Back to School 2012

It is time to start school again and I have been earnestly praying, pondering and searching for how I should be doing education for my children in a way I can handle and they will love. I feel fairly confidant that the methods I am putting to the test this year will hold strong and true.

It all started with TJEd and Charlotte Mason. I found so many wonderful things in their philosophies that I had a hard time figuring out how to implement it all. I gave trial runs all through the summer with different parts of the philosophies and found out how most work and how some just don't for our family. After a summer full of trial and error, this is what I came up with as our curriculum for the year.

Our subjects for my two whom I am actively teaching this year are Scripture Study, Reading, Writing, Math, Science, History, Spanish, Health, Music, Art, and Physical Training. At first glance this seems like a ton of work for a 1st and a 3rd grader. However let me explain what we are doing with each subject.

I have decided to start with the self as much as possible in each subject. For Scripture Study we will be focusing on personal conduct, which is of course most of what God teaches us about, and so we will also explore why God focuses on personal growth so much. In Reading I will read to the kids The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain as it is written in first-person perspective. (I will go into detail about how I am teaching my boy to read further down.) Writing will be copywork. For my 1st grader he will only be copying letters and single words until his aptitude with fluently writing letters and numbers increases. My 3rd grader will be copying the Articles of Faith from our religion and when she is done with those (as we are already 1/2 way through) she will be doing scripture verses from our morning Scripture Study. Math will focus on fluency with addition, subtraction, multiplication and beginning division. We will also be doing classification via size, shape, color, weight, etc. and time. For Science we will be learning about the Human Body, inside and out. History is going to start with Personal History, then move into Parental History and the Histories of their grandparents etc until we get into Family History. By doing this I hope to give them a greater appreciation for how history affects them, thus making them more interested in it, (Inspire not Require!). For Spanish we will learn one phrase, one color and one number per week. Health will be about how what we eat and what we do physically affects our bodies. Music and Art will be tied in with one or more of the other subjects and Physical Training will be Kenpo, which my husband will teach them.  



I am using Charlotte Mason's idea that lessons should be ten minutes to a quarter-hour. So, if we spent the max of fifteen minutes on each lesson we would have lessons for three and three-quarters hours. That in and of its self is a reasonable goal in light of the amount of time spent in the public schools. However, I will also be combining subjects when appropriate.

For example: Science this season is going to be about the human dody and Health is about our lifestyle's affect on the human body, so these can be easily combined. There are also many songs about the human body and healthy habits, so music fits in there as well. Kenpo is an activity which is good for the body, so that fits also. Our religious scripture has what is known as the Word of Wisdom which talks about what things we should and should not eat, that slips in their too! So as you can see, I can quickly condense a lot of these subjects into a shorter amount of time. And that saved time can be spent on pursuing the children's interests and promoting our upstart home based business and teaching the kids work ethic, cleanliness, discipline, love of God, and charity through service. All of which are at least equally important as scholastic learning, if not more so.

As for teaching my 6-year-old boy to read, I am using Charlotte Mason's philosophy. I am not teaching him to read words by sounding them out as I did with my older daughter, because too often that doesn't work. This way of teaching was developed by Friedrich Frobel who is the inventor of Kindergarten. If you couldn't guess by his name or the name of his invention, he is German. Deutsch (German) is a phonetic language. English is not. As a matter of fact, there are a lot of words in English, that if spelled phonetically would look suspiciously like Deutsch. So instead I am teaching the words as a symbol for the sound of the word we say. I look at it as more akin to the Chinese writing or hieroglyphs. This collection of letters in this pattern means this word. It is a fairly simple concept as children have such wonderful visual memories. I take a phrase, either from a nursery rhyme, or children's song, or the scriptures and have the words individually separated and teach them one by one, making sure they simply aren't memorizing some unintentional pattern of how I am showing them. Then as they know each word individually, I put them together in the phrase or sentence and they can read it through without pause. This is an average of 10 words each day. This is so much easier on the children than trying to remember the "I before E except after C or when followed by a G" type of exceptions to phonetic rules that our language is crawling with.

What kind of Monkey are You?

I know it has been a while since I have posted on here and I apologize for the absence. I have been struggling to get my feet underneath me firmly in the homeschooling department. There are some days when I feel like I am on top of the world and we are doing so great and my kids will be so much better for my efforts, and then there are other days when I feel like I am so deep in the ocean that I can't find my way to the surface and I know that surely my children would be learning more in public school. But see, even typing that makes my skin crawl because no matter how poorly the starting of this goes, in the long run there will be no comparison for the benefit of teaching my kids at home.

Well, while in the car today I found myself listening to talk radio. When I listen to talk radio it is usually the "conservative station", but when my husband is in the car he listens to the "liberal station". I enjoy listening to both, though there are times with both when I will turn them off with disgust. However, that is off topic.

The story we were listening to was about the findings in a recent study on monkeys and their problem solving and goal oriented thinking. One striking thing they found was that even though both monkeys achieved their goals, they did it in entirely different ways. One monkey was obviously patient and the other impatient. When given a goal, the patient monkey would wait until all of the "obstacles" were known before coming up with a plan to reach the goal. The impatient monkey would go for the goal as soon as it was visible and would have to deal with the "obstacles" as they arose.

