I use a lot of Evan Moor. It just works so well for my family. And, like I said earlier, when I find something that works, I stick with it. :)

I've linked up with the Heart of the Matter's Not Back to School: Curriculum Week Blog Hop. There are over 100 links full of curriculum reviews. It's worth checking out. :)