Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Milly Logic

Okay, I confess...I may rely more often than I'd like on the electronic babysitter while I'm doing school with Rachael. But the fact is, I can turn on Milly's favorite show (Team Umizoomi) and have a quiet, uninterrupted twenty minutes to focus on schoolwork with Rachael. Alternatively, I can leave the TV off, set Milly up with a pile of books, paper, crayons, what have you, and she's climbing my leg and screaming bloody murder within ten seconds because she wants all of the attention, and she wants it now.

Tonight, I was talking with Gene and mentioned that I'd be starting preschool* with Milly this fall. She was standing nearby and obviously overheard our conversation, and pondered it for a bit... About ten minutes later, she came to find me in the kitchen while I was making supper.


Milly: Me do school now?
Me: Yes, you can start doing preschool soon.
Milly: And Sissy watch Teamy Ah-zoomi?


:)


Got another clever one on my hands! School with her is going to be fun!



* Preschool, of course, not meaning any sort of rigid, structured curriculum - just more focused play on learning letters, counting, etc. She already has her colors down pat.

Monday, March 22, 2010

Update time!

Since I'm currently being screamed at by an angry toddler who wants absolutely nothing that I have to offer, I figured it was as good a time as any to update the homeschool blog - since we're between lessons until the tantrum subsides anyway. :)

Rachael took an early spring break this year, while we worked toward sorting out some attitude issues that were making school more difficult...if not downright impossible, some days. Now that things are going more smoothly on that front, it's back to business as usual.

We've finished the first ten lessons already in her new Bible study, Choosing Obedience. I was really hoping that it would focus on a real-life application, but instead it focuses on obedience to God...which is, of course, more important in the long run!

She's moving right along through her English/grammar book as well - the lessons are so short and simple that we quite often do two per day. Although I really love the layout of this curriculum (Learning Language Arts Through Literature), I think I'm going to have to consider something different before long. Maybe not next year...but this year she's been working on the second grade book, and it's not been much of a challenge. She's learning lots of new things, but the concepts aren't difficult for her. We may continue with the third grade book for next year, but it certainly won't take her all the way through her elementary school years.

She's still plugging along with math, too. We're working in the Math-U-See Beta book now (their equivalent of second grade.) She's doing quite well with it, but just plain doesn't like math. Thank goodness for so many online resources - we've been supplementing with quite a few "fun" printable worksheets, and that seems to make it more bearable for her.

With spring finally here - and hopefully warmer days than today to come soon - we'll be moving the "classroom" outside a lot more. We've all had a bit of the "blahs" lately, so maybe the change of scenery will help. :)

Monday, February 22, 2010

Happy New Year!

Originally posted on January 4, 2010

As promised when I first began this blog, I have been spectacularly craptastic about keeping it updated. New year, new attempt at keeping it at least somewhat regularly updated...

The first quarter of our 2009 school year couldn't have been more perfect. We were met with a bit of a challenge in the second quarter, which led to us only covering the basics (reading, math and Bible) on most days. Fortunately, reading and math are the big ones that the county requires us to do every day, so we're still in good shape. As of December 22, we had completed 90 out of the required 180 days of instruction for the 2009-10 school year. Halfway there!

After a week and half off for Christmas and New Year's, we're back at the kitchen table for school this morning. Quite a bit of what we're doing today is review, especially in the subjects that have been somewhat neglected (science, history, health) in the past months.

We'll be starting all new things before long, as Rachael is just two lessons away from finishing her math book - the one that we only started in September! Granted, we didn't do all of the review pages - I let her work on each lesson until she was ready to take the test, and then let her go for it. (As long as she has a good grasp on each concept, I see no reason to make her repeat, repeat, repeat.) So, she made short work of Math-U-See Alpha, which covered more skip counting, telling time on an analog clock, addition, subtraction, solving for unknown, word problems, etc. I'm very impressed (and, I admit, a little surprised) at just how well she's done with this math book, especially since she claims that it's her least favorite subject. Oddly, she complains about adding but has no qualms whatsoever about subtracting. We'll be finishing this book on Friday and then working on review pages until the next book (Beta) arrives.

We'll also be starting a new Bible study at the end of January, when we finish reading through her God's Little Princess Devotional Bible. As sweet and meaningful as the devotionals are for a girl her age, I'm looking forward to beginning something more in-depth with her soon. Train Up A Child Publishing has a series of "Choosing..." books that have gotten excellent reviews - I'm leaning toward Choosing Obedience or Choosing Self-Control to begin with, which will hopefully help nip some behavioral issues before they escalate. Other titles include Choosing Kindness, Thankfulness, Humility, Responsibility...all geared at children in K-5. There are more titles for teens that I think will be interesting to study with her later on, assuming that the reviews are correct and we love this series just as much!

Rachael still isn't a big fan of handwriting, although she doesn't fight me on it as much these days. She only takes offense when I erase a word for having capital letters randomly inserted in the middle...