So I posed the question to myself, "Which kind of monkey am I?" I have never been good at goal setting and very rarely achieve goals that I set and it has been a constant frustration for me. I don't know what I am doing wrong and it despairs me quite often. After hearing of this study, I finally realized what (hopefully?) my problem is. I am impatient monkey.

I see the goal and scramble to get there, bruising myself here, and scraping myself there, until I finally trip over something that I had seen as small and inconsequential in my mad dash, (if, of course, I had even seen it at all) and I knock myself out cold. Down for the count. When I finally come to and begin dusting myself off all I see is the beginning again and the goal way off in the distance, not understanding what it was, exactly, that prevented me from reaching that goal. So I start off again, renewed vigor, albeit a bit more wary of the obstacle that tripped me last time. But alas, my folly is not in the last piece of straw that has settled onto my back that collapsed me, it is the multitude of others hindrances that have piled up without my even being aware of them.

I have always been aware that I have a problem with follow-through. I just haven't ever figured out why. I pray to my Father in Heaven that this may be the key to solving my puzzle. I have been looking at the picture on the box and wondering why all these little pieces don't look like that yet. I hadn't been able to find a method for sorting it all out in a way that makes sense. Actually, I don't think I had even tried sorting.

There is another good saying here that fits. "You can't see the forest for the trees" Which generally means you are so focused on the small things that you can't see the big picture. I am backwards. For me the statement is more accurate when it reads "You can't see the trees for the forest". I have been so overwhelmed by the daunting forest that I haven't been looking at the trees. There is so much to be missed when you ignore the details. (Come to think of it, I had discovered this problem in my drawings nearly 15 years ago, so sad it took me this long to correlate that with my everyday life.)

To resolve this problem I am going to take a good hard look at the trees. I am in the process of doing this so I can't tell you yet what the outcome will be or what all the steps are. I will tell you that I started with a question. "Why do I always fail to stick to a schedule?" Instead of answering this question directly, I answered it with another question. "What is it that I am trying to schedule?" I wrote a list of everything that goes on in my life in a daily or weekly capacity that I need to fit into the schedule. Then I took each of these and wrote the specific details of what, in those items, fails, that makes it hard to stick with the schedule. For example, under the topic "Being awake at a certain time in the morning" was the fatal "going to bed late" and for me, the worse "Not feeling any pressing reason to get out of bed". After weeks of discussion with my sister on that particular topic I have come to the fact that this is a lack of willpower, but I had not yet found a way to make it less of a willpower struggle than it is. (I am currently testing a theory on a fix to this though.) 

So now I am addressing the trees. I want to be the patient monkey and see the whole picture before I start cramming the puzzle pieces together and collapsing from the weight of one tiny length of straw. I can over come this. It will all be better in the end. I just need to strategically map my course before I go diving into my personal no-mans-land.

Today is a New Day

27 March 2012

Today was a new day! I got myself out of bed by 8:00 am, which is average for me, but I got dressed, had breakfast, helped the kids clean their rooms and started on schoolwork! We were done with school at about 11:00am! The rest of the day I kept looking at the clock and saying to myself, "Is it really only 12:30?", "Is it really only 1:45?", etc., etc.

With Ra and El we worked on math and handwriting mostly. With Ca I tried showing him how to write his name again and how to properly hold a writing utensil (which he absolutely does not care to do). We are using Glenn Kimber's book Principles of Numeration, which is quite a good, simple guideline and definitely not a grab-and-go curriculum. I am thinking about buying the Math Masters book to accompany it as well.

For the rest of the day I worked on the audio book I am recording. I fiddled with the sound, the timing, the white noise and whatnot trying to figure out how the controls work in Adobe Soundbooth. Rather interesting. I also got myself an account on Lynda.com which has excellent tutorials on just about every software out there that needs explaining.

At the end of the day we went for a drive as a family and the hubby and I discussed many points about homeschooling as well as a few other topics, but mostly we talked about homeschooling. To my delight it would seem that the hubby is actually on the bandwagon with me about homeschool, finally! Though our reasons may differ slightly, we both definitely agree that our children need to be taught in the home.

Creative Scholastic Scalding

21-26 March 2012

Sorry it has been a crazy week (as it usually is when the hubby is in town) and I haven't made the time to blog! Ah well, when you fall off the horse you get right back up on it! In the last week we have done several things. The ones of note that I can remember off the top of my head are:

Place an order with Scholastic Books via Grandma Jane and adopted Grandma B. They gave me their teacher points to spend so it is not costing a thing! How cool is that!

And I burnt my hand in a sink full of water I had *just* strained from the noodles I had boiled. Don't ask, just don't ask. It was one of those stupid embarrassing I-cant-believe-I-just-did-that moments. After twenty minutes in ice water and a trip to Urgent Care everything turned out fine the next day.

I acquired the Adobe CS5 Creative Suite and have been having a ton of fun fiddling with the new programs. I also bought a Podcast setup to start recording some audio books. Voice acting, oh ya this will be fun if I can get the house quiet enough to do it!

