Kicking Pedagogical Ass

New blog home!

2012-06-03T09:35:00.005-07:00

This blog has moved to http://kickingpedagogicalass.wordpress.com/.

Week in Review--February 4, 2012

2012-02-04T07:37:00.000-08:00

We're now at the end of the fourth week of the winter quarter at the university and have settled into the new routine, though I've now added a new job to my list: I'm student teaching math to fifth-graders from extremely low-income and otherwise unfortunate/tragic family backgrounds. It's a very different experience from homeschooling, obviously, but the pedagogical tools and the variety of mathematical approaches I've learned from homeschooling have been absolutely invaluable. I've worked with two small groups of students, one at the just-below-average skill point and one well-below-average, and covered different topics with each. On Monday, the first group worked on simplification of fractions. Most of the students were fairly strong on their lower multiplication tables, but one didn't actually know that multiplication is just serial addition. Once he knew that, he could (slowly) solve anything I threw at him. I'm letting him play with that for a while (he's sorted out that counting by twos and threes is equivalent to and faster than adding them over and over--well done him!), and I plan to start working on the multiplication tables with him this week. It's well-timed, actually, because Oscar's going to begin memorizing his twos and threes on Monday as well (more on that below). The other students in that group were very close to full understanding before they came to me, and they'd achieved mastery by the end of our session.

The second group was more challenging, because one student speaks Spanish exclusively (my own Spanish is limited and rusty, but the goblins and I start back with our Spanish tutor this week so I'll be improving), and another student is reported to have an IQ of 70 and to be clinically retarded. That one is mysterious to me, because while he did certainly need remediation in topics well below fifth-grade level (we were using manipulatives to illustrate the concept of multiplication), he picked it up easily and is also thoroughly bilingual. He's apparently about to turn 13, but it's difficult to tell whether there really is an intelligence deficit or some kind of learning disorder (or disorders) muddying the waters.

On Wednesday I arrived with my own manipulatives and ready to pick up where we'd left off, but to my dismay we were moving on to long division (!). Their teacher has to move the rest of the class along, of course, and because we're working during class time we have to at least attempt to keep up. After the teacher's lesson, my first group of students made their way back to my table, and sat down not with the excited and proud faces they'd left me with on Monday, but with expressions of deep frustration and self-doubt. Still, even though we'd skipped some very important steps and they'd been terribly discouraged by trying to follow along with the lesson, they did get it working after we discussed it some as a group, and by the end of our time three ten year-old boys asked me if they could skip lunch and do more math with me. I'm taking that as a sign of success. I tried to make it clear to them that far from being dumb, they'd essentially skipped two grade levels (without mentioning the grade levels themselves) in 48 hours and still managed to succeed. I've also arranged to set up an after-school program two days a week so I can work with these students on the topics they really need to be working on so that they can follow the class lessons without frustration. The teacher asked if I could teach reading as well, and my groups are small so it's actually starting to feel a bit like homeschooling after all.

I mentioned earlier that Ozzy's working on multiplication himself. Singapore Math teaches operations and their inverses together, so the unit he's just finished in 2A covered the introduction to the concepts of both multiplication and division. When we're discussing a new topic, I always make the first few lessons a leaderless collaborative effort, the next ones a student-led collaboration, and the final ones I let him work through on his own with the option to ask questions. When he's going to be working on his own, I flip through what he'll be doing to make sure he'll be comfortable with it, but on Tuesday I somehow missed that the last two pages I'd set out for him were division, which we hadn't discussed at all yet. I'd gone down the hall to brush Sofie's hair, and when I came back five minutes later he was done, having apparently fully understood what the one-word instruction ("Divide:" followed by a list of equations) ought to mean and completed both pages without error. We've since discussed and played with division just to be thorough, but that was a fun moment.

Ozzy does have a tendency to despair if he doesn't fully assimilate a concept the first time he hears it, and working on difficult problems from multiple angles feels like cheating to him, so last night we watched the NOVA documentary on the process of proving Fermat's Last Theorem. Seeing that the world's top mathematicians struggled with that one problem for centuries, and that solving it absolutely required thinking about it from many different angles and using different approaches, seemed to help Ozzy relax and believe me that math is not a race and that part of the joy of math is the struggle and the insights that are developed during that struggle. It was also very interesting for me, because one of the classes I'm taking this quarter introduces proof techniques, which I could recognize in an extremely primitive way in the work in the film.

