SQT: Summer is Coming to an End Mash-up

One

Do you ever start a conversation making perfect sense in your head and half way through you suddenly realize that you have either forgotten everything you knew about the subject or you never knew it in the first place and your point, if there ever was one, has completely disappeared? I’ve been getting 4-6 hours of sleep a night and am feeling pretty beat up, y’all.  This return to newborn zombie-land is a little harder than it used to be.  But I didn’t realize how my cognitive processes were suffering until I sat down to finish a blog post I started last week.  Seven Quick Takes to the rescue! I still want to do the summer learning wrap-up I started, but I’m afraid that transitions between paragraphs are beyond me.  If that doesn’t make you want to keep reading, I don’t know what will.

Two

Andy dropped Gareth off at school this weekend, which is how I know that summer is really ending.

Three

Anyway.  Although the summer didn’t go as planned, learning went on.  I attempted to catch some of it in my teacher planner, but much of it just doesn’t fit.  A lot of our learning this summer happened in the form of discussion, not as titles or page numbers.  What happens if you don’t want to vote for either person for president, Mom? What will happen if we have an unqualified president?  What are they going to do to Rose’s heart? Can other people catch Down Syndrome? 

This summer was like that.  The kids at home saw their older brother and their parents struggle together to keep him going through a difficult summer job.  They heard us talk and talked with us about the current political situation.  We showed them diagrams of the heart and explained what would happen to their sister when she went into the hospital.  When she came home, we answered their questions about how her heart was repaired, how she would heal, and the dramatic and somewhat frightening incision on her chest.  (Which has been healing nicely).  We talked a lot about college choices and what is the end of education and how to make compromises between educational ideals and career and financial realities that didn’t sell out the educational ideals.

It seemed like we talked a lot this summer.  More than usual.  All of that is hard to encapsulate in a couple of words that fit into a grid, but it is the sort of thing that teaches kids a lot.  It was a long summer and academically, we are going to have to do some backtracking, but I feel like if I lived in a state in which I had to count attendance (which I don’t anymore), I would have counted many of our summer hours as “school is in session.”  It wasn’t a school any of us would necessarily have chosen (although I think that my 13 year old and 17 year old have had an interest sparked in politics and political philosophy), but there it is.  Our long break — from mid-May to the beginning of September, probably, unless I really get my act together — was certainly not educationally void.  Nobody’s summers really are, but sometimes I need to write everything down to make myself feel better.

Four

Speaking of which… I ordered another Erin Condren Teacher Planner for this year, but I’m somewhat disappointed. I think I can work around the fact that there are fewer Absentee log sheets, which I was using to log picture books, because there are also more pages for notes inside the monthly spreads.  But… a pet peeve here… the notes pages which coordinate with the colors of the monthly spreads are BEFORE the monthly calendar page and this does NOT match up with how my brain works.  What I want to do is get a visual sense of the big picture first, and THEN head on to my notes, which are probably going to include booklists and college application to-do’s.  Why would I want to look at a list of picture books before I saw that I had therapy appointments for four kids this month?

I also goofed and reversed the pattern and background colors I wanted on the cover.  That person they’re targeting with that little pop-up question at the bottom of your order form, the one that says, “Are you ABSOLUTELY SURE that you’ve got everything the way you want it?” That person is me.

<Insert face palm.>

Not that it’s a bad cover, it just wasn’t the cover I had in my head, you know?

(This is where I would put a picture IF I had enough memory to load one or IF I could find one to save from my Facebook feed.  Just picture a lot of pink when I had been thinking about a nice periwinkle blue with pink accents instead.)

I started looking at Plum Paper Planners, because you can customize the classes and I get tired of writing everybody’s name across the top every week.  But since I’ve already spent the money, I guess I’ll be sticking with the Erin Condren this year.

(For the record, I don’t use my planner to plan but to record.)

Five

This summer was also the summer of Beverly Cleary.  Back in May, I decided to do some “fun” reading with my 8 year old and my 5 year old (who is now 6).  This is where I have to admit that sometimes I find myself a bit… taxed with trying to read AO’s selections to my younger kids.  It’s not that we don’t enjoy them, because we do.  But there have been good books written after 1965 and we also enjoy a little historical fiction here and there, too, and sometimes the AO books, even the ones on the free reading list, start to feel a bit heavy.  So I pulled Ramona the Pest off the shelf — with my 5 year old specifically in mind — and gave it a go.  I didn’t know if the boys would like it or not considering that it is about a girl (and yes, I know, it’s Ramona but she’s still a girl), but wow, I could not have predicted that reading Ramona the Pest would mean that I would be required to read every single one of the Ramona books, including the later ones which are girlier and include Beezus growing up and getting moody and wanting her hair styled.  We just finished Ramona Forever.  The boys want to read Ramona’s World, but no one seems to be able to find it.

We also read several of the Henry Huggins books, which would seem to make more sense because the main character is a boy, after all.  But I think the Ramona books are better.  Beverly Cleary wrote Henry Huggins in 1950.  It was her first novel, and so I think it’s just to be expected that she would grow as a writer from there.  On the other hand, of the Henry Huggins books that we read, I think that Henry Huggins is the best.  (George may choose to argue with me, because I think that Ribsy was one of his favorite books at the age of 8 or 9.)  We ultimately had to take a break with the books in this series, though, because Beverly Cleary’s characters are just too darn life-like.  The kids argue and bicker like real kids, and Henry is constantly saying, “You keep quiet” (or he uses another expression which a lot of people use but which is banned in our house).  So when I heard my 5 (6) year old knocking through the house picking fights with his brothers and saying, “You keep quiet,” I knew where he had picked that up.  We put the Henry Huggins books down at that point.  Which is a shame because some of them are pretty funny.  In contrast, I think the Ramona books deal a lot more deeply (but in a humorous way) with the battles kids wage (with themselves and with grown-ups) in the process of growing up.  What’s interesting to me is that the Ramona books range from the late 60’s to the mid 80’s, and although there are a few discrepancies between the early Henry Huggins books and the later Ramona books (Ramona and Beezus first appear as Henry’s neighbors), mostly nothing in the books seems dated or out of place.  Including those 80’s commercials in Ramona Quimby, Age 8!

Leo was also most excited that Sprout was airing the movie Beezus and Ramona as one of their Family Night movies… but ugh, what they did to those books! Everyone watched it, but with much complaining about how they had edited and smooshed all the books together in order to produce a film.

Six

George spent most of his summer reading his way through our history shelves and practicing his wilderness skills in our backyard. I found it impossible to keep up with what he was reading. I should have made him keep a list but I didn’t, and now both of us are struggling to remember all the titles; I think that sometimes books blur in time and you think, when did I read that? This isn’t every book he read this summer, but it will give you some idea of what he was doing.

You know what amazes me most?  This kid has only been reading — I mean, really reading, beyond reader level — for a little more than two and a half years.

Seven

It didn’t seem possible to me a week ago, but I think that we may be able to start easing into school next week.  I’ve got my resource shelves organized, the last-minute oops-I-forgot-this books and curricula have been ordered, I’m working on getting actual books onto people’s shelves, the schedule is almost done (such as it is), and I wrapped up my old teacher planner with printed copies of my learning-in-review posts from last school year.  There weren’t many of them, and as usual I wish that there were more.  I know I say this almost every year and then posts dribble off around Christmas and never pick up again, but this year I am going to write a wrap-up post every week. Or maybe every other week. More than four all year at least! (How’s that for a goal?)  It might not be a long one, or it might be a smash-up of learning notes, but I’m aiming for something I can print out as a hard-copy record.  The notes and arrows I put in my planner are a good shorthand for what we’re doing, but sometimes I want to see a finished picture and not just an empty paint-by-numbers board.

 

Linking up with Kelly!

2015-2016 in Review: What Worked

Most of us (except for Katydid, who just finished her last class) have been on summer break for a couple of weeks now.  It wasn’t that we actually came to the end of work; instead, I just declared it was time for a break.  This hasn’t been the worst year, academics-wise, that we could have had, but it was far from the best.  Pregnancy, a baby’s birth in the middle of the year, a surprise special needs diagnosis and its accompanying extra trips to the doctor, a kitchen remodel, and a spring that has been full of stomach viruses and flu has not made consistency easy.  (Is consistency ever easy, though? I don’t think so.)