I will get back on track with this tomorrow! Sorry for the absence!

The Sword of Senack and the Co-op

20 March 2012

Today EC Stilson my good friend released her first YA Fantasy book today. It is called The Sword of Senack. I read her first draft of the book and am anxious to read the final! It is about pirates and mermaids and witches and all sorts of fun underwater magic. Ra absolutely loved the first draft and I am going to read the kids the published final as soon as it arrives. When we have read it I will post my annotations of it in a link at the top of the page.

Wayman Publishing, the publisher of EC's books is holding a Writing and Art Contest to celebrate the book. They are also doing a raffle give-away of a Kindle Fire! I am going to go over there right now and enter. How neat would that be! For information on all these awesome goings on visit her blog at the link below. 




I had the kids help me pick up the house before computer's were allowed to come on today. While they piddled around on the computer I cleaned and got ready for our day out of the house. I had to run some errands down in the south end of Salt Lake County today and so I also planned to visit some family while we were there.

My nephew, Sk broke his leg while jumping on the trampoline over the weekend and so we decided to stop by there and visit him. He is Ra's age and both Ra and El enjoy playing with him. They all played Wii for a bit and the kids rotated playing outside and playing on the Wii with Sk. I told my sister about a LEARN group that was to be meeting tonight in Farmington that I wanted to go to but I didn't have anyone to watch the kids for me. She offered to watch them for me which was extremely nice of her.(u c wut i did thar?)

At the LEARN (Learning Enrichment And Resource Network) meeting I met some new people. We talked generally about some of the things each of us has been struggling with and we brainstormed ideas for each other. It was a really good way to get to know each other because you could tell what their passions and interests were based on their ideas and response. I met several mom's with children the same age as mine and I hope to get to know them better.

The biggest thing I took away from the meeting was that I am going to start a co-op. I have been looking for one to join but they are all full, or not the things I am interested in or the segregate, only allowing certain ages of children.

So my project for the next couple of weeks is to come up with a structure for the co-op and a basic premises-model to build each meeting off of. I would like to have it a twice-a-week affair. I would also like to try and get about other families involved. I feel I would be comfortable hosting about twenty kids, so long as I had other mothers/fathers willing to participate in the teaching efforts!

I will probably separate the kids into a few different groups depending on skills, abilities and interests. There is a ton of brainstorming I need to do on this idea so it will probably be a few weeks in the making before I even try and approach others with the idea and an invitation.

Multiply by Love

19 March 2012

I was up most of the night with stomach cramps. Maybe that dinner wasn't as healthy as I thought! I still don't have any idea what it was that caused the cramping but it is miserable. I still can't move around much without the cramps coming on again. Unfortunately I did need to get out of the house and run a few errands today. Talk about miserable!

The kids were good to me today and cleaned up the house a bit and attempted to load the dishwasher. Ra sat with me on the couch for a while and we did some oral quizzing on multiplication facts. Now mind you I have not done any formal teaching on multiplication, at least not in the same way I did with K12 and adding and subtracting.

We have gone over the basics of multiplication however. The fact that one number is how many are in a group and the other number is how many of those groups there are. I have previously explained to her that any number multiplied by zero is zero. After all if you have no groups of ten you have nothing and if you have ten groups of nothing you still have nothing.

I have also explained to her that knowing her skip counting will help her in all other areas of math. She requested that I begin asking her multiplication questions based in what she already knows of skip counting. She can skip count by 2's, 3's, 5's, 10's and 11's to 100.  I asked her multiplication questions that involve these increments. She did very well! I am so proud of her.

At bed time Ra read Fancy Nancy Pajama Day and I read Stinkers and Stingers.

Cribbage

18 March 2012

Today we attended church, (a little late I admit but we made it!) and spent some time relaxing at home. We had such a busy week last week that we decided to take it easy today. Around 1:00p.m. my mother called and asked her and my father could stop by for a visit. They were up in the area for a missionary farewell for one of my cousins.

The kids were extremely excited as usual when we have company. We live about an hour away from most of our family so we don't get visitors often. The kids had so much fun showing off all they have been doing and learning in our homeschool efforts and Grandma Debbie and Grandpa Mike enjoyed hearing all about it. Ra showed off her skip counting prowess, beautiful cursive and all of the fun crafts we did for the various holidays.

When we were in Hurricane Papa Glen and Nana Lori showed the hubby and I how to play cribbage. It is so chalk full of math that I decided to use it at home. I have heard that card games, dice games and board games are some of the best ways to learn math, so why not give it a try.

I asked my parents if they have ever played cribbage and they said no. So I decided to use that moment to not only show my parents how to play, but Ra as well. Ra loved it and though Grandpa Mike was a little distracted by Puss in Boots on the TV, I think my parents enjoyed it too. Grandpa Mike told me that he is really good at math, something I have probably always taken for granted in my father until now. He said that the only thing that messes him up in math is a calculator! Ha! See! That is how proficient I want my kids to be, and myself of course, because I am no where near that.

After a healthy dinner we read some of the Old Testament Stories before I shooed the kids off to bed.