The Rest 2011-2012

For science, we'll be starting our second year with Mr. Qs science.  *hint - you can download the first year for FREE*

This year, Earth Science is the topic and we are all happy about that.  My kids love space, weather and geology.   It's labeled as Elementary Science but I think it is fine for an introductory look at science for my 11 year old.  Last year he read the text, completed the questions and then he, RePete and I did the experiments.  Sometimes I added other experiments like those found at Thames and Kosmos.  This year we are doing everything the same, except RePete wants to hear the text, so I am doing the reading.


For history,  Pete reads from SOTW2, outlines Kingfisher pages, adds dates and pictures to his timeline, completes the mapwork in the SOTW2 Activity Guide and finds it on a modern day map.  This mapwork, along with general map skills suffice for geography this year.  Although I do have additional resources including Expedition Earth and The Geography Coloring Book.  Not sure how or if I'll include them yet.

For spelling, we are continuing with All About Spelling.   Pete is finishing up level 5 and then will complete level 6 this year. RePete is starting with level 1 and may get started on 2.  (This will depend on his reading.)  For Pete, I am trying to come up with some kind of review.  AAS has review built into it, but from reading his stories that he writes and illustrates, there are some weak areas.  Working on that.

For Repete, he'll continue working on Writing With Ease 1 this year, skim through First Language Lessons 2, work through many Explode the Code books (he actually enjoys these), and continue with Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading and other reading materials. And soccer.  He plays in the fall and spring.

For Pete, all that is left is literature.  I purchased lots of good books covering the time period we are studying and will continue purchasing the Riordan books and any other books that catch his fancy.  He's not a sporty kid.  He loves being outside biking, running and ripstiking, but sports aren't his thing.  He will be stepping up his drum lessons with dad this year.  And learning to type.

Both kids will take classes at RSA.  RePete has art and elementary music classes and Pete has art, middle school music, theater and film crew.  Last year Pete took the film-making class and loved it but this year it was scheduled in the same time slot as music and we require a music class.  Luckily for him, the film instructor also holds a Film Crew 101 "course" on a different day.  It's actually more of an internship than a course; the students get to help produce a short film or whatever other project the instructor is working on.  Here's a film the students helped make last year... Zombie Pickles From Space

That wraps up our plans.  Of course, there are lots of field trips and side trips woven in and if something is particularly interesting, we'll spend time getting sidetracked.

In the end, it's about our journey, not boxes with tick marks.

~R

ps  I almost forgot Nature Study.  This is a random lesson that comes about just by our being outside.  If I know we'll see something in particular, I'll remember to read up on it.  Sometimes we take pictures, sometimes we draw or paint.  Sometimes we just observe the beauty around us.

Theater Takes Over

I found some posts that never got posted and I figured I went through all the trouble to write them, so they might as well get face time.

April 7, 2011

Three times a year, theater takes over.  Our group meets for Fall, Winter and Spring sessions.  The week of our production, we have rehearsals Tuesday through Thursday with quick dress rehearsals prior to the shows.

With Repete in soccer practice two nights a week and then a game on Saturday, we have to do tag-team parenting.  This week will be especially rough since BN is in an orienteering race and that means on Saturday, I have to take RePete to his game and then race Pete over to the theater for a quick dress rehearsal and show.  Should be an interesting day.

Pete preparing for his show.

RePete kickin' butt at his game last week.

Ready for a relaxing summer.

~R

Math 2011-12

Well, well, well.

Pete hates math.  I'm not sure why except that it takes longer than most subjects and he has to think.  He offers no other reason than "it's hard".  So, I'm pretty sure I'm right in my reasoning.

This is an area where I thought rote memorization was a waste of time and I was wrong.  Poor Pete the guinea pig had to find that out.  I figured the most important part of doing math was understanding the process, being able to find the answer, from from A to B.  Memorizing facts was secondary.  But in reality, and I probably knew it back then, knowing the facts makes the process so much easier, or rather quicker.