(For what it’s worth, here are the sort of nebulous plans we began the year with.)

But even in the hardest years it’s not like people just sit around learning nothing. Here’s what worked for us in a hard year.

1. Pulling books off a handwritten reading list.

I learned I was pregnant last year the weekend after Memorial Day, and I spent the summer in a fog of all-day morning sickness. Then we had a trip to Ohio for my grandpa’s 100th birthday (a trip I am so glad I made, because Grandpa died on Holy Saturday this year) and another trip to Virginia to drop my oldest off for his first year of college. When we came home, there was a lot of reshuffling of chores, etc. and getting used to his absence. I needed some structure for the boys’ studies, but I made a chart for my teenager and that was about all I could handle. I usually spend way too much time trying out different computerized methods of organizing our learning only to have them all fail, so this year I said heck with it and just scrawled out a bunch of titles (mostly taken from Ambleside Online or books that I knew I already owned) in my homeschool journal. When the boys finished a book, I pulled out the list to see what other books we had to choose from. Usually I have all these books on a shelf in the kitchen, but this year we had to pack up the shelf midway through. So the list was absolutely necessary. This is how I’m doing things again this year. I know it would be neater (and more shareable) if I typed it in, but I’m not going to put that stress on myself if handwritten is good enough — unless I have the time and breathing space to do it.

2. Switching away from Saxon and Beast Academy

I switched all my younger boys to Singapore Math this year, and I think it was a good decision.  It was too late to switch George, as a 7th grader, to Singapore, but we stopped using Saxon for him this spring when I got aggravated (again) with how Saxon handles teaching fractions (i.e., in the slowest, most broken up way imaginable).  For him, I got out Key to Fractions and the textbook Basic College Mathematics by Margaret Lial. (The new textbook is really expensive, by the way, but you don’t need it.  I bought a used copy for about $6.  Answers to odd problems are in the back and there are a lot of them, so you don’t need a teacher’s guide.)  I used Saxon for both my oldest kids and George for upper elementary and middle school mostly because Saxon is easy to hand to a kid when Mom has to do other things — like taking care of a bunch of babies and toddlers.  Especially when coupled with the teaching DVDs, it makes for very independent students.  But I don’t think that always translates into students who really understand (or like) math very much.  And it was taking Dennis (4th grade) For. Ever. to do a lesson, even when I only had him doing odds or evens from the Mixed Practice.  He understood the math, too, mostly, so I don’t know why it was taking him so long, but now that we’ve switched to Singapore I feel like we’re making more progress.  Because Singapore is basically a year ahead of Saxon in almost everything, we had to go back to 3A/3B to pick up some concepts for both the twins, but Huck will be finishing up 4A and heading on to 4B over the summer, and Dennis is ready to start 4A.  It doesn’t seem to take them an entire semester to finish a book, so I think they should be at least part of the way through 5B by the end of their 5th grade year.

3. Homeschool Band and Choir

From Instagram.  Not sure what filter I used, but it should have been brighter! This is Dennis the day he got his trombone last September.

One of my goals this year was to give the boys more experience with music.  I had heard many good things about the local homeschool band program and the boys did not seem to be keen on piano or violin, so I made an executive, not very unschoolish decision to sign them up for band.  The deal was that they would play an instrument of their choice for a whole year and if they found they didn’t like it after the year was up, they could quit.  George, Huck, and Chipmunk chose to play trumpet, and Dennis chose the trombone (which he had actually been thinking about for a while).  They managed their practices themselves — I rarely had to remind them — and all of them finished their books and graduated to the next level for the coming year.  (Even Chipmunk, who was a year younger than everybody else in the band and needed special permission to join.)  The boys learned a lot about hard work and perseverance, and I think they found that they all liked having music as a skill.  I liked the program because all the kids could do something at the same time and the same place.  I just wish it started later in the morning!

4. Fitting in Nature Study Around the Edges

Another Instagram photo, this one of a wooly bear the boys found last fall and watched inside for a while.  We looked up wooly bears in the Peterson First Guide to Caterpillars and discovered that they eat a lot of weedy plants that typically grow in yards, like plantain (the weed, not the fruit).

I suppose that this is always the way we do nature study, but this year I felt that doing nature study regularly was more of a goal.  Unfortunately, we still have not managed nature journals consistently, but we have gotten out the field guides and been a little less haphazard about our nature study in general.  For the first half of the year, we managed to fit in a nature walk between the boys’ band class and Katydid’s choir class.  The slot was roughly an hour and fifteen minutes long, which allowed us to drive to some place nearby and walk around for about forty-five minutes.  We checked out the local greenway, riverside nature trails, a little suburban oasis of a nature area, and a flooded field viewing area for migratory waterfowl.  All of these were within a fifteen minute drive of the suburban church which hosted our homeschool band lessons, in an intensively built-up suburb.  We stopped when I was too pregnant to walk far (and it was too cold and wet anyway), but after I was up and about again, we resumed our nature study with a special study of trees using The Tree Book For Kids and Their Grownups (HT: Jen at Wildflowers and Marbles) and spring nature walks in our own yard.  To get a little exercise, I would put Rose in the front pouch after lunch and go outside.  The younger boys would immediately nab me to show me the new developments in the yard, and George would fill me in on his progress in learning outdoor wilderness skills and plant identification.  We took these short ambles around the yard (we have five acres, but it’s definitely yard, not woods) 2-4 times a week throughout the spring.  If we accomplished anything, at least I think even the three year old might be able to recognize poison ivy now.

5.  Wilson Hill Academy Online Precalculus

This online math class was a BIG hit, and I wish Katydid’s teacher could Skype tutor all my kids. (Ann Stublen is her name, and she teaches Algebra II, Precalculus and AP Calculus.  HIGHLY recommended!)  Katydid will be taking Calculus with her again next year, and while I’m not sure if she’s exactly excited about it, I do think that she isn’t afraid of it.  Plus, the class this year came up with a bunch of playlists (yes, precalculus playlists) and even their own T-shirts.  They had one day each semester where they were supposed to interact in the chatbox as a character or other famous person to see if the other members of the class could guess who they were.  And she came out of Precalculus with a B+.  All the math classes (grades 5/6 and up) seem to use decent texts (not Saxon) so as of now the plan is to have all my kids do their higher math with Wilson Hill.  (The Well-Trained Mind boards seem to have a high opinion of their math classes, too.)

6.  Dancing Bears Reading

I learned about Dancing Bears from my friend Lindsay who was using them with her son.  Dancing Bears is written for late, struggling, or dyslexic readers and designed to be done in about fifteen minutes a day.  About halfway through the year, I decided that Chipmunk needed a little something more to push him over the edge into reading.  With George — who clearly had major difficulties — we used EasyRead, which worked wonders but was also very expensive.  Chipmunk’s difficulties are not on George’s scale.  After studying the online samples, I thought that it looked pretty good and we might be able to do fifteen minutes a day, so I ordered the book.  It turned out that we were not always able to do fifteen minutes a day, but — what we were able to do combined with a slightly different glasses prescription and continuing vision therapy at home has been enough to bump his reading up just enough that we can see, yes, he’s improving and he’ll probably get it at some point.  We’re going slower than the instructions suggest, but only because we’re accommodating Chipmunk’s rather wiggly attention span.

7.  All About Reading Readers

In conjunction with Dancing Bears, Chipmunk has been reading to Andy at night.  Years ago, I bought this book:

I bought it for George when he was about 7.  This book is no longer in print, as such, because it has become this book:

Same book, different title.  Chipmunk recently finished it and requested others like it, so I bought two of the other All About Reading Readers for him.  These are nice books, especially as readers go.  They’re hardback and feel like real books of stories.  I did not order the whole All About Reading program when we first started teaching him to read, because he was learning at the same time that George and the twins were learning.  Doing the All About Reading program with four non-readers at the same time was a little cost prohibitive.  Plus it seemed Mom-intensive, too. But the readers are really nice, and I just ordered the Pre-Reading program for Leo, whom it seemed to suit.

