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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

See Me Homeschool: Thursday, February 19

 I am just squeaking into this linkup at Ordinary Lovely at the end of the month! The challenge is to show an actual homeschool day using only pictures and no words.  I’ve often kept track of our days using words, but never just pictures.  So I gave it a shot, using only (or mostly) time stamps.  See us homeschool on a fairly typical winter Tuesday in northern Mississippi…

 

<Insert the pictures various people promised me from Crossfit, choir, and Boy Scouts but failed to take >

9:30 or, “The Remains of the Day.”

Learning in Review: First Week of Advent (Week 16)

In my last Learning-in-Review post I mentioned (briefly) that I had hoped this week would be a more “normal” routine for us, but that it did not in fact turn out that way.  I jotted down a few notes on Monday, which will perhaps give you a feel for what the week was like:

Monday

I had high hopes that today would be a “normal” day when I could sit down with the younger boys and do handwriting, math, and phonics… all things that have been cut a little short lately due to illness, travel, and the constant need to provide feedback for college application essays.  Alas, it was not to be, exactly.  Today was the early action and/or scholarship deadline for a couple of Gareth’s schools, and I suggested to him that he should call and make absolutely double-sure that his applications were complete.  It was a good thing he did, because they were not.  One of them lacked a letter from me that I had tried to submit via the Common App, but the Common App is not homeschool friendly if you’re masquerading as a guidance counselor.  The other lacked an outside recommendation letter, so Gareth had to make some more phone calls.  This was a little stressful. (Perhaps more stressful than the situation actually warranted, but arrrrgh.)  And then at lunchtime, I was informed that there was poop in the garage again, except the garage door was closed early last night which made us wonder if, perhaps, the possum who eats the cat food has actually begun living in the garage instead of visiting the cat food from the outside.  So I started off my lunch by googling possum scat.  Very appetizing.

We did, in spite of everything, get some things done, but they were done largely independent of me.  (In addition to everything above, I also had to clean out the bottom of the linen closet because the boys had jammed it full of toilet paper and paper towel packages so they could use the big Amazon boxes as wolf dens. And the toilet paper and paper towel packages were spilling out into the hall and the door to the closet could not even smush closed if you shoved it.)  I did manage to read another lesson of Fallacy Detective, from Saints for Young Readers about St. Edmund Campion, and I started a new to us book for Christmas:

Everyone loved Kersti (myself included), which should tell you something since it is about a family of seven girls and all of the children to whom I read this were boys.  But they did love it, and it was the great success of the week.  Otherwise…

The possum was indeed living in the garage.

(I should warn you to scroll down a bit if you’re squeamish.  But possums kill chickens and they are impossible to get out of humane traps.  They do not play dead.)

My seven year old discovered this at about 8:30 PM on Monday night, just when we were getting ready to settle down with some bedtime reading.  Instead, Andy got his gun and chased the possum around the garage.  He shot it several times, but it retreated behind some boxes and Andy figured it would die and he would get it in the morning to bury it.

Tuesday… started out with Andy realizing that the possum was not dead yet.  So he shot it again.  And it still wasn’t dead. But he had to go to work.  So he went to work and left the hopefully soon to be dead possum in the closet behind the boxes. After the possum drama, I took a shower — hoping to get started with our morning work before 10:30 (as had happened on Monday), but just as we were sitting down to read, a delivery truck pulled up with the Boy Scout troop wreath order — only 22 boxes this year.  They hadn’t called to tell us they were coming, though, so we had to drag a bunch of stuff out of the garage… and then there was the But-I’m-Not-Dead-Yet possum, remember? We cleaned up some of the yucky stuff and stored the boxes.

At 10:30, we sat down to say our prayers and I read to the boys — from The Jesse Tree by Geraldine McCaughrean and D’Aulaire’s Greek Myths. The teenagers and I found some Old English and German poems in O Holy Night!: Masterworks of Christmas Poetry, which we also read aloud.  Melanie mentioned that she was tempted to let writing Christmas cards count as copywork, but I sunk to an all too familiar low and allowed writing Christmas lists to count as handwriting.