This year I came full circle and switched us back to Saxon.  Pete is in 7/6 and each day starts with a facts drill - which he hates.  I haven't been doing the mental math portion because we've been using mostly mental math programs for the past five years - he gets it - and I'm trying not to overwhelm him in the beginning.  Next is practice problems for what we've just learned and then mixed problems. So maybe 30 problems in all.  Not that much compared to being in a classroom and working problems and then working double that for homework.  I remind him of this daily.

For the timed test, I give him five minutes because he needs it.  He hasn't completed a full page yet in that five minutes and he probably should - this is where I smack myself for not boring him with flashcards.  The remaining problems take him much longer than it probably should, again smacking myself.  But I figure with all the drill and the built-in review, I should be able to get him up to par this year, at least that is my goal.

For RePete, math is intuitive.  He wasn't ready to do a lot of school last year, so we touched on math here and there.  When I could get him to sit still, we did a worksheet, or a math game.  He loves games the most.  Unrelated, he made up a card game called Bob.  He's cracks me up!

I decided to start him out in second grade Saxon based on the skills he possessed from what little we did over the last two years and I wanted to make sure we covered all the basics.  Just yesterday, he was doing a timed fact test on the doubles and when he came to 6+6, I heard him reasoning to himself, "5+5 is 10, so 6+6 is eleven...twelve!"  We've haven't gone over any thinking like that, he just got it.  He's even able to compute more complicated math problems because he understands what the end result should look like.  Not that I've taught him, he just gets math like he gets science.

So, I think this will be a good year for math all around.

~R

Reading 2011-12

RePete, like his brother before him, is still learning to read fluently at age seven and a half.  As in my school teacher friend is tutoring him for me and he still scored in late K when we started mid-summer.  I've been using a few different resources for his reading and it's either bad teaching on my part or a readiness for RePete, like his brother before him.

As an update, Pete finished reading all five Percy Jackson books in less than two months and rereads parts of them for fun now.  He is starting another Rick Riordan series, The Kane Chronicles.   (BN and I will have to steal it at night so we too can read it.)  Pete has decided he wants to read all of Riordan's books with the exception of the 39 Clues series.  He doesn't care for them for some reason he can't articulate but I'll buy the first few and keep them lying around anyway.  He may change his mind.  It may be that the one he tried before was from the library and he has a thing about books from the library.  Unlike me, who loves the smell of the library - part paper part mustiness - Pete doesn't.  And he likes to be able to revisit books he loves so having his own is a must.  I figure if it'll keep his nose in a book, then buy I will!

After fretting and worrying when Pete was seven and still not fluently reading, I've taken a much more laid back approach to the delay with RePete.  I wouldn't have sought tutoring for him except that my friend was so excited to work with him that I couldn't turn her down.  (She'd just come off a high getting all of her K'ers to read and read well.)

At the same time, I know that reading opens so many doors and fosters some independence so I would prefer he read proficiently now that later, but again, no stress.

Not for him and not for me.

~R

Writing 2011-12

Oh how I dread the writing.

Pete loves to write so I don't want to squash that interest, but his writing needs work.  Granted he's only eleven and I've been teaching him grammar and sentence structure, but I still think it's an area where he can improve and he'll need to improve in the coming years.

So bless those folks at Peace Hill Press.  They are working on the middle or logic years for writing as well.  The only formal writing program we've used is Writing Strands (WS) and it bores Pete silly.  So silly that his sentences usually end up with the word poop in them.  So I knew I had to find something that focused more on the mechanics of his writing than the creative.  He's plenty creative when he's interested and obviously WS was not interesting to him.

So once again, Susan generously provided chapters of her upcoming book Writing With Skill (WWS) to all the begging WTMers on the board and shared it on her blog .

I really like that Susan focuses on the mechanics before the creative.  I think she is spot on in desiring to have the students understand how to put the words on the page before letting them loose to do their own writing.  And being able to find the main ideas and supporting ideas will be a huge boon to his report writing skills later on.

All that said, he's is struggling with it.  We didn't have the luxury of using the Writing With Ease series geared towards the lower grades and I love that process, one also used by Charlotte Mason.  We started using the WWE 4 book last year and he seemed to do okay with it so I'm not sure if the trouble he's having now stems from not having enough practice at narrating or if he's just being reluctant.

Time will tell, but I'm sold on this program.