And a few more favorite books and resources from this year:

 

 

 

Learning in Review: Week 6 and 7

Weeks 6 and 7 (the two weeks before Halloween week) were been busy ones — in a good way, and in a not so good way, too.   I am seriously contemplating going to a 6 weeks on/1 week off year-round calendar next year.  I’m not sure how to make that work around high school students who follow traditional academic schedules with outside classes, but at around 6 weeks I could definitely use a couple of teacher in-service days!

I have to warn you that this is going to be a somewhat longish post because I’m catching up a little bit… but I print these posts at the end of the year and store them in a binder as a sort of hard-copy journal.

(And another brief note about the photos: I’m still being forced to use photos from my iPad instead of my camera.  The trackpad on my Mac is not working now, so I’m also having to use one of our two Dell laptops — that are supposed to be dedicated to school use — to work on.  Because these laptops are often in use, I wrote most of this post on my iPad mini.  Using one finger to type.  So if you find any typos or formatting blips — like pictures that are turned the wrong way — that I may have missed, I apologize.)

First, the good: Gareth came home for fall break!  It was nice having him around this week, and it will once again feel odd and quiet after he leaves.  Not that he’s such a loud kid (that’s a bit of an understatement), but we sometimes used to have conversations while I was making dinner and now mostly I just watch grocery haul videos while I cook — because, you know, there is something fascinating about watching another mom show me the snacks she buys her kids at Costco.

(I am not kidding about this.  I really do like to watch grocery haul videos. I just wish more big families would make them.  My favorite grocery/meal planning/shopping videos are by Jamerill Stewart — who does have a large family — and How Jen Does It, who does not.)

Anyway, we took Gareth out to eat for his (belated) birthday and hit a bookstore last weekend.  George bought the long-awaited new Rick Riordan novel, Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard, and devoured it in about a day and a half.  The bookstore we like to go to is mostly new but does have a small used section, and I found a couple of books that I have been meaning to read for a while (and that are on Ambleside’s Year 12 list): Gifted Hands, by Ben Carson, and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which probably almost everyone has read but me at this point.

Chipmunk picked out a book called Try This!: 50 Fun Experiments for the Mad Scientist in You by National Geographic, and is keen to try out the lemon battery experiment. We have all the materials; it’s just a matter of Chipmunk not showing up to remind me at five minutes before lunchtime, “Can we make a lemon battery now?” and me remembering later on in the afternoon when there really is time.  And Leo chose Richard Scarry’s The Adventures of Lowly Worm, which we have been reading over and over again for the past several days. Rather, we have been reading the part called “The Broken Foot” over and over again for the past few days.

I don’t know if Richard Scarry actually wrote this one or not.  There are some typos in the text, and the caliber of the writing is a bit lower than it is in Richard Scarry’s classic storybooks.  But Leo loves Huckle and Lowly (and also reading about casts apparently) and he doesn’t seem to mind.

More good busyness: Altar Server Training, which is also helping us all with our Latin; ballroom dance and high school theology group for the older kids; band and choir lessons, which had a break last week but started up again this week; and FNE, which involved a camp out last weekend, the first ever for some of my boys. (Huck came down with a cold and couldn’t go with his brothers, so he stayed home and ate ice cream and watched old Doctor Who episodes instead.)  Andy was too busy supervising to get pictures, but there was canoeing and cooking on a campfire and sleeping in a tent on a cold, dark night and a heritage festival at a nearby state park where the boys got to dry fire a musket, throw a tomahawk, and watch a blacksmith make bullets. And Chipmunk sang 2 or 3 verses of the Battle Hymn of the Republic for everyone… Which he has memorized by listening to his favorite CD, the soundtrack to Ken Burns Civil War, over and over. So it was good, even without pictures.

The busyness that was just sort of “enh”: Andy was out of town for all of week 6, I had a doctor’s appointment, Chipmunk had vision therapy, we had to buy food, and Katydid took the PSAT. This year’s PSAT incorporated the changes that are coming to the SAT in 2016. The paperwork took longer, the test itself was longer, and all told, everything took a good four hours. Based on what Katydid reported, the changes to the reading section are maddeningly in line with Common Core, but she said the entire test seemed easier to her, and she didn’t think it was just because she was a year older. Scores won’t come back until after Christmas this year, which is later than in the past, so… We’ll just have to wait and see.

And the bad busyness: We have been busy trying to find a new home for our dog. When the boys run and wrestle, she often gets overexcited and plays much too rough with them, and her constant barking at night is annoying the neighbors. We got an angry complaint last weekend from one of our neighbors who turned out to be having a very bad day and who brought us some beautiful roses from her bush to apologize…. But the dog, erf. I think she’s still going to have to go. (If you know anybody who needs a giant outside dog who likes to bark and chew hoses and recycling, let me know. Actually, she’s a very friendly dog, and I think she just belongs on a farm with older boys who don’t wrestle quite as much.)

Oh, yeah, and I think we did some schoolwork, too…

Pre-K/K:

While my 2 and 5 year olds don’t precisely do schoolwork, I thought I would start with them because I didn’t mention them last time. I have to tell you that what my 5 year old is doing will probably look a lot like pre-k to many of you (except for the fact that he has taken over the bulk of kitchen clean-up on his own these days.) Most of what he’s doing would be considered “Practical Life” , or art:

• loading and unloading the dishwasher
• emptying trash cans
• swiffering (dry and wet)
• collecting and sorting laundry
• vacuuming
• helping cook and bake
• sawing and nailing wood
• punching paper with punches of different shapes
• playdough
• making things out of cardboard boxes with tape, scissors, yarn, etc.

Many of you are looking at that list and wondering if he’s assigned all those chores. The answer is, he’s only assigned to collect and sort the laundry. The rest of his activities are completely voluntary, and don’t think I don’t appreciate the fact that he does more work around the house than the big kids on many days! But, he’s 5, and this too shall probably pass.  Unfortunately.

He also gets 30 minutes of iPad time every day, which he uses to do Starfall apps and Montessori phonics and handwriting. That’s also completely up to him.

My 2 year old is still spending a lot of time coloring on the same piece of cardboard.  When he finally decides he’s done, I think I’m going to frame it.

(At this point, there are so many layers of crayon and oil pastel on the cardboard that it’s like one of those scratch art projects.)

And of course we read books… although not as many as I would like.

Picture Books (read to the boys 8 and younger multiple times)

All of these except Arthur’s Halloween (which, honestly, I am not terribly fond of) are family favorites. Too Many Pumpkins has lost both covers at this point, and Petunia — while a more recent acquisition — was one of my favorite books as a child.

Board Books for the Two Year Old

 

2nd/3rd Grade

Chipmunk is working steadily through Singapore 2A, and would probably be able to go faster if I could get my act together.  He had apparently figured out how to carry on his own but not how to borrow.  So we have been working on borrowing this week.  We’re also continuing with our homemade reading lessons. Chipmunk participates in our morning time and I read aloud to him and to his younger brothers two other times a day (usually), but he also spends a lot of time outside.  And he likes to play chess on the iPad.

We just finished up The House at Pooh Corner as our read-aloud.  Technically it was for Chipmunk, but Leo and the twins also listened in.  No one much liked the ending.  Not because it was bad, of course, but because it was sad, and all of us wanted more Pooh.

4th grade (Ambleside Year 3.5… ish)

The Men Who Found America has officially made it onto my favorites list.  This is an Ambleside Year 3.5 selection, but I don’t know why it hasn’t been included in one of the regular years.  I find it to be a very balanced and highly readable treatment of some of the most important explorers of North America.  I also like it a lot for copywork selections.  All of Huck’s copywork is coming from this book right now.  I choose a paragraph from each chapter and write it down on Handwriting Without Tears paper for Huck to copy.  A paragraph usually ends up being a few days’ worth of work for him, since he’s only required to copy one page a day.  (He still has problems with handwriting, which is why we are not using cursive or smaller paper.)

The other books Huck is reading right now:

• Loyola Kids Book of Saints (He finished up Saints & Heroes by Ethel Pochocki.)
• The Incredible Journey by Shiela Burnford (I know this is included on the Ambleside lists somewhere, but I can’t remember for which year.)
• The Secret of Everyday Things (Farbre, Year 3.5)

Plus a bunch of books about chess.

We also wrapped up all the topics from Singapore 3A that I wanted to cover with him, and next week we’ll begin 3B.

