All About Reading Continued

 We are still working through All About Reading, pre-reading with Dot, who will be 6 in May.  We finished lesson 32 today, lower case F.  I still really like it, and so does she.  My goal is to get through all the lower case letters before she turns 6, hopefully sooner.  She's just very gently absorbing letters and sounds.  I have noticed that some of the pre-reading games have been challenging for her, which makes me glad that we are not pushing any kind of formal reading at this time.  And then one day things click.  Today, she seemed to understand a lot better about the sounds of words being broken up.  So, waiting for her brain to be ready on its own seems a better strategy than trying to push it.  I'm really thankful that she is not in a kindergarten class, and that her brain is free to learn in a non-stressful way.  

We may play a little more often with letters, as she thinks it is fun to form them.  I want to make some Montessori phonetic object cards to encourage this.  

Schiller Math Continued

 Dot and I have now completed lesson 55 of Schiller Math.  I am very glad that I bought this kit.  She loves doing math and probably would have liked to have moved at a faster pace.  We are going to try to do math a few times a week now so that I can get her moved through material she is ready for.  

What I like:

• Lessons are short and easy.  
• No prep.  
• Covers concepts I might miss if I were planning on my own.  
• This program is really solid, and the workbook is attractive.  

Ways that I adapt it:  

• The cardboard thousand cubes were annoying.  They kept getting crushed.  I actually switched to my Montessori Outlet golden bead material, which Dot finds far more appealing.   (The hundreds and thousands are wooden, except for the demonstration set, which are beads).  That is the one thing that really put me off from Schiller to begin with, and why I didn't use it--I don't love the blue cubes.  But it's really, really easy just to use the bead set that I have with it.  
• I've been skipping some of the left-right and even-odd lessons.  I feel like left-right is learned more developmentally.  I think even-odd is easier to understand once someone has mastered division and gotten a little older.  
• I think that the four operations are best learned with large quantities, not with small ones.  So I will be adapting the Schiller lessons and using the ones I learned in my Montessori training.  

So, yes, I'm still very happy with my Schiller purchase.  Next year, I plan to supplement it with math story books.  Around the third grade, as we work through the material, I will transition to Life of Fred.  I imagine there will be a little workbook work too, to prepare Dot to take a standardized test.  

Homeschool Spanish Academy

This morning at 9 AM, both of my sons logged into their Spanish lessons on Google Meet.  Each had a 50-minute private lesson with a native Spanish speaker and trained tutor, who teaches from Guatemala.  Neither son complained.  Both enjoy their lessons and are developing beautiful accents, a love for the language, and an interest in other cultures.  I highly recommend Homeschool Spanish Academy.  

https://www.spanish.academy/

Back to Cozi for planning

With the New Year, I realized that we needed to change our system for keeping the family calendar.  With me in graduate school, an active volunteering life, 2 kids homeschooling, and the other in a final year of free range preschool, the system I had been happily using (paper planner/bullet journal) was about to break down.  The main issue was that I needed to enter a lot of repeated events (karate practice, zoom classes, etc), and the time it would take to enter everyone's activity into a paper calendar was not feasible. Not to mention the fact that the data would not be portable or easily transferrable to anyone else.  

I first tried Homeschool Planet (yet again).  This is the third time I have tried it, and I do not like it.  I also do not understand why it looks the same as it did several years ago.  I find it complicated and clunky, and every time I access it, it is more dated.  

I then decided that everything I need to do (since I do not track grades), I could do in Cozi, which I had used years ago.  I put everyone's scheduled activities into it.  I also put in all chores and assignments as all day events.  All of us have the app on our phone.  Each boy's individual agenda is also printed, and I put them on the refrigerator with magnet clips.  

Here is what I like about this system:  

• My husband and I and each boy can be clear on our expectations, eliminating a lot of the fuzziness that was so bothersome to Bug. 
• I can punch holes in the agendas when the week is over, and I actually have a record of what they did!  I can also jot things down (documentaries they
  watched, etc) that were not assigned.  This is good protection for me in the extremely unlikely scenario that we would be accused of educational neglect.  Of course, in that scenario, I am also pretty sure that 5 minutes of a social worker chatting with my kids about any academic subject would do the trick as well.  
• We can all access the calendar from our phones.  
• I can use the reminder function.  
• It's easy to input events, to make them repeat, and to change them.  