Which still prompted drama from a child who shall not be named, who needed COMPLETE and UTTER SILENCE to copy down Lego sets from The Lego Star Wars Visual Dictionary, probably because he was still grumpy because his brother would not play Creationary with him according to the rules and his mom told them to put Creationary away then and do their work.

Dealing with said drama meant that I did not get any reading down with the seven year old before it was lunch time, though, and we have really got to get to long vowels before Christmas.  Because this is ridiculous.

Anyway, the afternoon was more of the same because Andy came home early to bury the possum, only to discover that the possum was still not dead (!).  So he shot it again and this time — finally!! — the possum gave up the ghost.  (We both felt terrible that it had suffered for so long, but I mean, really?)  It was a very large possum and Andy buried it back in the wooded corner of the yard, which is probably now haunted with the ghosts of all the dead chickens and ducks and possums and raccoons that have been buried there over the years.  And then he was my hero and cleaned up the rest of the garage.

Wednesday… I was hopeful that we would sit down together before 10:30, but guess what.  10:30 again and I cannot remember why.  I have no idea. I think the teenagers could not be rooted out of bed and Katydid barely scooted into her 10:00 online Algebra II class on time.  At least there were no more possums!

Thursday… Now I remember why we got a late start on Wednesday.  I felt horrible.  One of my down days, and I have no idea why — just really fatigued. On Thursday I woke up feeling much better with decent energy, so I figured I had better take advantage of it to make eye appointments for everyone and to call the kitchen designer we had discovered whom we were hoping would finally be the one who worked out.  (Over the past two or three years we have tried a list of people, none of whom have called us back.)  And then there were some other things and… it was probably 10:30 before we said prayers. But at least Gareth and Katydid got their German class out of the way before that.

Friday… Friday morning is our extra chore morning, so we got started on that and then managed to slide in some math and handwriting (Christmas lists) before an abbreviated lunch.  Friday afternoon went like this: squeeze in an extra voice lesson for Katydid before the recital – home again for an hour – out again to pick up a bulk food delivery — forty minute trip to the library in the pouring rain — drop off the teenagers at church to help move table for Saturday’s Breakfast with Santa — back home again to make dinner — Andy picks up the teenagers and brings them home. It is Friday night and we are all wet and cold and done with the week.

And on the other hand, awaiting Gareth when he got home was a big package from his first choice college… with a T-shirt and acceptance letter… and so we were both very happy in retrospect for that interrupted Monday! Now there’s just a little more nail-biting as we await all the scholarship offers to come in to see if we can afford to pay for it.

Saturday… was St. Nicholas Day and Breakfast with Santa and a trip to Tractor Supply to look at buried dog fences because we are getting a puppy from a friend of ours after Christmas (a Great Pyrennes/Border Collie mix).  We hope that this dog will run off possums and raccoons and not eat the chickens.  Our friend has chickens, too, and says that her dogs are pretty good around them, so… keep your fingers crossed… maybe even the raccoon that has been digging up our front yard looking for grubs will go away.

(But back to Advent, already in progress.)

Advent/Christmas picture books:

 

George’s books from this week:

Started The Children of Noisy Village
Started Edmund Campion: Hero of God’s Underground (Vision Books)
Red Dog
The Avion My Uncle Flew (I think he’s still reading this one)
Books 1 and 2 of the Wolves of the Beyond series (checked out of the library on Friday)

 

Huck finished Life of Our Lord for Children and Dennis is still reading Lad: A Dog. I really want the boys to finish reading their for-school books before Christmas. Although Dennis told me today, “I don’t usually like to spend that much time reading books. Because I get bored. Unless they’re dictionaries.”

I think what he meant was DK Visual Dictionaries. He and Huck were both reading the Encyclopedia of Animals this week, too.

 

And a few pictures from the first week of Advent:

 

(From Instagram: Our Advent wreath is lit on time for probably the first time ever.  Thank goodness for Amazon Prime!)

What JM thought about Breakfast with Santa… we spent the entire time walking around outside.