4th grade (Ambleside Year 3.5/4… ish)

Dennis finished several of his books in Week 6 and needed new ones, so we went back to the list and the shelves and found some more.  He finished up:

The Cure of Ars: The Priest Who Out-Talked the Devil
The Struggle for Sea Power by M.B. Synge
Crossbows and Crucifixes: A Novel of the Priest Hunters and the Brave Young Men Who Fought Them by Henry Garnett

Although some of M.B. Synge’s books are given as alternatives on the Year 3.5 and 4 book lists, The Struggle for Sea Power (which is largely about England’s battles with Napoleon) is not one of them.  Dennis enjoyed it and learned not only quite a bit about Napoleon from it, but also some bits and pieces of poetry, too. But when it came time to pick a new history book, his one request was, “Can we read a book written by an American?”  I have heard this same complaint before about some of the books Ambleside recommends as history spines, especially for the first part of American history; they are largely written by British authors in the early 20th century (This Country of Ours comes immediately to mind) and, as Dennis informed me,  they “usually think the British are better than everybody else.”  In particular, I think Dennis took issue with how Synge handled the War of 1812.  I had been going to hand him This Country of Ours, but instead we settled on George Washington’s World and H.A. Grueber’s The Story of The Thirteen Colonies and The Great Republic, which is used by Memoria Press.

(You’ll also note that this is all somewhat out of chronological order. This happens because I let my kids choose their reading from a handful of titles that I approve. I do find that they usually can keep things straight, and it certainly doesn’t seem to hurt the connections that they make.)

Dennis also started The Blessed Friend of Youth – Saint Don Bosco and Hornblower Goes to Sea, a condensation of the Hornblower books for young readers. (HT: Jen’s booklists.)

7th grade (Year 6.5)

There is no Ambleside Year 6.5, but that’s kind of what we’re working on this year for George in 7th grade.  Last year he expanded the modern focus of Ambleside Year 6 to last all year instead of just one term, and now he’s going a little more in depth into Greece and Rome.  I started out the year asking him to read The Iliad (Lattimore translation), but it proved a little too tough for him.  Since really all I was after was an introduction to the real story (he’s read or listened to many adaptations for children), I am letting his listen to the Iliad on Librivox.  The recording on Librivox is the Samuel Butler translation, so it’s somewhat archaic and also uses all the Roman names for the Greek gods — which is a bit confusing.  But I couldn’t find one of the other, more modern translations online.  While Gareth was here, we had some interesting lunchtime conversations about the Iliad and the Odyssey, since he had just finished reading both (again) in his freshman literature class.

Other books George is reading for school:

• St. Athanasius
• Great Myths of the World
• Augustus Caesar’s World
• Whatever Happened to Penny Candy
• Archimedes and the Door of Science

As far as science goes, we were going to follow AO’s Year 7 science, but George has been reading so many books about animal behavior and wilderness survival on his own that I haven’t worried about science at all yet for him.  (I should sit down and do a compilation of all the books he’s gone through in the past several weeks.)

Other books George is using:

• Saxon 7/6 (with the Saxon Teacher CDs)
• Prima Latina
• Seton Religion 7
• Seton’s Better Handwriting for Young Catholics

My goal is to get back on track with grammar and to phase out the handwriting book, which George has been using to refresh his knowledge of the cursive alphabet, and to phase in actual copywork.

11th grade (timeframe corresponding to AO Year 9)

Katydid’s schedule finally started to click during these two weeks.  It took a long time this year, which seems to be the pattern with junior years, at least in my house.  (Or anyway, she’s the second kid who’s had this problem with juggling junior year.)  But she finally seems to have gotten things sorted out with her German teacher, Environmental Science seems to be moving along fine, and I can’t say enough good things about the teacher of her Precalculus class at Wilson Hill Online Academy.  The quality of the teacher is making a huge difference for her in math.  Her grades haven’t changed too much, but her attitude toward math is much, much better.

Outside her classes, we’re still struggling to make the proper time for reading and writing.  Katydid handles her own schedule (a practice which I believe has helped Gareth in his first year in college).  I don’t give her prescribed times to do anything, but I do give her deadlines for narrations, papers, etc.  I hope to wrap up our first term work around Thanksgiving, but right now Katydid is still working her way through The Scarlet Letter, Pope’s Essay on Man (AO Year 9, and easily the most difficult thing she is reading right now), C.S Lewis’ Mere Christianity, primary source selections from Seton’s American Literature for the colonial period, and selections from Prose and Poetry of America (St. Thomas More, Volume 3)about the colonial period.  She has also been reading from William Bennett’s America: The Last Best Hope (Volume I): From the Age of Discovery to a World at War.
And so that’s where things stood as we went into Halloween week, a week in which we always (every year) get sick.  This year was, unfortunately, no exception, although the cold was pretty mild.  But more about that in the next Learning in Review post.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Learning in Review 2015-16: Weeks 3, 4, and 5, in which I try to cover the basics

Some years time seems to go by quickly.  Second trimesters tend to do that, too.  The good news is that some of that second trimester energy has finally kicked in for me, and I have been able to tackle some of the problem areas in the house which have gotten out of control over the past few months.  I also actually made some homemade gluten free raisin bread for breakfast this Sunday instead of just doling out Cheerios in paper bowls.  (Did you know that most varieties of Cheerios are entirely gluten-free now? Except I still can’t eat them because they contain cornstarch.  Oh well…) Since I changed my diet a couple of years ago, my pregnancies do seem to be a little easier — less back pain, fewer contractions, a little more energy.

The bad news is that this isn’t really translating into more homeschooling.  (It has translated into a pantry that I can actually get into to put food away, which is also important.)  We’re still struggling to develop a good routine.  We have a lot of different factors to take into account this year.  For example:

1. Changing up the chore routine because Gareth went to college.
2. Mom is pregnant.
3. The two year old’s favorite pastime is to sneak into the bedrooms with a crayon and close the door.  (Fortunately, oil pastel is easily removed from most furniture with Murphy Soap and water. )
4. The two year old’s second favorite pastime is to stand on a chair and yell at the top of his lungs whenever anyone tries to talk.
5. The two year old’s third favorite pastime is to try to climb out the front window through the screen. (It’s a low window, don’t worry.)

You probably get the picture.  Then there are Katydid’s online classes to plan around, the fact that we’re totally out of the house all morning until early afternoon one day a week, and this used to be the day we used to do the “extra” chores — like cleaning the bathrooms, picking up all the shredded kleenexes and post-it flags the two year old has plastered all over the floor in the computer room (tied for his third favorite thing to do, actually), excavating the floor in the boys’ room so you can actually walk through it… etc., etc.

Anyway, we have sort of a de facto routine going which allows us to accomplish a modest amount most days, but I tend to feel guilty when I read Facebook and blog posts about what other moms are doing.  I am not doing much pre-reading, I am only managing math three days a week with a couple of my kids, reading lessons for my non-reading 8 year old are a stretch even for short Charlotte Mason lessons, and if Morning Time happens twice a week, it’s a good week.  We also have yet to pull out a nature journal after one of our nature walks, I haven’t picked up Latin again my twins, and grammar is hit and miss (mostly miss).

But we’re trundling along.  On the plus side, we are taking nature walks almost every week, George and the twins are reading quite a bit on their own (and they like their books), I feel like both Huck and Chipmunk are making progress with their math in spite of the fact that it’s only happening three times a week, and I’ve got George going with both Latin and written narrations. (Not Latin narrations, although that would be awesome.)  Katydid is starting to get her classes all sorted out, although she’s had some administrative troubles with German, and I’m reading to my eight year and five year old about an hour almost every day.  (Almost every day, in two thirty minute time slots, in case you’re wondering.)

Maybe it all works out in the end.  What I discovered from the college application process — and now, after seeing how Gareth is doing at Christendom about mid-semester — is that those years in which we didn’t get much accomplished (the ones in which there were infant twins and a couple of moves, for instance, and even that one high school year that didn’t have a whole lot to put in it) were kind of leveled out by the better years.  His ACT scores were good, he did a good job on his essays, and he was even chosen as a finalist for Christendom’s full tuition Padre Pio scholarship.  And he seems to have made the transition to a difficult liberal arts program pretty well.  Not that I don’t still worry about not doing enough with my kids still at home, but I guess it’s easier now for me to take a deep breath and not freak out about it.

