Right Up To The End

J is front row on the left at his eighth grade continuation ceremony.

My oldest son is in a small charter school.  He was home educated through 6th grade and we had various reasons for making that switch when he entered 7th last year.  This May, he graduated from eighth grade.  I think academically he accomplished some great benchmarks this year.  His teachers challenged him and enjoyed him.  However, his last week of school consisted of watching The Lord of the Rings (in his teacher's defense they had just finished reading and writing essays on the Hobbit), ultimate Frisbee, yearbook distribution, locker clean-out, random school-specific standardized testing, an awards ceremony, continuation ceremony, a day at an amusement park and a school bbq.

S's Kindergarten graduation from his once a week Options class.  S is in the plaid shirt.

My other two sons continue to be home educated.  B finished 4th grade and S finished Kindergarten.  Their last week of school was nothing like their older brother's.  S's final task was to daily read through his last four lessons in Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons.  We played some math card games and he participated in some of what his brother was doing too.  We were covering the Revolutionary War so B was typing up a paragraph on Washington as the first President, creating a book jacket book report on Johnny Tremain that we had read aloud, trying to at least make his over-ambitious rag-rug until a potholder, mapping out major war battles and watching a video about Yorktown.  In addition he continued to do some fun multiplication drills online, finished reading through the book of Exodus with me, and reviewed about a dozen spelling rules.  On our last day, after he'd finished up all of the above, we did our traditional oral review quiz that happened to take over an hour.  Then we proceeded to plant the front garden and map out our family road trip.  The learning never ends.

To say their last weeks were decidedly different is a bit of an understatement.  But I don't have final grading to get done like J's teachers do and B&S and I get to intersperse slacker fun activities through the year rather than cram them all into the last week.  Our last week is always one of productivity and pushing through to tie-up loose ends and wrap-up notebooks.  And our last week is never easy.  When we are a week away from being done for the year we start salivating for the outdoors, taking our work upstairs near the windows or outside on the deck.  We linger over lunch because the sandbox is such a nice place to finish the meal with a Popsicle.  We have to push ourselves back inside because the garden seedlings pushing through the earth are too distracting and steal our focus.  But we make the academics happen all the way to the end.

It's exhausting.  But when that final review is done and the notebooks are complete we heave a sigh of relief.

And then we hop in the car for a roadtrip and listen to Adventures in Odyssey tell tales of early America, visit a few museums of American history, hike through areas of geological peculiarity... I just might count vacation as school days for next year.

Wizard of Oz Unit

 

When I went to bed last night I had no idea what we were going to do in school this week.  We just finished studying about India last week and I didn't feel the need to stretch that out any longer.  So, we have this one week left before we take off two for spring break.

What to do.  What to do.

We have spelling, math and writing and Bible to continue in.  Those can all be stand alone sujects just fine.
B has been asking us to help him grow crystals (a Christmas gift) and that sounds like a good school activity to me.  Additionally, I had also begun reading The Wonderful Wizard of Oz to B&S off my Kindle while we were waiting for appointments.  And they've really been enjoying it.

If crystals can be dyed green they might resemble emeralds... hmmm.

And so began our Wizard of Oz Science Study for the week.
...growing our own Emerald City.
...soda bottle tornadoes.
...animal (lion), vegetable (scarecrow) or mineral (tin man) classification.
..."Witch" dissolves in water?

And because our vacation in May will be in Santa Fe where the Georgia O'Keefe museum is AND poppies show up in the next chapter of the book we'll work on a huge O'Keefe poppy mural I just purchased from Art Projects for Kids.  It will be huge and B is so excited to get into my pastels.

I love it when all things converge.

 

Number Card Activities

I made over a hundred number flashcards about 10 years ago and I just keep using them over and over again.  Each card simply has one number 0 - 100 written on its front.  I have duplicates for 1-20 as well as smaller cards with + - =  signs on them.

Today we pulled them out to use with S and I discovered that I had a cheat sheet of activity ideas stashed in between the cards.  I don't know who to credit for the ideas, but it made for a perfect day of math activities with him.  I love it when my past-self helps out my future-self.