She's still taking gymnastics lessons, and doing well with them. I love watching her flip over the uneven bars! She's also beginning her last year (sniffle) as a Daisy Girl Scout. I can't believe she'll be a Brownie this fall! The first meeting of the new year is tonight, and we'll be kicking off the COOKIE DRIVE! (No, I'm not at all excited about that!)

So, there's our new year update - hopefully it won't take me three months to post another one. :)  It's my intent to ease into a more classical method of education over the next few months, which focuses very highly on history (as well as math and language arts, of course.) If you're a homeschooling parent and have never read The Well-Trained Mind, I would highly recommend it. Lots of wonderful food for thought!

Happy 2010, everyone! I'm very much looking forward to making some changes in our home this year, and to a fun and insightful school year!

It's not pink; it's a cupcake.

Originally posted on October 6, 2009

I'm starting to wonder, already, if homeschooling Milly may not be more of a challenge than it is with Rachael. She's already exhibiting signs of being an abstract thinker, and I'm not sure my brain twists in her direction...

We were all sitting in the floor together this afternoon, when I decided that it was as good a time as any to start teaching Milly her colors. (Already later than I started with Rachael, but oh well...Second Child Syndrome (SCS) is unfortunately alive and well in our home.) The prevalent color in our home being PINK, that seemed the natural choice to begin with. And here is the conversation that ensued...

Me: Milly, what color is your nightgown? (Yes, she's still in her pajamas. Why get dressed when we're not going anywhere?)
 Milly (looking down at the big picture of Dora on her belly): DORA!
Me (holding up her pink sneaker): It's PINK. What color is your shoe?
Milly: Mine!
Me (holding up a toy cupcake with pink icing): It's a PINK shoe! What color is the cupcake?
Milly: Yummmmmy!
Me (grabbing one of Rachael's dolls, dressed in a pink dress): Yes, yummy PINK cupcake. What color is the baby's dress?
Milly: Sissy's baby.
Me: Sissy's baby is wearing a PINK dress. PINK. See this? It's PINK!
Milly: PINK!
Me: Yes! Pink!
(Rachael retrieves a pink doll trunk from the toybox.) Rachael: What color is this, Milly?
Milly: A box.
Rachael: NO, it's a TRUNK.
Milly: PINK trunk!
(wild applause)
Me: Good job, Milly! It IS pink! (picks up cupcake again)  Now, what color is this?
Milly: A cupcake.

*sigh*

It's BRAG TIME!

Originally posted on October 5, 2009

Here we go on week #8...it's amazing how quickly the time is flying by. In filling in my lesson plan book last night, I marked off two days for Thanksgiving already. Yes, only two days...but you know that the rest of that week is going to mostly be Pilgrim stories and fall crafts, right?  :)

Rachael is still doing great with her schoolwork. I've had to let go of a few of my OCD tendencies where math was concerned. Each lesson in the Math-U-See Alpha consists of six pages - three that focus on that lesson and three more that review previous concepts - plus a test booklet with a test for each lesson. I was dividing each lesson into two days in order to do all of the pages...and it was taking forever. Did she really need six pages of practicing writing numbers up to 100? I think not. So, my new easier/faster rule is that she does the first page of the lesson and decides for herself if she needs more practice before taking the test. If she's struggling, of course I recommend that she does one more page. But if not...it's test time, and help is unavailable during the test. Once she finishes, we'll discuss any answers she might have gotten wrong - but those are pretty few and far between. She has much less issue with math now that it doesn't take soooo long! This book, so far, has focused on addition and subtraction of single digits, and solving for unknown. (Algebra at age five!)

We nixed our Book of Virtues unit study last week in favor of reading a chapter of her new Girl Scouts handbook each day. We finished it up on Friday, and that earns her one more patch for her uniform!

And now, on to today's brag... I pull her spelling words each week from a book called Natural Speller. There are several pages of words for "Grades 1-2", broken into columns of 7 or 8. To begin with, I was going in order and giving her one column each week. In week seven, her spelling words included such perplexities as in, if, it and sit. What utter nonsense! She could spell in she was two. So I devised a brilliant new plan. Rather than giving her spelling words on Monday, having her copy them all week, and then testing her on them on Friday...I would give her a test on Monday. That's right - I'd just start reading through the words and having her do her best to sound them out - and when she got up to eight that she had spelled incorrectly, I'd stop and those would be her eight spelling words for the week. That way, she would be working on eight words that actually presented a little bit of a challenge.

Well. We sat down today and I started reading through the words. She wrote...and wrote...and wrote...and finally started complaining, asking why she was having to write ALL of these spelling words? The child wrote 56 words and only missed FIVE. So much for my goal of eight! The words she missed were: block (bloke), start (sart), third (thrid), stir (str) and shirt (sirt). I chalk the last four up to the fact that they were so near the end, and she was sick of writing by then! So, those are our spelling words for the week. All five of them.