A few details… with only a few Instagram/iPad pictures, because my computer is giving me trouble and I can’t download any photos… (I’m hoping to get that fixed soon!)

One of the biggest events of the last three weeks… The twins turned 10! They decided they wanted to make a Candyland cake and decorated it with Teddy Grahams and gummy bears.  The Hershey’s Cookies and Cream bar (Dennis’ favorite) is supposed to be a raft on the river.  The jury is still out as to whether or not the gummies in the water fell overboard or purposely dove in to go swimming.

Math

I mentioned in my last Learning in Review post that I had picked up Singapore 3A for Huck, which seemed an odd choice because he is a mathy fourth grader.  I did it to patch some of the holes left by our exclusive use of Beast Academy.  We were actually switching back and forth, covering a little bit of Singapore, then back to Beast Academy, when Huck got a little deeper into the distributive property section of Beast Academy 3B and I discovered that while Beast Academy teaches kids the reasons behind multidigit multiplication pretty well (eg., 67 x 3 = (60 x 3) + (3×7)), it never ever, in all four books at this level, teaches kids the regular method for multiplying 67×3, where you just carry the 2.

At that point, our discussion went like this:

Me: “Do you want to see how to do this a shortcut way?”

Huck: “Sure.”

I show him how we all learned how to multiply larger numbers and explain how it fits with what Beast Academy just showed him.

Me: “So do you want to go back to Beast Academy or do you just want to do some more shortcut multiplication in Singapore?”

Huck: (looking at me like I’m insane)  “I want to do it the shortcut way.”

So we covered that section, which didn’t take long, and then we moved on to long division with remainders, which took a bit longer to click, but only because he was doing so much of it in his head and skipping steps that I gave up and showed him the shortcut way to do long division, too.  We are probably going to move on from 3A in the next week or so, after we cover adding and subtracting money (which basically means keeping the decimal point lined up.) At this point, I think we may be done reviewing 3B by Christmas.

As far as Beast Academy goes… I think we’ll be using it more as a supplement.  Unfortunately, it’s a little too Common Core to serve as our exclusive math program anymore.  While it is nicely challenging, sometimes it is also needlessly complicated.

Written Narrations

Over the summer, I read a terrific blog post by Karen Glass called “Beginning Charlotte Mason’s Methods with Older Students”.  This post is not only helpful to those who may be just beginning a more Charlotte Mason-ish/living books approach with children aged 11 or 12 and up, but also to anybody who’s wondering what appropriate writing goals are for grades 7th-12th, anyone with kids who were late readers and writers, or anyone who maybe — like me — doesn’t follow the Ambleside Online curriculum or Charlotte Mason’s methods in general to the letter.  The post focuses heavily on written narration and composition, and how to help your child make the transition from oral narration to written narration, and from there, to the formal study of composition.

I was interested in reading this article particularly because George, as a late reader at the age of 10.5 and a dyslexic, definitely did not start shifting into written narration mode at the recommended time of 4th or 5th grade.  Reading didn’t really click with him until the middle of 5th grade, and although his reading is now excellent, he still has problems with spelling, language mechanics, and translating the sentences in his head onto paper.  We also don’t do many oral narrations in the most formal Charlotte Mason sense — after a single reading, while calling it a “narration” — which I think probably does help with writing, except that it absolutely kills my kids’ enjoyment of their books.  This is not to say that we never do narrations; on the contrary, I ask for narrations quite often.  But I never call it “a narration”, and it often comes some time after we (or they) have finished the reading, in the context of a normal conversation.  This certainly still gives me a handle on their comprehension of what they’re reading as well as giving them an opportunity to chew on their readings a little bit, to see what they think about them, but our informal conversations can be a little more difficult to convert into the written word.

I’ve just started asking George for two or three written narrations a week.  He types them on the computer because he doesn’t like to write by hand, and after he does them I show him some things about language mechanics and spelling and we talk about how you shouldn’t say, “Oh, yeah,” in a formally written paragraph, and then that’s it.  It’s mostly about the practice at this stage, because many of these issues will simply get better with time, experience, and more reading.  I’ve also asked Dennis for his first written narration, which I am allowing him to type as well because handwriting is difficult for him.  Dennis doesn’t have the dyslexic hurdles that George has had to deal with, so he’s beginning these at about the recommended age.  I’m curious to see how this works out, as I didn’t ask for written narrations from my older kids until they were 12 or 13.

So far George has done written narrations of Augustus Caesar’s World and Great Myths of the World.  I asked Dennis to narrate (in writing) from The Cure of Ars: The Priest Who Out-talked the Devil (A Vision Book).

 

Reading Lessons

A page from Chipmunk’s binder, in which he wanted to write down all the words he knew how to spell and then we had a reading lesson.  It wasn’t the most exciting set of sentences I could have come up with.  Usually I try to make my writing for early readers a little more interesting!

The main problem I have about not using a planned out reading curriculum is that it’s really easy to let reading slide, especially when the non-reader in question has a habit of disappearing before you can make him sit down.  But I think that approaching reading in this more informal way can be a lot more meaningful to the child.  It certainly seems to go more smoothly.  Since Chipmunk’s eyes are still bothering him (after almost 18 weeks of vision therapy), it’s easier for him to read words I write on paper than to read the smaller font of a regular reader, even something like Go, Dog, Go.  So generally what we do is this: when we sit down to “do some reading”, we might start out with him spelling words with tiles or writing some words down that he already knows.  I try to build on that knowledge to teach him new words.  (For instance, he spelled “apple” one day — “appl.” I told him about the silent e, then we used “apple” to add “little” to his list.)  Then I usually take the words we’ve worked with and write a little story with them.  I usually try to make the stories a little creative (i.e., funny), but sometimes (obviously) my creativity fails me and we are left with standard reader fare.

My other non-reader is five and currently using the Montessori phonics apps on the iPad on his own.  Sometimes I feel a little guilty about it, but if he learns to read this way, I will jump up and down and shout glory hallelujah, having thereby avoided the usual three to five years of agonizing over it.

Read Alouds

Our current nightly read alouds are Ambleside selections, so I won’t link them:

Winnie-the Pooh (A. A. Milne) — finished

(After we read the first chapter, my boys proclaimed that “Paddington was better.”  I don’t think they’re saying that now.  As soon as we finished Winnie-the-Pooh they immediately asked me for The House at Pooh Corner.  They especially liked the Heffalump.)

The House at Pooh Corner (A.A. Milne) — halfway through

The Jungle Book (Rudyard Kipling) — Andy is reading this one to the boys at night

(You can see what we’re reading for Morning Time in my recent update!)

 

Picture Books

(I know there were a few more of these, but either I can’t remember them or I can’t find them to see their titles!)

I have to include a note here about Flicka, Ricka, and Dicka.  This is a book about three Swedish girls, in a series that my mother-in-law — whose family is Swedish — grew up reading as a young girl.  There is a boy series, too, called Snipp, Snapp, Snurr.  We only own this one book and I don’t know that I’ve ever read it to anybody.  I found it when I was changing out the seasonal book basket, and I asked Leo if he wanted to read it.  It is about girls, but he grudgingly consented… only to demand that I read it again as soon as it was over.  So, just because you have a bunch of boys, don’t totally discount the girl books! Your boys might surprise you.

 

 

 

My First Podcast… and a Morning Time update

A little shameless self promotion this morning… I recently had the privilege of talking to Pam at Ed Snapshots about how we have Morning Time with our larger than average family.  I wasn’t sure what to expect about recording a podcast but it was a lot of fun!

You can find the podcast here: YMB#5: Big Family Morning Time: A Conversation with Angela Boord

In the podcast, Pam and I talk about how our family has managed a Morning Time for most of the past ten years or more with a wide mix of ages and lots of toddlers.  (Hint: It’s not perfect and it’s certainly not quiet!)

Our Morning Time is a little different this year than it has been in past years, because our schedule has had a big mix-up with our oldest going to college and our chores being redistributed and one day of our week taken up with outside activities and me being pregnant.  We’re only managing to sit down together about twice a week (although I’m working on that) to do more than say our prayers.  I’ve had to reassess what I was planning to read, too.  Here’s what we’re doing for Morning Time now:

Saint of the Day
Memory/Latin: The Confiteor
The Thinking Toolbox: Thirty-five Lessons That Will Build Your Reasoning Skills

Our Lady’s Book

Tree in the Trail

And just yesterday we tried out Focus On Middle School Physics  at the twins’ request.