Grab a stack of cards and a marker and make your own set.  These were great activities to do with my 5 year old:

• Hold up a card and have him say the number on the card.  We worked with 0-20 today, but in the next few weeks we'll work through chunks all the way up to 100.
• Hold up two cards and ask which number is greater.
• Hold up two cards and ask your child to count forward or backward from one of the numbers to the other.  
• Pick a card without showing it to your child.  Have him or her guess the number by solving a number clue such as, "This number is one more than 63," or "This number is one less than 35," or "This number is between 59 and 61."
• Place the cards into number families (20's, 50's, etc.)
• For basic identification practice, create a concentration game using the duplicate cards and try to find matches.  
• Make your own number sentences:  put one card down, put a +/- card down and put another card after it.  Follow it with the = card and have your child solve it.  
• After you use them, they'll need to be put back in order so make this your child's last activity.

A Great Thing

We have begun a new unit study about India that should take us well into March.  Its purpose is twofold:
1. to expose the boys to a completely different culture, its inner workings and curiosities.
2.  to help me grow in knowledge for a trip there this summer.

These are my favorite studies to do; those in which we are all students together.

However, as I put my "teacher" hat on all of my lesson plan ideas were essentially me telling B what he needs to know about the country.  Yet I have never been to India.  Aside from a class in Hinduism in college, I have very little insight into the way the country thinks and works.  Yet, I embarked to teach him.

We started out with the geography of India.  B drew his own outline map of India (and did a beautiful job) and then over the next few days he filled in mountain ranges, rivers, bordering countries and bodies of water, major cities, listed all of the states, and drew the flag.  That was a fair enough assignment for a fourth grader, but he was still relying on me to give him the resources he needed and I'm not sure he was super interested in the process.  I was still at the center of the lesson and it didn't seem right to me.

As I was reading The Courage to Teach by Parker J. Palmer, I had a brainstorm of sorts.  In his chapter on teaching in community he said this:

Passion for the subject propels that subject, not the teacher, into the center of the learning circle -- and when a great thing is in their midst, students have direct access to the energy of learning and of life.

I reviewed again the two purposes of our unit study.  What would help B and I move into the subject itself so that we both take hold of "the energy of learning and of life?"  And it hit me.  He shouldn't spend his time doing what I think is important for him to do and know.  He should explore India for himself.

I'm going to let him create and submit an itinerary for my trip.  He can research and compare plane ticket costs, find locations of religious or cultural significance, tell me how to take the train, what the money exchange looks like, and how I should respectfully dress.  He'll be my tour guide through India and present me with a little portfolio.  Anywhere within a day trip on the train from Delhi is fair game.  I'm certain the Taj Mahal will be in the mix.

We are reading YWAM's biography of Amy Carmichael aloud and will work on a journal project to go along with that.  This week we'll also begin working on some Indian embriodery  (yes, my son loves to sew).  And for a culminating activity we'll have to splurge on a little construction project:  These Nanoblock sets are perfect.

Technology for the Ill-Prepared

When I closed up school for the weekend I made mental notes to find a read-aloud, a science book about blood, make out some lesson plans, and find my old lesson plans for this unit to refer to for ideas.

This morning when I woke up I had done exactly

none

of that.

Quickly searching the web catalogs of our local libraries I found a book that would work for our read aloud.  It's even on the shelf at our local branch.  But at 8 a.m. I'm not getting the boys ready to go out quite yet... hmm.

Enter Kindle's whispernet and free sample.  I downloaded the free sample instantly and we read the first 8 pages of our new read-aloud.  In a few minutes we'll head out to get the hard copy from the library and keep up with our reading for the next two weeks.  Mission accomplished and it didn't cost a thing.  

Now, that science book that I thought I could find this morning is, of course, nowhere to be found.  It's driving me crazy because it was exactly the resource I needed to teach with today.

Enter YouTube.  I had to do a little searching through some strange things (my search was "parts of the blood") but I eventually found a video explaining and diagramming what I wanted B to know.  We drew our own diagram, figured out the percentages of what our blood is made up with (perfectly tying in with today's math lesson... which is also online!) and had a decent science lesson.

Last Thursday when I brought out a video tape (yes, video tape) resource from the California Department of 

Water the tape didn't work at all.  I was disappointed because it had great paper workbooklets to go along with it which included some some neat experiments to view.  YouTube came to my rescue again that day.  I found the exact video presentation on the site and we carried on without much of a hitch.  And the video tape went in the trash.

I love how homeschooling is so much easier now than it was for me when I started 10 years ago.   It's not helping my work-ethic per se, but the world's knowledge is, indeed, at our fingertips.  

