Homeschool Sandbox

As the school year winds down, I find myself mentally pondering the highs and lows and trying to figure out improvement strategies for next year. Overall, I’ve been pretty happy with how the year went. We went with Tapestry of Grace for history/Bible/literature/church history/geography. It’s a lovely classical, integrated curriculum that winds all those things around each other as they are in life and so far seems to produce a strong understanding of how history all flows together.

Tapestry actually has such a massive amount of possibilities that the problem is picking and choosing what you want to really focus on and not making yourself (or your children) crazy by wanting them to do everything. The Tapestry people themselves don’t even recommend trying to do everything lest you turn into psycho people.

After probably biting off more than the kids were able to chew (hmm, sounds kind of gross when you say it that way) this year, I’ve decided that for next year we are going to be a lot shorter on the written questions and things. Instead, I am going to supplement the history with Hold That Thought pages. These are excellent notebooking pages on a whole bunch of historical people and events that we will be studying. We’ve been pretty sloppy on writing this year, so I’m planning to gear a bit more in that direction next year and see how it goes.

Hold That Thought has notebooking stuff for many different subjects. Several years ago I bought their My Bible Book and Beginners Bible/Church History notebooks and have printed them off several times for the kids and even for my niece (made a church book for her to do during the sermon). In addition to the Advanced History ones for next year, I am picking up Advanced Church History to go with our studies. We are going through Trial and Triumph (read aloud) and Church in History (Georgie) over the next year or so, and the HTT printables with dovetail perfectly.

If any of you are interested, Hold That Thought is running a word-of-mouth special right now. If you tell two other homeschoolers about HTT or write them up on your homeschooling blog, you will get a free notebooking CD of your choice with your order. So, I am now off to go place my order and get my freebie.

Rachel

Rachel and her Husband, George, have been married since 1996 and are happily raising six charming children in West Linn, Oregon. In her off school time Rachel likes to read, play softball, crochet, play Dutch Blitz, and build websites that she doesn't have time to manage.

Happily, today is one of those together days. Georgie got a 96% on his grammar test, and all three of the girls got 100% on their spelling tests. Yay! I teach good. Yeah sure, I suppose they may have had something to do with it.

This is Kyra’s first year of school (she’s five, turns six in July), and I’ve switched curriculum with her. The other kids I taught to read with TATRAS; and while it was okay, it just seemed to take f-o-r-e-v-e-r, and the phonics didn’t always translate to the spelling side. Georgie didn’t pick up any reading speed until he was at least eight despite having been through all of TATRAS and several years of school. Trinity read right off the bat but was was an atrocious speller.

This year I switched everyone over to Spell to Write and Read and started Kyra off with it. I also decided to be bold and teach her cursive right from the start instead of printing. Okay, so that’s not bold like jumping from moving aircraft or engaging in hand-to-hand combat with an armed assailant, but it’s educationally bold. For me.

The basic philosophy of SWR is to skip the whole teaching them to read thing (which I loathe doing anyway because it is painfully slow and repetitive and awful) and just teach them to spell. After they hit a certain point, all the stuff that they can spell they will also be able to read and the reading will sort of organically occur.

Kyra and I have been faithfully practicing her 70 phonogram cards all year (which she only forgot two of today and she’ll have completely down by the end of next week), and guess what? It seems to be working. She’s starting to pick words off of things like the Amazon box and wants to read her readers more often. Learning cursive right away hasn’t seemed confusing with reading things in print. Here is today’s spelling test:

Awesome, huh? Go, Kyra! In case you’re trying to figure out the marking system (which I’m sure you all are), the double underlines are silent ‘e’s, and the single underlines are for double letter phonograms.

The other children have all had a marked improvement in both spelling and penmanship except for Georgie whose penmanship remains borderline terrible despite my best efforts, death threats, and blackmail. Hmmm, blackmail. Maybe I should tell him I’ll post his stuff on the blog. He’s almost to the age where parental embarrassment becomes an effective disciplinary tool. Hehe. His spelling isn’t too bad though. I guess in another year or two I should teach him to type.

In other, unrelated news that also falls under the “School” heading, I now know where the Duero River is, which until two weeks ago I had never even heard of. Yay, geography! Oh, I’m supposed to be teaching the kids school? Right. I knew that. Learning all this stuff myself is just a happy byproduct.

Rachel

Rachel and her Husband, George, have been married since 1996 and are happily raising six charming children in West Linn, Oregon. In her off school time Rachel likes to read, play softball, crochet, play Dutch Blitz, and build websites that she doesn't have time to manage.