(I think this program is probably a little on the easy side for middle schoolers, so I’m using it for my 4th graders this year because they wanted a science text with experiments and an experiment kit — available from Home Science Tools.  It does seem to lend itself to reading aloud, though.)

We have Morning Time in stages this year.  My high school age daughter stays for prayers, Latin memorization, and The Thinking Toolbox.  I read Our Lady’s Book and Tree in the Trail to all the boys, including my 7th grader, and we have a lot of discussion.  If he wants to leave to do his other schoolwork around this point, that’s ok.  Then I read the Physics book to the twins and Chipmunk (age 8) listens in, too… although he has his own Elementary Chemistry book that I read to him later on, when I just focus on reading to him and my five year old (although his big brothers often listen in as well, even if I’m reading picture books.)

That’s what’s working for us at the moment.  It’s definitely not perfect, but it does seem (mostly) to be doable — which is what counts in the long run, I think.

 

 

Learning in Review 2015-16: Weeks 1 and 2 (and a pregnancy update)

I think I can finally say that yes, we have started school.  We aren’t getting to everything yet that I would like to, but as we gradually get used to the routine (and get over the dregs of our colds), we’re able to fit more into our days.  I’m feeling better, too — finally! — although I still cannot make myself be a drill sergeant in the mornings, and thus, we didn’t have Morning Time ( we don’t really call it that) until Wednesday of week 2.  It was a good morning time, but short — we had an involved theological discussion about the Seven Sorrows of Mary, the Immaculate Conception, whether or not Mary could actually have told the Angel Gabriel no, and then — I don’t know how we got there — but we also defined “heresy” and “schism”.  And then I read from Our Lady’s Book (HT: Celeste, although I can’t remember where on her blog I found it mentioned!), which I think is going to be a wonderful read-aloud for everyone, but — that was it.  It only lasted about thirty minutes and then it was 11:00 and Katydid had an online German class and George was concerned he wouldn’t be able to get his Latin done and history read before lunchtime.  Still, it made me feel better about the week.

But… the biggest news of the week has to do with my pregnancy.  I had my ultrasound this week, and everything looks great.  We did get one big surprise, though… and if you’re a Facebook friend or follow me on Instagram you already know what it is…

WE’RE HAVING A GIRL.

Exactly none of my kids believed us when we told them.  Andy texted Katydid (who was in charge at home while we were at my appointment) to let her know, and even after he texted her the ultrasound picture on which the doctor had typed “Girl”, she still met me at the front door saying, “So… it’s really a girl? Dad’s not joking?”

To be fair, that was kind of the same conversation I had with the doctor.

So we’re all still a bit stunned, in a happy way, and also maybe a bit overwhelmed because the bedroom situation in our house was bad to begin with and now it’s even worse, and I don’t think there’s any room downstairs for girl toys. Of course, we’ll have a little while to figure those things out because the baby always stays in our room anyway, and I don’t think she’ll need a dollhouse as a newborn.

(Although, you know, I have been dollhouse-deprived for a long time!)

The other events of the week weren’t quite as out of the ordinary.

Chores

One reason it’s taking us a while to get settled into a school routine is that we have a new chore routine.  Katydid and George are taking over Gareth’s old chores, which were big ones: kitchen and bathrooms.  Since they moved up on the chore ladder, the other kids had to be redistributed as well.  Leo, as the youngest with assigned chores, has now taken over gathering and sorting the laundry, which he does pretty well except that the novelty has worn off.  So for the past three weeks there’s been some extra time involved in remembering who has to do what, and what standards need to be lived up to when doing it.  (Not that my standards are so very high, but if there is still a big lump of macaroni and cheese underneath the table I can tell you didn’t move any chairs to sweep under there.  Just saying.)

We’ve also been trying out a new grocery shopping routine which, sadly, is not working.  In the interests of simplifying our lives, I was trying to do most of the grocery shopping at one store with the boys while Katydid was in choir.  But shopping with five boys and a toddler who likes to shriek loudly and constantly demand whatever fruit you have just put in the cart is difficult. (I have tried just about everything I can think of to keep him happy and quiet, but nothing seems to work.)  This past Friday we had an unpleasant encounter with a woman in the cereal aisle and ended up leaving before we got all our shopping done.   So now it’s back to square one in trying to figure out how to juggle homeschooling, outside activities, chores… and food sensitivities, eating, grocery shopping, and the budget.

(Speaking of which, I’ve been enjoying Elizabeth Foss’ dinner time periscopes all month.  Seeing how much her little girls do has prompted me to get my own kids more involved in the cooking process, which is something I have always meant to do but have generally failed to do because I’m so often in a rush.  Sending a kid off to college has made me rethink my habits, though.  Also, I took her Aunt Lisette’s advice to make my marinara sauce with only garlic (not onions) and to put seafood in it (smoked clams).  Fantasic sauce! Even my sauce-hating boys liked it.)

Outside Activities

Week 2 was a big week for outside activities and appointments, too, which always ends up being a little disruptive, even if many of the activities are good ones. In addition to band, choir, and the ill-fated grocery shopping on Fridays, we also had two doctor’s appointments (one unscheduled for an ear infection, the other for my ultrasound), vision therapy, altar boy training (my four middle boys are learning to serve the Extraordinary Form of the Mass), and the boys’ very first FNE  meeting.

FNE stands for Federation of North American Explorers.  It’s a Catholic alternative to Boy Scouts which has grown out of European scouting, and it’s very similar to Boy Scouts except that faith is an integral part of the program. (The goal is not just for boys to become good men and leaders, but to become good Catholic men and leaders.)  Andy and some of the other homeschool dads in our area have been working for months to get a new chapter off the ground in our area, and Thursday night was their first meeting.  They had a great turnout and all the boys had a good time.  Andy is leading the Explorers (age 12-16), but what’s nice about this group is that ages 5-12 can also participate, and that means that all the boys except the baby can be part of the program.  Leo is an Otter, Chipmunk and the twins are Timberwolves, and George is an Explorer.  They are all terribly excited, and I think the dads are quite pleased (and relieved!) with how the first meeting went.  Next week they’re going to do their first hike, led by a naturalist down at one of our favorite nature preserves. (One of the FNE requirements for boys aged 12-16 is to keep a nature notebook.  How helpful is that to a homeschool mom?!)

Nature Study/Science

Speaking of naturalists and nature preserves… we’ve been doing our fair share of nature-related “stuff”, but — alas — almost zero nature notebooking.  We’ve been going someplace new every Friday, and I think we have canvassed every nature area within fifteen minutes of band class.  For my local readers, those places would be:

The Wolf River Greenway (and Germantown Greenway; they have different entrances)
Lucius Burch Natural Area (which we have visited before)
Riverwoods State Natural Area

The Wolf River at Lucius Burch Natural Area

(All of these are nestled in a quite urban/suburban environment, by the way, so don’t think that just because you live in a city that you can’t do nature study. I’m hoping to do a post about that soon!)

Unfortunately, I am just too beat after we get home from our busy Fridays (see above) to follow through on the nature notebooks in the afternoon, even though I would really like to draw in mine! I’m thinking about pulling them out on Saturdays instead.

This backflow channel from the river was almost dried up, but still deep enough for baby catfish.

Last Saturday, we attended the annual Hummingbird Festival at Strawberry Plains Audubon Center.  The big draw this year for the boys was not hummingbirds but the predator biologist who had worked on the Yellowstone Wolf Project.  Katydid, George, and Dennis all attended several presentations, on chimney swifts, predators in myth and reality, and endangered species.  Katydid and Dennis also held a really big snake.

And I came away from their native plant sale with some woodland asters to plant out with the azaleas.

Katydid has a project going in our azalea garden right now for her AP Environmental Science class.  She was supposed to find at least 40 pill bugs, mark them with red nail polish, then let them go and count marked and unmarked pillbugs for the next seven days in order to calculate population density and dispersal.  She’s had a hard time getting this going because it’s been so dry that pillbugs have at some points been hard to find, and now whenever she counts she finds many, many more unmarked pillbugs than marked.  I keep telling her that this is part of doing fieldwork … you know, trying things and having them not work out.  She’s wondering if the nail polish didn’t dry well before she let the pillbugs go.  We certainly haven’t had any rain that could have washed it off, though.