Do Not Be Afraid

We have always been a part of co-ops and homeschool groups for two reasons.
1.  P.E.
2.  Art

My oldest son hated getting his hands messy, always needed to know where we were going, refused to use color and rushed through everything.  Aside from the first couple of years when he was very young, I eventually determined that unless it seemed enjoyable to turn a lesson into a meltdown, I would simply not do art with him.  Instead, I farmed it out to other homeschooling moms to have the "pleasure" of exploring J's creative side during the classes they volunteered to teach.  Sorry, mom friends.

As a result, art has essentially sat dormant for a while. I tried to find ways to expose the boys to it in non-messy, linear ways.  We looked at masterpieces and learned about artists and I have always had them drawing (lots of stick figure art going on over here).  But that's essentially been my maximum effort.  Because the terror of the art lessons of the past has never left me, I don't even get out the paints unless I'm really throwing caution to the wind.   Sorry, Charlotte Mason, but we don't do nature notebooks.

When J was no longer schooling at home last year, B and I spent the year figuring out what worked for us.   And then we spent the beginning of this year finding out what worked for him.  He's an auditory/kinesthetic (large muscle) learner.  His intelligences lie in the areas of spatial, body and intrapersonal.  He's essentially an artist when he's not being an athlete.  But he's not the kid who loves drawing and painting, shading, perspective, etc.   He likes the sculpting, the building, the graphic designs, the turning-something-into-something-else kind of art.  He loves to make things and he cherishes each thing he creates.

In the past month he's been busy creating.  And surprise of surprises, I'm actually enjoying the process with him.  Of course, I've always enjoyed art and pursuing creativity.  And now, we've brought it back into our school day.  It turns out that I just needed to do it with the right child.

I will no longer be afraid of the art lesson.

Here are just some of the projects B and S have done in the past few weeks:

• Rice Krispie castles.
• A tile mosaic crown.
• A truss bridge out of Popsicle sticks and white glue.
• Scarab stamps out of baked modeling clay.
• Egyptian wall friezes out of Plaster of Paris

This doesn't include the lanyard helicopters, the countless fuse bead projects, the carving he wants to do of the Sphynx or the paper mache mummies that we'll try to hit this week.    It's exhausting.  It's messy.  And it's no longer fearful.

 
 

Today's Table

I thought I'd do A Day in the Life based on this photo.

This is what my coffee table looked like today after our morning of school at home.  I swear that sucker was clean when we started.  However, it tells a pretty good story of what we did today.

When I came downstairs to begin with the kids I brought with me my tea (Green Tea Pomegranat), the book I'm reading, and the container of blueberries.   After I read Blueberries for Sal to S,  he had to estimate how many berries would fit inside the tablespoon you see there mixed in with the markers.  Then we estimated how many blueberries long a marker was, and counted how many would go around the perimeter of Sal.  Then we tested out how many we could balance on that wine cork -- he could do three. After that, he munched on the berries while he ripped and cut out his own construction paper rendition of Blueberry Hill complete with a Momma bear.  I also gave him four pictures from the story and had him sequence them and color them in for fun.  These last two ideas just came out of my head as we were going along.

Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle's Magic showed up next.  We're doing this fun read aloud to start the year and B is making the cardstock gameboard to go with the book (sneaking in some writing there).  The idea comes from Games With Books which you can see underneath the game board.  We've used Peggy Kaye's books over and over and over again.  I love her ideas.  (That's where some activities for Blueberries for Sal came from too.)

There's a Math Mosaics book there that got forgotten today because the game board took longer than we expected, but that's okay. While B was working on the game, S and I were on the floor with the Clifford math magnets .  He had fun with those.

On my clipboard are the pages of the Math placement test that B completed today.  Because I'm switching curriculum, I'm not sure if I should get him 3rd grade math or 4th grade.  He's good at math, but after this placement test I think he may need a pretty good 3rd grade refresher before we move on.  I knew I should have been doing math with him all summer. Underneath those papers is the Kindergarten readiness test I downloaded and completed with S today.  It just told me what skills to focus on and what he already knows. I can't remember where I found it, or I'd link to it.

Let's see, what else is there?  Oh, the stack of alphabet cards (the S is there on top of Mrs. Piggle Wiggle) were used when I found out that my Kindergartener really isn't sure what his last name is.  He does know it, he just doesn't know the first/last designation.  So we worked on spelling it out today and getting used to what it looks like.  We spelled it in capital letters but on the flip side are those very confusing lower case letters, so we spent some time on those.