 

I was fortunate that Katydid was the official Breakfast with Santa photographer, using our camera.  She got some shots for me even though I was only inside for about five minutes at the beginning and five minutes at the end. Andy’s mom and dad joined us for breakfast, just like they do every year.

I found out later that Chipmunk asked Santa for a big bag of incense to go with his Mass kit.  I’m not sure what Santa made of that.

And we had to come in at the end to see if breakfast was done, too.

Linking up with Melanie’s Guilt-Free Learning Notes again!

Getting Organized and Cleaning Up (Week 9)

I’m not sure the kids fully understood why we were taking a break this week, or even what “taking a break” meant.  The teenagers, of course, did not get much of a break since their online classes continued unabated and Katydid had to take the PSAT on Wednesday.  I used our “break” to fill up our new bookcase and reorganize the other ones.  (Still not finished, of course, but at least I’ve made progress.)

Please ignore the shelf in the middle with the binders on it.  That is George’s shelf.  We’re working on that, too.

I decided to move most of our “Great Books” sets and reference books out here.  At the top are the educational videos and document boxes with booklists, various lesson plans, and helpful blog posts that I have printed out over the years.  I think I’m going to put math texts that I won’t need for a while in the empty uppermost shelf.

Moving all these books in here opened up most of a bookcase in the front room, so I was able to move most of our Sonlight books down from upstairs (where they were being sorely neglected):

I noticed in taking these pictures that it is really hard to get a good angle on anything in our house. Also, organizing books is a little like playing Tetris.  Because we need about five more new bookcases.

“Organized” is a relative term, of course.  But at least they’re in the bookcase.

(I think someone already pulled a book out of this shelf. I think it was another Rosemary Sutcliff book.  And I think Gareth is the perpetrator.)

My mom and dad decided they were going to come Saturday, so we also spent a good deal of our “break” cleaning up.  I cleaned out the refrigerator, including all the ancient bottles in the door.  (I was going to take a picture, but it was lunchtime and no one was going to wait on me to take a picture when there was food involved.)  Andy was out of town all week, though, so not as much got done as should have been.  Mainly because of JM not going to bed until almost 11, or getting up at 3, or my having to get up at 5 AM to drive an hour to the PSAT.  And then having an 18 month old who wouldn’t nap. In other words, I’m tired.

The most important thing that happened this week…

Gareth turned 18.  It seems cliche to say, “Where did the time go?” but that’s exactly how it feels.  Gareth didn’t want a big deal for his 18th birthday.  We went to Mass, then out to eat Italian food, then to our favorite bookstore, then home for ice cream cake, and then he and Katydid went to youth group.  That was actually the day before his birthday, because Andy had to leave the house at 4:30 AM the next day to catch a flight to New York.  On his actual birthday, he wanted grilled cheese and bacon sandwiches for dinner.  So that’s what we had.  Pretty low-key, but I think he was happy.

High School (and a brief tangent on Beast Math)

We did get some things accomplished this week, beyond organizing the house and cleaning up.  I was able to talk to Gareth and Katydid about next quarter and we got some plans in motion.  Gareth and I sat down and drew up a list of the responsibilities each of us have in the college application process. (Gulp.) Now that his Eagle Scout project is done, it’s time to work on that.  We decided that trying to have him do ALEKS SAT math and Jacobs’ Mathematics: A Human Endeavor was too much math (for someone who doesn’t like math) at the same time, so we agreed that he would focus on ALEKS until December when he will have taken the ACT for the last time.  Then we’ll switch.  I’ll still send him interesting and weird math links, though, like this one: How to Cut a Bagel into a Mobius Strip.

Speaking of math… and it seems I spoke about it a lot this week… I read Amy Wellborn’s math learning notes which were all about Beast Math, and I think that Beast Math may have gone over better in my house if I had started Huck on 3B instead of 3A.  I gave George the 4A readiness assessment this week because he maintained that he might like to do Beast Math, too, and… argh.  I don’t know if he was having bad day because of food sensitivities (which could have been, given the kids’ diet for the preceding few days) or if Saxon just doesn’t transfer at all or if he really had just forgotten almost everything he’d learned about multiplication.