Math and Grammar

Math is something we have been doing faithfully for the past two weeks, and I have done a reasonable job at introducing a new grammar program for George (7th grade) and the twins (4th grade).  On Jen’s recommendation, I switched this year to Winston Grammar Basic.  Last year I tried to get going with KISS Grammar for 6th and 3rd grades, which I like in theory, but in practical application I found that it seemed to skip some explanation that the boys needed.  Winston Grammar seems to be a good fit so far.  None of them like using the cards because they are at the noun/article/pronoun/verb level of analysis and it is easy, but it seems to me like a very Montessori idea that may come in handy as the sentences get more involved.  Doing the exercises takes at most 15-20 minutes, and they haven’t been doing them quite every day… although I have George going a bit faster because he needs to.  Unfortunately, I can’t group them all together for their explanations because then it’s suddenly as if I teach in a middle school, complete with class clowns.  (Why is that, by the way?)

Math has had a little bit of a shake-up this year, but not much.  Chipmunk is actually doing a formal math program, which is a change; I put him in Singapore 2A, but I think he is probably going to go through it pretty quickly.  In spite of having done no formal math ever, the first part of 2A is definitely review for him.  He also likes math and seems to like the way the book is laid out and how it explains things, so I’m happy about this decision.

I also picked up 3A for Huck.  This is a somewhat weird choice, considering that Huck has been working in Beast Academy’s Level 3, which teaches kids tricks for squaring enormous numbers, but Huck has some odd holes in his math knowledge.

Let me rephrase that.  They’re not exactly “holes”.  Maybe blind spots is a better word.  What has happened is that he has come up with a lot of ingenious ways to do math — complicated math even — in his head.  But sometimes that backfires, especially if the numbers are big.  He’ll lose track of one number, and then when I try to explain where he went wrong using paper and pencil he looks at me like I’m from Mars.  We ran into this the other day when part of his problem involved subtracting with regrouping.  I got out the base ten blocks to demonstrate, but for some reason, nothing I said made any sense to him until I figured out how he was working the problem and tried to come at it from that way.  Using Beast Academy alone does nothing to remedy problems like these because it includes no review and each workbook contains only one or two topics.  Also — because it is written with Common Core standards in mind (although it isn’t entirely based on them) — I think that some of the methods it teaches for problem solving are needlessly complicated.  Huck has difficulty with writing and therefore doesn’t like to write, but as math gets more complicated, he will need to do some of it on paper.  So the plan right now is to use Singapore for review and to fill in the gaps that Beast Academy leaves.  It’s not going to take Dennis very long to get through 3A and 3B considering that he won’t have to use all of either, but I’m really kicking myself that I’ve let things get to this point with a kid who really likes math.  Of course, to be fair… I’m not sure I could have gotten him to sit down and actually go consistently through a math program at age 6 or 7 (or 4 or 5), but still… I don’t consider this an optimal situation.

Kindergarten

Leo built a bridge out of pegs from the pegboard.  (From Instagram)

I am keeping Leo’s kindergarten informal, but my goal is to do a lot of strewing for him.  In particular, I want to set up some Montessori-ish shelves for him, but I haven’t yet gotten around to doing that; instead I just have a few boxes of Lauri materials out for him to use (Pegboard, lacing shapes, etc.).  Of course, he can always get to the Cuisenaire rods, and I’ve loaded the iPad with educational apps.  (He likes Starfall).  But I’d like to be a little more intentional with him.  He has a different skill set than most of my other kindergartners did; he can build a cross out of wood and paint it; he helps his dad outside regularly; he knows how to take care of the chickens and feed the dog and cat, although he can’t manage the big chicken waterer yet; and he knows a lot more about cooking at this age than the other boys did.  (In fact, he recognizes many spices by smell.)  He also likes to memorize books and “read” them to himself.  But he’s a little slower to come to letters and numbers, though he’s at least somewhat interested in them, and he has a lot of problems holding a pencil and even drawing representationally the way most 5 year olds do.

Helping make pizzas (From Instagram)

I meant to work on his shelves this weekend, but then I ended up spending most of Saturday making food.  And taking a nap.

Read-Alouds, Picture Books, and Read-Alones

I’ve done somewhat better at sitting down with the three youngest boys to read aloud, but have done nowhere near the amount of reading aloud that I feel I ought to be doing.  (Certainly nothing like the amount of time the two oldest got every day when they were little!)  Here’s what I read aloud this week:

Plus several twaddley Curious George adaptations and a couple of Spot board books that JM wanted read over and over again.

Unfortunately, I’ve only been reading aloud to the younger three and haven’t managed anything of note to the middle boys.  George is listening to Winter Holiday on audio and just finished reading A Philadelphia Catholic in King James’s Court, which I had given him as a school book. Now he wants another book like it, but I’m not sure I know of any! I passed on Tom Playfair for a try.

The twins are enjoying reading the AO Year 3 and 3.5 science selections: Storybook of Science and The Secret of Everyday Things.  Dennis (who is reading Storybook of Science) went out looking for ants and plant lice (aphids) the other day, and Huck was very interested in the discussion about plant dyes in The Secret of Everyday Things, especially that roses and violets will turn white when exposed to fire.  We might have to try this — at least with roses — if we can build a safe fire.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

First week of the new school year… sort of

I’m trying to fix an issue with Feedly, which doesn’t seem to be updating my feed.  So if some of you see this twice, I apologize.

I keep pushing back the beginning of our school year.  First I was hoping to do some work with the boys in July and August when it was hot so we could take off some time in September when it was cooler.  But no energy, brain fog, etc, and getting Gareth ready for college plus two long, cross-country trips (one to bring him to college) put an end to those plans.  Then I was going to start school for everyone on August 31.  But we got sick.  (Some kind of wicked cough/flu-ish thing).  So last week only Katydid completed anything like a real schedule; I tried to read to the boys a little more and we got some of our books nailed down, but that was about it.

This Tuesday is our new goal for the “official” start of school.

But I thought I would report on our Week Zero anyway.  For one thing, I haven’t posted anything in a long time.  (You may or may not have noticed.) I have a few drafts in progress, but I’ve run into problems with adding photos.  My “start-up disc is almost full” perpetually now so I have to delete pictures in order to download new ones.  I’ve tried moving my Aperture library to an external hard drive and then just automatically downloading all my new photos onto the external hard drive (which is theoretically possible), but none of the external hard drives seem to work with this Mac.  Is there anything I’m missing?  If you have any ideas, please let me know.

I have a few Instagram pictures for this post, but alas, not very many.

For a second thing, it isn’t as if the boys have been sitting around twiddling their thumbs either.  I was folding laundry over the weekend and got into a discussion with most of the boys about mag-lev trains.  (Because isn’t that what everyone talks about with their kids while they fold laundry?) Anyway, in the course of the conversation, it became clear that Dennis (age 9) had read most of our books about magnetism this summer and that he had a good idea of how mag-lev trains worked.  Chipmunk and Leo (age 8 and 5) happily demonstrated with their toy trains.  I got up afterwards and wrote it all down in a notebook as proof that somebody did something this summer other than watch a bunch of mindless TV.

And for a third thing, I thought you might like a peek at the plans I do have for the year, such as they are.

One of the many block worlds the boys have been building lately, complete with its own economy and natural disasters (aka “Hurricane JM”).

Year 11

Since Katydid did the most academic work last week, I’ll start with her.  Last year, we relied heavily on Sally Thomas’ Western Civ 2: The Medieval World online lesson plans, after I made an Ambleside Online-type spreadsheet schedule for her Term 1 but had a hard time following up for Term 2.  Katydid liked all the links that Sally provided along with the readings (nicely divided by week, with writing assignments included), so we just shifted onto Sally’s schedule around the later Anglo-Saxons.  Although Sally also provides her lesson plans for 11th grade and Early Modern/American history — very helpfully, I might add — the 11th grade plans are in daily checklist format without the links and discussion which made earlier lesson plans so appealing to Katydid, so I told her that this year I would try to provide the same sort of links for history, literature, and religion on the high school blog that we created a few years ago and have used here and there when necessary throughout her high school years.  My intention was to put the lesson plans themselves online, a la Sally, but due to the circumstances of this summer, I only got as far as making a spreadsheet of Term 1 as overview.  So she’s working off that, and I’m putting related links online.