On the floor up in the corner of the photo is the file folder game I had prepped for S last year.  But I pulled it out today just for fun.  I think he's beyond it now so it's time to make some more.  (Love that website!).  While he did that, B and I worked through You're Smarter Than You Think: A Kid's Guide to Multiple Intelligences  He took the quizzes for the first three intelligences and we settled on Picture Smart for him and found out what that looks like.  Tomorrow we'll read through some of the others and see if he discovers a couple more that fit him.  We're spending our first days on learning styles/ modalities/intelligences, et al. because I want my dyslexic son to know how he's smart and that "smart" looks different for everyone.

Here's how funny God is:
My child is an auditory/kinesthetic learner; I'm a visual learner.
My child is a concrete random processor;  I'm an abstract sequential processor.
My child is picture smart; I am word smart.
We are complete opposites.

Finally, there on the table intertwined among the colored pencils and markers is a homemade Indiana Jones whip.  Random.  But that's so commonplace.  At the end of every day there's several odd artifacts that have made their way into our learning space.  It's humorous.  And I love it.

The rest of our day consisted of lunch, grocery shopping, cleaning the fridge, LEGO building, and picking up J from school.  I dropped J at Taekwon Do, went to the gym, came home to the dinner dh had prepared and then had coffee tonight with a super fun new friend that I think I'll get the honor of spending more time with in the coming months.

Today was a really good day.
And, yes. The table is still a mess.

#300 and a Blog Hop

This is my 300th post. It's fitting that it's the first post of our 10th school year of schooling at home. Lots of round numbers there.

J:  My dramatic one. 

Here are our first day of school photos:

On Tuesday, my 12 yo began 8th grade at the charter school he attended last year. I had much less anxiety this year. I didn't feel like I was "sending him to the wolves" like I feared his first year. (You can read my thoughts about his first year in a brick and mortar school here.)  We both knew what to expect (same teachers for the same subjects) so it was easier.  I spent the night before reading to him selections from The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth: Popularity, Quirk Theory, and Why Outsiders Thrive After High School because that's, truthfully, his demographic.  He may change the world one day, but he won't change middle school.

B: finally got that new watch he's been wanting.
S: my final Kindergartener!

My other two boys began school at home yesterday.  They were up before 7 waiting for the backpack fairy.   We got started at 8:45 and we were done at 12:00 on the dot.  How surprising and wonderful.  It'll likely never happen again.  Case in point:  it's now Day Two and at 9:00 they are both still sleeping.

We are doing a soft start for a few days.  Just getting in the habit again, playing learning games, doing some assessments to see where my 9yo should start in Math and Spelling, playing with letters with my Kindergartener and reading aloud.  After their grandma visits next week, we'll get going with our full unit study.

It's now 9:27 and I hear the other four feet in the house so I think we're ready to see what the day will hold.

Blog Hop & Mixing the Old and the New

I'm planning to start my 10th year homeschooling in a couple of weeks. We have always used the Weaver unit study curriculum from Alpha Omega.  I love that it gives me age appropriate learning standards from K - 6th grade so I'm cycling back through it again without having to repurchase it.  I've actually unglued myself from its directives over the years and just used it as a skeleton to help me know where to go next, but it's still a solid, thorough Bible-based curriculum that's great for you if you don't need a scripted curriculum. (It requires some prep.) I was going to set it aside this year because it's my 9th year using it, but in the end I decided that it was just too valuable for my kids and I didn't want to have to learn something new.

Because EVERYTHING else is new.

Here is what we are adding this year for my fourth grader:

        


I have just a couple weeks to figure everything out.  There's a huge manual for Spelling Power that takes about 12 hours to read.  Angling for Words was recommended for my dyslexic child so I have to read through that teacher's manual too.  I haven't even ordered our full math curriculum yet and there are other manuals for Right Start to read as well.

The YWAM biography will be a nice break mid year.  We have used their unit studies before so it's familiar to me.  DH and I are hoping to take a trip to India in the spring, so we'll make it a unit study.

I still haven't quite nailed down what my kindergartener's directives will be this year.  Here's a few resouces I'm going to work with though:

      

I've already taught two children to read and I've never even looked at Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons until now.  I have borrowed this from the library to look it over.  It might be a good fit for S.  I've used Games with Books for years for all my young kids and we're at least going to start the year with some of these activities.  The Nature Book just inspires me to get outside with my child and make things with our hands.  Finally, while I used Making Math Meaningful all the way through with my oldest son, I never did the Kindergarten level which is scripted and has very little writing work.  Perfect.  Other than that, he'll be doing the age appropriate learning activities along with his older brother out of Weaver.  We start with the themes of Royalty and Respect.

So, if you need me I'll be buried under all my instruction manuals.