A sample of our summer weather school day.

1. Read from 2 books about the ancient Greeks. (Tapestry of Grace)
2. Cut out our tiny book and draw pictures of the ancient Greek gods.
3.  Put on our Greek clothing, a peplos for Charlotte, and a chiton for Levi.
4.  Attend “greek school”, where we practice writing the names of our family in the greek alphabet. (and reviewed memory work, times table, verses etc)
5.  Spend the next 2 hours playing outside, pretending to be ancient greek citizens, slaves and gods.
6.  After a lot of fun, come inside and watch hercules, and discuss the things that disney got wrong.

We didn’t quite get to our unit study on the ocean, spelling, piano or reading. Oh well!

Lana is a homeschooling mother of three, Wife of 1 handsome hubby, and wannabe Proverbs 31 Lady. In her non-school hours, Lana likes to sew, play games with her family, and listen to endless Bionicle stories.

One of my personal downfalls with homeschooling is the lack of a permanent schedule. I usually burn out on the very first day, and just have them do the required work in no particular order, with no particular deadline. 

This term, after looking guiltily at the schedule again, I decided to revamp it with MY lifestyle.  That’s right, no rising at 5 am here. I also included time for a walk, email, playtime, and the chores.  After our first round of testing, the schedule was a decided success!  We only made it till noon, before real life interrupted (extended family car emergency)  but the children had excellent attitudes with the routine.  And here’s the best part, I didn’t lose my temper the entire morning.    

After a Tuesday break for piano lessons and running around, we are now back on the schedule…well, almost…. we are just 10 minutes behind….

**UPDATE**  I have now decided that 2 schedules are good, 1 for early morning rising, and 1 for sleeping in days…     This way even if we are up late, we still get to all our schoolwork the next day.

Lana is a homeschooling mother of three, Wife of 1 handsome hubby, and wannabe Proverbs 31 Lady. In her non-school hours, Lana likes to sew, play games with her family, and listen to endless Bionicle stories.

A sample of our summer weather school day.

1. Read from 2 books about the ancient Greeks. (Tapestry of Grace)
2. Cut out our tiny book and draw pictures of the ancient Greek gods.
3.  Put on our Greek clothing, a peplos for Charlotte, and a chiton for Levi.
4.  Attend “greek school”, where we practice writing the names of our family in the greek alphabet. (and reviewed memory work, times table, verses etc)
5.  Spend the next 2 hours playing outside, pretending to be ancient greek citizens, slaves and gods.
6.  After a lot of fun, come inside and watch hercules, and discuss the things that disney got wrong.

We didn’t quite get to our unit study on the ocean, spelling, piano or reading.  Oh well!  
 

Lana is a homeschooling mother of three, Wife of 1 handsome hubby, and wannabe Proverbs 31 Lady. In her non-school hours, Lana likes to sew, play games with her family, and listen to endless Bionicle stories.

One of my personal downfalls with homeschooling is the lack of a permanent schedule. I usually burn out on the very first day, and just have them do the required work in no particular order, with no particular deadline.

This term, after looking guiltily at the schedule again, I decided to revamp it with MY lifestyle.  That’s right, no rising at 5 am here. I also included time for a walk, email, playtime, and the chores.  After our first round of testing, the schedule was a decided success!  We only made it till noon, before real life interrupted (extended family car emergency)  but the children had excellent attitudes with the routine.  And here’s the best part, I didn’t lose my temper the entire morning and neither did the students.

After a Tuesday break for piano lessons and running around, we are now back on the schedule…well, almost…. we are just 10 minutes behind….

Lana is a homeschooling mother of three, Wife of 1 handsome hubby, and wannabe Proverbs 31 Lady. In her non-school hours, Lana likes to sew, play games with her family, and listen to endless Bionicle stories.

After I wrote up my schedule on Tuesday, hated it by Wednesday, and rewrote the entire thing on Thursday, I spent a little time thinking. It seemed to me that the reason I was having trouble scheduling was because I was basing my schedule off the schedule the kids were using at school before.

Not knowing exactly how long everything would take, how much teacher help each subject would take per child, and how much of an issue the younger ones were likely to make was a problem; but it seemed that the real difficulty was one of prioritization. Which things were the most important to me to spend how much time on? Which things can I alternate back and forth between days or terms? Which extra stuff can I cut out entirely and what do I want added in?

To sort through these issues, I sat down on Friday morning and wrote out a big list of what I think the end goals of each subject should be and general philosophical ideas about education. I am expecting this to be an evolving list since I wrote it in an hour and in general tend to append things willy nilly once I think about them further. Plus, I’m sure as soon as anyone else reads it, they’ll have all kinds of great ideas that will no doubt need incorporating.