Katydid’s Year 11 is based on AO Year 9, with generous tweaks and substitutions by me.  Here’s a screenshot of part of her Term 1 schedule.  (We’ll be making changes over the course of the month as she determines what sort of workload she will have with her online classes: AP Environmental Science, German II, and Precalculus.  She’s also working her way through chemistry as a corequisite to APES, using the Spectrum Chemistry materials.)  Essay on Man, Gulliver’s Travels, the Alexander Pope poems, The Elements of Style, and Traditional Sentence Style are all AO titles, but the others are our choices. America As Seen by Its First Explorers: The Eyes of Discovery is a neat book about what North America was like when the explorers explored it. (What else would they do, right.  Anyway…)  I just took selections for the regions that we had the most experience with: Mississippi with De Soto (for whom the county we live in is named), upstate New York and French Canada, the Midwest (we used to live in Missouri), and the Mississippi River.  (AO’s geography selections in some of the upper years seem to me to be British Isles heavy.)  She wanted to read The Scarlet Letter, and the American Literature book from Seton contains primary source material collected from a Catholic point of view, which Katydid also wanted to include.  We’re only planning to use selections from the Colonial period up to about the Civil War this year.

The entire schedule is too much, though, and we’re going to have to adjust.  Last week Katydid’s German II and AP Environmental Science classes began, and they are both a lot of work.  (I don’t think she was expecting that from German, which she is again taking with Kolbe, because the workload for German I wasn’t that heavy).  She starts Precalculus this week.  Chemistry is what is throwing a wrench into the works, because she didn’t get nearly as much done over the summer as we had hoped.

Music for Everyone

Katydid’s voice teacher of the past four years moved away this year, so I had to find another musical outlet for her.  What I found was a music program for everyone.  One (early) morning a week, we pack everybody in the van so the boys can participate in a beginning band program and Katydid can sing in a choir.  There’s a gap in between their classes, so during the gap we drive to a nearby greenway and take a short nature walk.  Then I drop Katydid off at her class, and I take the boys for a quick grocery trip.  It’s exhausting (primarily the grocery shopping), but we get a lot done.  For better or worse, I’m considering working in Chipmunk’s vision therapy on that day, too, since the eye doctor is not far away from music classes, but about a forty-five minute drive from our house.  Then I would just have one driving day all week.  (Something I have never managed before.)

Year 7

George and I sat down last week to choose his books for the term from a stack I had collected.  Originally he had wanted to do an American history and outside Europe year, but when I sat down and thought about it… and looked ahead at high school… and thought about how my older two had done things… and thought about Gareth’s freshman classes (at a Catholic liberal arts college)… I decided that it might be better just to pick up the other 2/3 of AO’s Year 6, which covers the ancients.  To be honest, I don’t think AO does a great job of the ancients or of the world outside Europe, but trying to do a more traditional Ancients/Medieval/Early Modern/Modern history rotation in high school has necessitated quite a bit of squishing for us, and I’m not sure that’s a good thing either.  So George is going to do a sort of Year 6.5 this year, at least until December or thereabouts, when he’ll hopefully pick up AO Year 7.

We’re doing our Year 6.5 a little differently than just using AO’s Year 6 ancient world recommendations, which focus entirely on the Greeks and Romans.  We swapped out Bullfinch’s Age of Fable for Padric Collum’s Great Myths of the World, and instead of Guerber’s Story of the Greeks and Story of the Romans, George wants to read from Susan Wise Bauer’s History of the Ancient World, which covers the entire ancient world including China, Africa, and the Americas.  He’s also going to read The Iliad, since he’s listened to many children’s versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey on audio, and I think he read Black Ships Before Troy last year.

I don’t have any neat and tidy spreadsheets to show for him, though; all I do for the boys is to sit down with a stack of post-its and a calculator, which I use to divide up the reading in the books we’ve chosen for the term.  I write down how many pages they should target per day on the post-it, and I stick the post-it in the front of the book.  For some books they read according to the schedule, and some books they end up reading faster.  I am fairly relaxed about this.

Year 3.5/Year 4 (Grade 4)

The twins are technically both in 4th grade this year, but they are vehemently opposed to reading the same books.  So I went through the booklists for AO’s Year 3, 3.5, and 4 and wrote down the titles I thought each of the twins would be interested in that they hadn’t already read.

(More of my hi-tech homeschool planning.)

I also added titles from our shelves that I thought they would like.  Actually, we owned almost all the books listed, and I just picked up a few titles that looked particularly interesting or that filled gaps I thought needed filling.  (Not that I need excuses to buy books.)  Right now most of these books have been collected to the twins’ shelf in the kitchen, and Dennis and Huck have both put together a stack of books they want to read.  Huck’s stack actually includes a bunch of books that I didn’t write on this list that were just hanging around as free reading during the summer, but since he did it on his own before I could prompt him, I’m inclined to just let him work his way through the stack.

By the way, the twins will not read all these books this year; it’s just a list to choose from.

Year 2… or maybe 3?

Chipmunk’s birthday falls so near the cut-off date for grade placement in our school district that he could be in either 2nd grade or 3rd grade.  Because he’s a late reader, it’s easier to think of him as being in 2nd grade.  I liked the look of AO’s Year 2 for him this year, so most of the books I collected for him (for me to read aloud) come from AO Year 2.  Right now we’re reading from the book Built To Last (subtitle: Building America’s Amazing Bridges, Dams, Tunnels, and Skyscrapers.)  We’ve already renewed this book once, but that might just be because I can’t get my act together for regular bedtime reading.

Year 0 (Kindergarten)

Leo is five this year, and supposedly in kindergarten.  Please do not tell him this, though, because it is a matter of some contention.  Any learning this year that is my idea will have to be done by stealth.  To this end, I have loaded the iPad with Montessori and Starfall apps.  I’ve also been rethinking my approach to teaching reading, which will apply to Chipmunk as well.  Five of my kids are excellent readers, but I often think they learned to read in spite of me — or at the very least, not because of me.  I tend to always begin with the idea that I will be a much better homeschooler and stick to a consistent and well-developed phonics curriculum.  But after a while… we both get frustrated at the slow pace of the phonics curriculum and the lack of interesting reading material.  So at that point I throw out the phonics book and bring out the readers and we just read.  (Usually it’s at this point that we discover the underlying visual difficulties that are going to cost us thousands of dollars not covered by insurance to fix.)  The readers aren’t that interesting either, but we fight through them.  And then the kid spends his time looking at Stephen Biesty Cross-Section books or playing Spell Tower on the iPad and is suddenly able to read words like “castle” and “September”.

So this year, faced with my seventh kindergartner, and a not yet reading eight year old… I thought, if I sit down with everybody to do math for thirty minutes, and I sit down the little boys to do reading, too… I will spend three or four hours every day doing nothing but math and phonics.  Ok, so no, that is not happening.  For one thing, JM will only stand at the table and peel the labels off crayons for so long.  For another thing… I’ve been homeschooling for 14 or 15 years, and I have at least as much to go.  For me, there is no quicker road to burn-out than to focus solely on the basics day in and day out.

To make a long story short, I couldn’t bear to even think about trying to make this child sit down with a workbook every day.  So I decided that we would take a more informal approach that would maybe take into account sight words (which I find are not dealt with very well in most phonics-based curricula).  These blog posts about the Charlotte Mason approach to reading at The Joyful Shepherdess blog have been very helpful as I’ve thought about how I want to approach reading instruction this year.  It turns out that I had the wrong idea about Charlotte Mason’s approach to reading, mostly because I had always thought of it as more of a look-say approach.  As it turns out, I missed all the phonics that is supposed to be laid as a foundation.

I’ve also been rereading Teach a Child to Read With Children’s Books, which I do periodically.  I bought this book back when Gareth was a struggling reader (and the book was in print).  I’ve never seemed to be able to get it off the ground, but it’s good to have it in the back of my head.

So there’s a peek at our year as it stands right now.  I have a feeling we’re going to lean toward the more unschooly end of the spectrum this year, but some years are like that.