Maybe I’ll just end up buying every single math curriculum ever in existence and by sheer force of dollars my kids will somehow learn math.

Katydid is coming to terms somewhat with her Algebra II class that uses Abeka, but I think she still considers it deathly dull.  The afternoon after she took the PSAT we spent hours grappling with a scanner software problem that turned out to be easy to solve; neither of us were in the mood for grappling with technology and it occurred to me that while online classes are certainly convenient, they do have a few disadvantages.  Every single week there seems to be some kind of glitch.  Either we’re on a learning curve with software, or their quizzes aren’t set up right and they have to e-mail their teachers, or the computer doesn’t grade an online test appropriately or — something.  Overall, we really like using online courses and the Memoria Press classes are top-notch, but — gah.  Technology can be frustrating.

I also talked with the teenagers about their reading and the charts I made.  The consensus: the charts are helpful if you look at them. Katydid likes hers, so I’ll make her one for quarter 2; Gareth had a hard time remembering to look at his (given all his other stuff that was going on) and I think that’s fair, since I made the chart without any of his input (he was in Wyoming at the time) and not knowing how busy he would be during this first quarter.  For quarter 2, we’re going to more of a “structured unschooling” method for his English, history, and science coursework. We figured out how much time every day he would need to work in those areas in order to get one credit.  Then he looked at his day to see when he could work in that time.  So he’ll have a scheduled time every day (one that he figured out) to read through the books that I collected for this year for him, based on his interests and what he would need to graduate (i.e., American history).  It will be my job to help him stay accountable to the plan he’s made.

We’ll be tweaking Katydid’s chart a little next quarter, though.  It turns out that she is enjoying Bede much more than she enjoyed reading secondary source history, so I think we’ll just stick with primary sources and historical fiction.  She’s been keeping up with all her literature reading (Idylls of the King, Bullfinch’s Mythology, Beowulf) so we will just continue that in the same vein.

Next week will be exam week (Charlotte Mason style) and I hope to actually post our first quarter charts, with some commentary, now that we’ve tried them out.

This week, writing for the teenagers took the form of speeches for the monthly homeschool Speech and Debate class.

Gareth had a little help with his speech.

Family

The boys really were supposed to have a break this week, but they still asked that I read the next lesson in The Fallacy Detective (which I did, for everyone including the highschoolers).  The twins continue to read ahead and will often grab the book from the basket on the piano whenever they come in the room.  Dennis asked me this week, “Are some fallacies actually sins?”  He meant fallacies like ad hominem (attacking the person).  We had a good discussion about that.

On the feast of St. Margaret Mary Alcoque, we read her entry in Saints for Young Readers, v. 2, and then pulled out our copy of A Treasury of Novenas at Dennis’ request.  Dennis has become interested in novenas over the past few weeks, and he wanted to see if we could say one.  Instead, I found the section on the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and we said the Litany to the Sacred Heart that night before bed.  (We had to wait on Katydid, who began choir practice for the Christmas choir and was also coopted to learn handbells.)  Litanies are also a subject of interest, and once this week, we said the Litany of Loreto because Chipmunk asked, “How many names does Mary have?”  So a litany sounded like a good idea.

Our new missals also arrived in the mail. (St. Andrew Daily Missal and Marian Children’s Missal.) We’ve recently begun attending Mass in the Extraordinary Form, something we’ve wanted to do for a while but haven’t because Mass is at 8:30 with a 45 minute drive.  It seemed too difficult with so many little ones, and little ones awake at all hours of the night at that.  But now we’ve reached the point where we can suck it up and mostly get out of the house on time.  There are still those Sundays when Andy has or has had a migraine or when someone is sick, etc. that we have to attend a closer Novus Ordo Mass, but we are enjoying the Extraordinary Form (even if I am usually circling the building with a very loud toddler.)  I showed everybody how to use the missals, but of course we weren’t in Mass and so it’s all still a bit theoretical for me, too.