After I wrote this I sat down to do the schedule again and had the whole thing finished to my liking in about an hour (I’ve updated the one on the last post so it is current). Yay! Much better. Hopefully posting all this here will help me find it more easily than keeping it in the spiral notebook I originally wrote it in, which will no doubt get tossed as soon as it’s full unless the kids abscond with it for their inscrutable purposes.

So, here is Rachel’s Educational Philosophy, also known as “Rachel’s cure for insomnia.”

Happy Reading!

Rachel

Rachel and her Husband, George, have been married since 1996 and are happily raising six charming children in West Linn, Oregon. In her off school time Rachel likes to read, play softball, crochet, play Dutch Blitz, and build websites that she doesn't have time to manage.

Okay, so I am officially starting homeschool with the kiddos this coming Monday (4/20/09). Yikes! Actually, I’m feeling pretty ok about it. Got the schedule all sorted out. See?

What, you can’t read that? Well, click on it and it will take you to the bigger version. For term study this time we are doing a unit on sea life. That way when we go to Family Camp at the end of the term, we can have an excuse to go to the excellent Oregon Coast Aquarium (like we need an excuse).

Even better, the aquarium has a whole bunch of downloadable curriculum for homeschoolers, which will make organizing easy for me (big plus). Yay! So now I’m all excited.

I went through what I have and need yesterday and am hoping to make it out to Exodus Books tomorrow or Saturday to finish picking up class materials. I think I need to clean off one more bookshelf today so I can finish setting up the classroom and then I’ll be ready-ish. So yep, feeling pretty good!

Oh, were you wondering what the heck Resurrection Term is? We are running our school year according to the church calendar and days of creation. So instead of having three or four terms of school and then the summer off, we are having seven terms that are seven weeks each.

The first week of each term the kids have off of school as a reflection of Sabbath rest the first day of each week. The school year starts mid-November for Advent Term, and that entire term of seven weeks is off of school (first term of seven, also reflecting Sabbath rest on the first day of the seven day week).

There are several advantages to doing it this way.

1. Your children’s brains don’t leak out their ears over a long summer holiday.
2. The longest break comes around Christmas when everyone is swamped and wants to do family stuff anyway.
3. If you don’t like the schedule or get behind on something, your term is only six weeks of actual school time so it’s not going to screw the kids up too much to just wait and revise next term.
4. For summer, we do a bit lighter load and the schedule is flexible enough to allow for that.

If you’ve been calculating in your head as I’ve been explaining, you’ll notice that seven terms of seven weeks makes 49 weeks but there are 52 weeks in the year. That leaves three floating weeks to take elsewhere as vacation.

We’re taking two in June, before and after Family Camp which is the start of the Apostolic Age Term and then the last one probably in August somewhere during the Church Age Term. No doubt this will come up again in a later post, but if you’d like to do a bit more reading on your own, this idea was developed by my friend Melody at Solis Ortus.

Oh! One more thing. My friend Lana has joined this blog as an editor, so she’ll be posting her homeschooling life on here as well. Welcome, Lana! This should be fun.

Rachel

Rachel and her Husband, George, have been married since 1996 and are happily raising six charming children in West Linn, Oregon. In her off school time Rachel likes to read, play softball, crochet, play Dutch Blitz, and build websites that she doesn't have time to manage.

Kyra’s educational voyage began today, and boy was she happy! She’s been asking me to start doing school with her ever since her nap schedule dropped from every day to every other day a few months ago, and as I was browsing through my computer stuff today I discovered a whole stash of old alphabet printables that I had made up ages ago when I got started with the older kids.

After rummaging around downstairs for a binder and printing off all the tracers, Kyra and I put together a school book for her and she sat down next to me in my room and did school while I worked on my computer. She’s four and a half. School at this age is not terribly consuming, and I’m pretty sure I can keep her busy with tracers for a few weeks until I get going with the big kids next month.

We started today with tracers for her name. As soon as she can do that, we’ll move on to the alphabet. Here’s a couple of pictures of my happy new student:

Yes, fancy desk and materials, I know. She seems thoroughly happy to be sitting on my bedroom floor right next to Mommy with the bathroom stool for her desk. So congratulations, Kyra, and welcome to school!

Rachel

Rachel and her Husband, George, have been married since 1996 and are happily raising six charming children in West Linn, Oregon. In her off school time Rachel likes to read, play softball, crochet, play Dutch Blitz, and build websites that she doesn't have time to manage.