What I don't like:  

• I feel like the to-do function could be improved.  I would like to input their chores and repeating assignments as to-do items rather than all-day events.  
• There is so much on the calendar that the monthly view isn't usable.  
• I liked my simple, low-tech paper system.  It was calming.  But 5 people with irregular schedules is too much for me to keep up with using a low tech system.  

Planning English class (7th and 11th grade combined)

With Bee home next semester, and Bug no longer taking English at his co-op. I am coming up with a plan to teach them both myself.  The truth is that I really don't like teaching writing.  It's the subject I am most qualified to teach and also the one I actually have professional experience teaching (college writing lab).  It comes very easily to me, however, and I find it frustrating and tedious to try and teach it.  When I write something, I often start at the beginning and end at the end, with minimal planning and revision.  I have a process for writing research papers which involves a bit of writing notes and quotes, but it is mostly internal and difficult to explain to an overwhelmed young writer.  

The most enjoyable curriculum I have used has been WriteShop.  It breaks the process of writing down in ways that I honestly can't.  So, I will continue with Bee where we left off in the program a couple of years ago and start Bug in WriteShop I.  

I will also be working with them both on some basic skills with writing research papers.  I ordered a book of citation exercises to use with Bug, and a book of help for writing a research paper for Bee, but I may just use both for both.  We will see.  I've learned that too much advance planning tends to backfire.  It's best to be loosely prepared and go with the flow.  

But the part of their English classes that I'm truly excited about is POETRY.  This is the perfect thing for us to study because poems are short.  I can choose a poem, we can read it together, discuss it, do some analysis, and be done.  Very little preparation is required.  And poetry is so important and so understudied in high school and college.  I hope to have them take turns choosing poems at some point.  I'm excited about this new adventure!  

And we come full circle

Some time ago, I posted about how Bee's homeschool journey had come to an end.  Well, 3 semesters later, we think we're going to pull him out again.  The school system's pandemic learning plan has been a disaster, especially for someone like him who is twice exceptional.  I will not violate my child's privacy by discussing all of the particulars, but there are other problems as well.  Traditional school is not a good way for him to learn.  I'm not sure it is good for anyone, including the teenage girls in his advanced classes who cry regularly over the workload and the pressure.  

There has been discouragement and disillusionment among all of us, especially my husband and Bee.  The system pretends to be something that it is not.  Mastery of material or profound engagement with subject matter aren't the focus--assignment completion and following instructions are.  Helps for kids with ADHD is abysmal, so we've found.  Advocating is pretty much a waste of time.  It's not the people (administrators and teacher); the system is deeply flawed.  

Bug has been taking outside classes.  They are good, but I'm coming to realize that I do just as good a job if not better with helping my children learn than any teacher.  And signing my kids up for classes often causes me more stress than just doing it myself.  (Except for science, where my interest and ability is very low).  So, Bug will be taking fewer classes too.  

I am in a hybrid-distance seminary program, receiving A+'s.  This has done a massive amount for my confidence level.  Homeschooling is so thankless, with no outside gratification.  It's nice to feel competent and knowledgeable at something.  

So, I will be back to homeschooling my boys.  Bee has three more semesters until graduation! I am truly thankful to have the option to homeschool my children.  It is so hard sometimes, but after much prayer, I believe we are making the right choice for our family.  

Shiller Math: After 27 Lessons

Dot and I have completed 27 lessons on Shiller Math, and we are loving it so far.  She begs to do it most days.  I'm thrilled because it is such a nice program.  It seems thorough, gentle, and, just like in a Montessori class, it's learning through exploration. 

As a trained Montessori teacher, I find the materials a little different, and sometimes things are scripted in a way that aren't quite the way I was trained.  That's okay, and I just make adjustments. 

The Shiller material, like Montessori material, is diagnostic.  Because it isolates concepts so effectively, it is easy to tell what a child has mastered and also to see what concepts she might need more work on.  I quickly learned that Dot needs to practice counting a little more and gain a little confidence in counting numbers over 5 (which she finds slightly overwhelming). 

I am love with the Montessori "bank" material.  Of course, I love the golden beads used in the Montessori classroom, and the blue plastic units are growing on me too.  It gives me a thrill that she can now identify which ones are the tens, hundreds, and thousands.  Such a fun thing for a 4-year-old to be exposed to.  I enjoyed watching the kids with these materials when I was a student teacher.  They love playing with the large quantities.  Dot likes to play with them outside of our lessons, which I think is great.