~R

ps  once again, WS is a perfectly valid program and many people sing its praises, just not what we need right now.
pss I use the word so too much which is strange because I don't use it when I speak.

Grammar 2011-12

After using Growing with Grammar (GWG) with Pete for the past three years, we're making a switch.  Peace Hill Press is coming out with grammar and writing programs for the middle school or logic stage.  Although her first book, Advanced Language Lessons (ALL), is slated as fifth grade resources based on the progression of her books, I'm glad it's just coming out in his sixth grade year.  Their books tend to cover a range of ages and he falls within it without it being below his skill set.  (I wish her elementary years had been completed when we were in that stage - but I can use them with RePete.)  We began using the teaser chapters that Susan Wise Bauer graciously gave us eager WTM beavers and I love them.

 GWG was great in that it covered everything and wrote to the student.  What I didn't like about it was how the grammar was put into practice.  The student worksheets were sentence after sentence after example after example of the same thing.  For some students this type of rote memorization might work.  Pete basically worked the first problem and them filled in all the remaining blanks based on his first answer.  It wasn't effective in teaching him the rules.  He didn't have to work to get the answers and form an understanding.

An example from GWG on pronouns looks like this:

• Jerry drew pictures in his notebook. 
• Asta brushes her hair.

FLL, reminding myself I only have the first five (not totally edited) chapters or so, is turning out to be just what I think he needs.  He can't guess the answers because the problems are all different and Susan uses passages or sentences from real literature. 

• Although Helen Keller was blind and deaf, she became a famous author and speaker. 
• Peter realized that he would never be able to capture Azov unless he could stop Turkish ships from reaching it.

I think it is obvious how the GWG way would be easy to "cheat" your way through and the FLL way would take a bit more thought.

And so far, it has him thinking.

~R

ps.  I think GWG is a perfectly valid program.  I just have a different need right now.
pss  I think I need to take the grammar course right along with Pete.  I suck at grammar.

Friendships - Part Deux

I deleted Part One but it's available in readers.  I'm not sure why I deleted Part One.

But Part Deux is where the real meat of the issue lies.  We're dumb and we're abnormal.

I was reading over at The Foil Hat and the last sentence of her post summed up our last six years of homeschooling.  I commented about it because it struck me so.

I live in a huge area.  Our cities all clumped together make the 5th largest metropolis in the US.  We have a HUGE homeschooling community.  If you can throw a rock, chances are you'll hit a homeschooler.

A gifted homeschooler.

Unless you hit my kids.  They are as dumb as the rocks being thrown.  Or at least that is my impression.  Personally, I think my kids are awesome.

Pete can draw anything, is a wonderful comedic actor and can play the drums by ear.  Pete has written several stories and comics and has written and produced several well thought out films.  Pete also likes to just hang out and play video games or watch television or read a book.

RePete can also draw anything, has also started to play by ear - both drums and piano, and who knows what else, he's only seven so time will tell. RePete doesn't know all the terminology, but he totally understands the way our universe works.  I have to confer with BN on this because I'm not a science-y person.  But in the middle of dinner he'll start talking about recycling or planet rotation.  He still loves Legos and Playmobile and video games and Spongebob and is a top player in his soccer league.

But those boys are just plain dumb compared to what the other mothers share about their kids around the playground.

I wish I knew more dumb people.  I wish they were a little more abnormal.

~R

Wow!  I leave my blog world for a few months and I come back to a total stranger.  Is this even my blog?

It looks like my blog.  It smells like my blog.  Okay, well actually my computer screen still smells like my kids' hands because they can't keep their fingers off the screen and I don't even want to analyze what smells are lurking on here.  But this whole editing page is crazy and BIG and WHITE!

My computer illiteracy expands year by year such that I cannot for the life of me do a screen print to use in this post.  But that compounding deficiency is also causing my chest to tighten a bit as I type because what happens when I finish and can't figure out what to do next.  I'll still be sitting here tomorrow morning staring at this screen instead of a published page.

Which means squat because who the hell cares anyway.  And why when I push the return key does my cursor pop to the beginning of the previous paragraph?  Oh Lordy, I'm doomed.  I don't like change.

~R