Elementary

Well, here in the boys’ independent work, there really was a break.  Huck forgot we were on a break and did handwriting one day, but he didn’t make that mistake again.  Next week I am planning to shift the twins away from learning cursive and onto print copywork.  I am not sure writing by hand will ever be something that the twins enjoy, but maybe they will hate print copywork less.

Some other things done around here this week:

Chipmunk made a Lego plane and labeled it FEDEX.  We live in the flyway for the Memphis airport, where FedEx is based. 99.9% of all planes we see flying over are FedEx.  When the twins were little and we had just moved here, they would ask what FedEx plane Daddy was coming in on when Andy went out of town.  I didn’t get a picture until Chipmunk had partially dismantled his plane, but I liked the label.

George made a swordbelt out of Lego tracks and a Lego gear.

George also started planning a trip to Great Smoky Mountain National Park (I mentioned that we might want to go in the spring) and worked on his Programming merit badge and did some Web Ranger activities.

The boys got together on Friday and Saturday to do a “critter watch”.  Saturday they invited George’s best friend for pizza and critter-watching.  Their plan was to station themselves in various trees, in the dark, to watch for the raccoons and possums that are digging up our yard looking for grubs.  They made it for a little while each night, but alas, saw nothing.  In fact, the closest we have come to critters this week was the shrew the cat ate on the driveway (leaving its intact digestive system for us as a “present”) and the fish counter at Whole Foods where they display whole fish on ice, and not behind glass.  That made waiting for Gareth and Katydid at Speech class a little more tolerable.  Well — that and the giant oatmeal chocolate chip sandwich cookies I bought in a fit of insanity.

Picture Books

I did read to Leo and Chipmunk this week, but not too much.

Leo’s Books

(Really he made me read the Richard Scarry book over and over all week.)

Chipmunk’s Books

Both excellent with wonderful illustrations, Letting Swift River Go was the one Chipmunk grappled with, as it is about a town that is flooded to build a reservoir. He asked for this book twice. How We Crossed the West was longer, and it took us two sessions to finish.

Linking up with Melanie’s Guilt-Free Learning Notes again!

 

 

 

 

 

2014-15: Weeks 2 and 3 in Review

Fair warning: this is a ridiculously long post! 

Friday marked the end of our third week of formal studies, and — predictably — I now have seven sick kids. The September virus doesn’t surprise me anymore.  I think it has visited us every year since my oldest was in kindergarten.  That was the year he came down with strep.  Anxious to start his school career on the right foot, I had geared myself up to actually plan schoolish activities for him — all about apples, like any self-respecting homeschooler teaching a kindergartener in September — and I was zooming him through all of them, and he was sort of listlessly cooperating with me, and I was wondering why on earth he wouldn’t be excited about doing apple stamps on the driveway… when I realized he was running a 103 degree fever.  By the end of that week, we were battling over the yucky pink medicine.  In fact, there’s probably still a stain on the kitchen ceiling in that house.  (Yes, the ceiling. Don’t ask.)

Anyway, the really amazing thing this year is that the kids didn’t get sick sooner.  Schools have been in session since the beginning of August.  In the past month, I’ve heard rumors of stomach viruses, colds, fevers, and — deja vu — strep swirling all around us.  So it was just a matter of time before we picked up something.  At least this year nobody was forced to make apple stamps against his will.

From the last two weeks, before the virus…

High School

The apple stamper is now 17 and has chucked our physics plans for climatology.  Well… actually that was a family decision.  Stepping out of the traditional high school box is always a little scary no matter how many times I do it (see this hopeful article about unschoolers and college, though), but we decided together that since he really isn’t interested in pursuing a career in science or math and since he is taking three languages this year (which is what he wants to do with his life) and since he already has three science credits (although one of them is a little iffy on the lab component), that not doing a course in basic physics was probably okay.  The thing is that this child has picked up a lot of basic, conceptual physics by osmosis anyway (educational TV and magazines like Scientific American are largely responsible), so I think his scientific literacy is actually pretty high.  And I keep going back to Dorothy Sayers’ assertion that by the teenager years, those students who do not like math should be allowed to “rest on their oars”.  I’m not really a Dorothy Sayers-ish classical homeschooler, but that comment has always stuck in my head. The problem with physics (for Gareth, anyway) is that even conceptual physics at the high school level = math.