In case anyone is interested, here are the words she didn't miss: got, hop, drop, shop, top, not, hot, on, dog, fog, box, stop, mop, sun, cut, us, fun, run, up, but, such, club, much, cup, rub, jump, running, arm, farm, car, far, hard, harm, are, card, cart, star, dark, part, apart, bird, first, girl, birth, born, more, for, or, fort, corn and horn.

Yep! Still proud of her. :)

Wow, week six already?!

Originally posted on September 22, 2009

I missed two weeks of updates - which included the one month mark of this school year. How did that happen?! Now we're into the sixth week - already! It seems like we just started! I'm taking this as a very, very good sign. If things weren't going well, I would most likely be slashing the days off of the calendar in red marker and keeping a running total in my head...only X more days until my goal is met! But no - we have our routine now and, even though Milly is still irritated sometimes that all the attention isn't focused solely on her, it's mostly a smooth process.

A few things that have happened since my last update...
  • We finished Math-U-See Primer (kindergarten). Rachael was terribly excited that we wrapped it up on a Friday afternoon and that the next book in the series hadn't yet arrived. Just as she began rejoicing the fact that she wouldn't have any math to do on the following Monday...the UPS truck arrived with the Alpha book. Them's the breaks, kiddo! (I gave her Monday off from math anyway, just because.) The first few lessons in the new book have been review, but new material (word problems) will commence next week.
  • Handwriting is going better - she doesn't mind doing the lessons any more - but we still butt heads on a pretty regular basis. She has apparently decided that she only cares for capital letters, and would be quite happy using nothing but. In what must be a half-hearted attempt to please me, she'll occasionally throw in a lowercase letter or two, so her English workbook is filled with lines such as "THe cAT rAN AWAy FrOM THe DOG." I'm sure most everyone has encountered the teenager who randomly capitalizes things that way online, and how annoying it is. I refuse to let Rachael become one of them! She gets pretty mad at me when I erase the whole thing and demand a re-do, but darnit, lowercase letters are our friends. (Incidentally, we seem to be going through an inordinate number of erasers.)
  • Rachael has a spelling test, consisting of eight words, each Friday. She missed one word each on the first three tests, but hasn't missed any on the last two!
  • We're still loving our Book of Virtues unit study, although the section on compassion that we just finished up was hard for my soft-hearted girly. It took a good half hour to stop the tears after reading The Little Match Girl. The Gift of the Magi was better received, although Rachael maintains that she's going to grow her hair all the way to the floor and will never cut it all off to buy a gift for any man.  ;)
  • Girl Scouts is back in full swing, with the first fundraiser of the 2009-2010 school year starting next week. Expect her to be hitting you up for orders of nuts, toffee popcorn and choclate-covered everything. Thankfully, it's not terribly expensive. We got to sample everything at this week's meeting too, and it's all really, really good.
  • Gymnastics is still going well. Rachael flipped over the top bar on the uneven bars this week, without so much as a teacher standing there to spot her. I was so proud!
I asked Rachael what she would like to say on her blog, and here's what I got out of her:
"Homeschool is really cool. The funnest part about homeschool is that Mommy gets to teach me. I like the books that we read for English."

And now, being that it is Tuesday afternoon, we're off to the library for craft time and to re-stock on chapter books. We've begun reading about Kirsten, the pioneer American Girl that Rachael will be for Halloween. She's discovered Cam Jansen books and absolutely loves them, and she's always on the lookout for more, more, more things to read. I have to shove books out of the way to make room for her to sleep at night, but I'm not complaining. If genetics are to be blamed, it's all my fault anyway. :)

Week three is over!

Originally posted on September 4, 2009

It's hard to believe that we're three weeks into first grade already. Things are almost going too well - I keep waiting for a big problem to pop up somewhere, and keep praying that it doesn't!

We didn't have co-op this week, since all of us have had colds, and one of the other mom/teachers wasn't feeling so hot either. Rachael missed it, but had a nice, restful day with not much in the way of schoolwork. She did go to gymnastics that evening - her first class of the new school year. It's a large class, being in the evening rather than midday, but she liked all of her new teachers, which is more than we can say for the last class. Plus, her best friend is in this class - so it's going to be a good year for her.

With the arrival of a bit of cooler weather, we're starting to look forward to fall and all the fun things that go along with it. Apple picking is high on my list this year, followed by learning to make apple crisp. Rachael received her very own set of purple measuring cups and spoons for "back to school", so she'll be helping me more and more in the kitchen. Her math curriculum hasn't gotten to fractions yet, but she'll be learning a little about them anyway by measuring out ingredients. Talk about a practical application for math! Yummy too. :)

As we wrap our school week, I'm thrilled to note (and report) that Rachael has mastered the art of telling time on an analog clock! I devoted the whole week's math lessons to it, and it paid off. Next step: replace batteries in her pink Cinderella clock so she can start (really) using it! We will be working on subtraction next week, and finishing up the Math-U-See Primer (kindergarten) book. I ordered Alpha (first grade) today and can't wait to see what she'll be learning for the rest of the year.

Have a great Labor Day weekend, everyone!