In any case, Gareth and I discussed a number of topics which might be of interest to him, and he decided on climatology for this semester.  As it happens, I am something of a weather geek, and I already had some books on the shelves.  These are the ones we pulled off for possible use:

We also found a few lectures on how seasons and other weather cycles work at Kahn Academy.  And we poked around NOAA’s Paleoclimatology and Climate Education sites.  And we discovered NASA’s Earth Observatory, which has neat images of the earth from space and many, many featured articles on paleoclimate.  (I should probably write a post.)

I’ll therefore be altering the charts I made for him, as well as for Katydid, after we get a sense of their real workload this week when the rest of their online classes begin .  This week they had their first German I classes from Kolbe’s Online Academy, which had to cancel orientation last week because of the recent Napa earthquake.  Everything seems to be up and running now, though — thankfully!  Next week the kids add in their classes from Memoria Press.  They’re both taking Latin IV and Gareth will also be taking Biblical Greek II, while Katydid adds Algebra II.  Labor Day sort of upset the cart this week, so the kids felt like their workload got a little heavy.

Family Work

I’m still tinkering with our Morning Time.  Adding in the number of subjects and books that other people juggle just seems to make me feel stressed out.  This is the chart I’ve been using:

We rarely (okay, never) get to all of this.  In particular, I think I will have to remove Parables of Nature, because we have yet to read anything from it.  We’ve read from everything else, though, if not exactly on this schedule.  This week was a particularly bad one for Morning Time.  Labor Day threw us off in the beginning, and then I realized that the stack of books on the coffee table was going to kill somebody if it fell over.  And then all the books on top of the bookcases in the family room started to annoy me, and… well, let’s just say we’ve spent a lot of time decluttering this week.

Oh, and I have some new bookcases to fill:

They’re Ikea (of course).  I just asked Andy what they are called and he told me, “Mary and Bob.” Everybody’s a comedian in this house.

(I don’t actually know what they are called.  I will have to look it up, but right now I am feeding little bits of apple to a photobomber baby who will only eat fruit and cheese.  I promise I will write a real post about our computer room when it’s done. I will say that the bookcases in this picture had been bolted to the wall already, so they were safe for a baby to pull on.)

(You’ll notice, however, that they are not Billy bookcases.  That’s because Ikea, for some baffling reason, has stopped shipping Billies.)

Our other family work is art, and that is going better.  It’s on the schedule every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon, and the teenagers have been holding us to that.

The first projects in Drawing with Older Children and Teens are all about expanding your horizons instead of immediately getting into actual line drawing instruction.  I had thought that I would do the regular Drawing with Children instruction separately with the younger boys, but when we all sit down at the table to do art, the younger kids usually want to work on the same things the older kids are doing.  (Unless they only want to draw tanks. Or snakes.)  One of the projects in Drawing with Older Children is symbolic/story drawing.  First, you are supposed to write a very short story, and then translate it using symbolic (not realistically drawn) images.  The teenagers had a lot of problems with this project, but the younger kids were all over it because younger kids naturally use drawing for that purpose (unlike boring older people).  Chipmunk (age 7) drew this giant conflagration of a meteor strike.  He started out drawing maps (the green circles with the blue lines), then he added meteors, and then he decided to draw a train track with a steam train on it, narrowly avoiding the meteors.

The other boys drew variations on the theme — tanks, laser guns, spears, dragons.

Katydid drew a castle with a princess in it.

Although 90% of what the boys draw involves violence, Dennis(age 8) drew this sunset landscape of a lake the other day, inspired by the frontispiece of one of our art appreciation books for children.

6th Grade

George had a good week.  He was inducted into our Scout troop and attended a merit badge college and completed all the requirements for his Environmental Science badge.  He also wrote a program to tell how many days it would take until he could become a park ranger (a lot), did some science experiments to see how rocks from his collection reacted to acids (in the form of vinegar diluted with water), wrote up his results in his science notebook, and started work in Voyages of English, which he immediately stated “would kill him”.

Because George only started reading last year, we have not done much copywork or other instruction in language mechanics.  George likes to write stories on the computer (typing is much easier for him, especially when he can use the spell check), but punctuation remains largely a mystery to him.  I think that this (like his spelling) will improve with the amount of reading he is able to do, but in my experience with Gareth, some kids do not naturally intuit how to use periods, commas, etc. from either reading or copywork.  So I pulled my copy of Voyages of English 3 off the shelf to use the exercises in punctuation and capitalization and tricky homophones.

This led to an extended and lively discussion in which certain people who know a lot of history (more than one certain people) informed me that since punctuation didn’t even exist early in our history (the Irish monks who copied out books in the early Middle Ages didn’t use it, for instance), that its usage today really ought to be considered voluntary and was it really that useful anyway, because it and standardized spelling just made our lives harder.  Then we had this lesson:

In which I wrote everything without punctuation and capitalization first and then added it in later.  (Also, you’ll notice that one of the example sentences comes from Eats, Shoots & Leaves: Why, Commas Really Do Make a Difference!)  Apparently this was more exciting than Voyages in English, because George decided to continue the story where I left off.

3rd Grade

Dennis finished Bambi this week, and Huck has been reading Charlotte’s Web and narrating it to his brother.  (Really, he’s just telling him about the book.  We’ll call it narrating, though, because it is.)  They are also diligently working on their handwriting at the rate of one page a day.  We use New American Cursive because the first workbook is created for first graders, and that means bigger spaces to practice.  Dennis worked through half of the first book last spring but after a summer off had forgotten everything, so he is starting over with Huck and Chipmunk. We are also continuing to work on our whiteboard math, which seems to be going well.  I know they could go so much farther if they didn’t have to depend on me to do everything with them, but even the computerized math curricula require the child to write and then to enter the answer.  After some deliberation, I’ve decided to embrace the fact that we have to do this orally for a while, and I went ahead and ordered Beast Academy 3A for both of them. 3A contains a lot of geometry, so that should work out better than a traditional math curriculum which is all about writing numbers.  Cross your fingers.

1st/2nd Grade

No, I still haven’t figured out where to put Chipmunk.  Is he in 1st or 2nd grade?  Who knows.  I picked up Home Learning Year by Year: How to Design a Homeschool Curriculum from Preschool Through High School, which I look through almost every year just to get some sense of where the kids might be, especially in the early years, but aside from giving me more ideas for books to buy, it didn’t help me much as far as grade placement.  Instead, it confirmed what I already thought.  If I classify him by reading, he would be first grade; if by math, he would be second.  So I’m inventing “first and a half” grade.

Chipmunk was the first to come down with the virus, but his version was so mild that mainly all it meant was that I got to sit with him on the couch a bit more to read A Bear Called Paddington.  Which was kind of win-win for both of us.

Pre-K

Poor Leo.  I always feel like I ought to have more for him, but it has taken me all this time just to get around to sorting through his book basket and sticking a new Richard Scarry book in there for him.  (Busy Town.)  I’ve decided to rearrange the schedule a bit to make more time for reading aloud picture books to him and Chipmunk, and hopefully a couple of board books to poor JM as well.  Then maybe we can get past the stack of Clifford and Curious George books that we’ve been reading over and over (and over) again for months.

Speaking of picture books! I’m waiting on an order from Daedalus Children’s Books.  Have any of you ever ordered from them? They’re a book outlet, and I’ve gotten their catalog for years but apparently either I’ve never really looked at it or this catalog was really good.  I found lots of interesting picture books in it, for good prices.  So now I’m waiting on the box to fill up the picture book basket.

Linking up with Melanie’s Guilt-Free Learning Notes Linkup at The Wine Dark Sea!