In my last weekly review, I mentioned that we'll begin MCT's Grammar Island in the next month or so, and I expect to transition into it's being our primary grammar curriculum instead of First Language Lessons. I had already ordered FLL3 when I discovered MCT, and from what I've read the combination of the two is rather ideal for the first level or two of MCT so that worked out fine. I haven't ordered MCT yet, but FLL arrived last week and confirmed something else I'd read about FLL: that FLL2 is unnecessary for most students. Oscar's over halfway through, and we'd been taking the lessons two or three at a time because they were fairly repetitive and moved forward in rather small increments, which might be very good for a student for whom language or memorization are not major strengths. FLL2 repeats everything covered in FLL1, and the new material in FLL2 is repeated in FLL3, so unless a student needs the repetition or some extra time to mature, it's very feasible to go from FLL1 directly into FLL3, which is what I plan to do with Sofie. In any case, Ozzy's started on FLL3 now and is doing very well with it.

Week in Review--January 13, 2012

2012-01-13T08:26:00.000-08:00

Perhaps I should change these posts to "Month in Review" posts, because that's about how often I'm actually doing them. In any case, this was our first week back at the university, and our first week using our new lesson schedule. It went very well, although I did realize there were a few changes I needed to make to our schedule to reflect the change that will happen to our Thursdays when Ozzy's ballet class starts in February. I had planned to do full math lessons Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday, but they won't be getting home until 7:30 on Thursday nights once the ballet class starts, so it'll be getting a bit late for a full math lesson (which usually takes about 45 minutes per goblin). It's enough time for each goblin to have ten to fifteen minutes on the math software, though, while I do a full spelling lesson with the other (spelling lessons are only about twenty minutes each, once a week, with a five-minute review four days a week). Also, since Sofie's ballet class is a different day, Richard will do her reading and penmanship with her during Ozzy's class so that'll be out of the way when they get home. So I ended up moving Thursday's full math lesson to Monday nights, when we're home at 7:00 instead of 7:30. It must sound like the goblins are constantly on the go, but they're really not. It's just that instead of having their less-busy hours at the end of every day, sometimes the quieter hours are in the morning or afternoon. Thursdays are, unequivocally, a bit busy though now that their Lego engineering class is Thursday mornings instead of Fridays, but it means Friday mornings are less busy, so it evens out.

Ozzy and I have really been enjoying the switch in his math lineup. He likes the change of pace and the fact that the bar has been moved higher, but because Singapore Math seems to be more evenly incremented one topics are introduced, the trajectory is smoother. I've heard the opposite about SM, and I can easily imagine that that might be true if SM were used as a solo curriculum--which it's intended to be--but since we're still using RightStart to introduce new topics, we seem to have avoided that issue.

Sofie's math has been a challenge, though. I think I mentioned in my last Week in Review that she'd reached a point in RS B at which she could no longer make real progress until she could achieve instant recall of addition and subtraction facts. To improve that for her we've taken the last month or so off from formal math curricula and just played math games like Go Fish (in which a number is chosen at the start, and the "pairs" are two numbers whose sum is that number, instead of two numbers that are the same), Addition War (in which both players play two cards at once and whoever has the higher sum gets all four cards), and some other games. She's made some progress and has been enjoying it, but the part of math that appeals most to her (and to me) is the discovery aspect and the joy in seeing how all the concepts relate to one another, so she's started to get bored and keeps getting out the RS B manual in hopes that we'll get back some "real math," as she calls it. She's very strong on mathematical thinking and makes connections that I wouldn't have thought to point out to her yet, so I'm not concerned (am actually secretly thrilled, because my bias favors conceptual understanding over procedural understanding), and have decided to take this as an opportunity to try Miquon Math. Miquon is discovery-based (an exploration, rather than a guided tour), and uses cuisinaire rods instead of the abacus, which will be a fun change of scenery. Miquon is very inexpensive, so I ordered the first through third-grade books so that Ozzy can play, too. We might also add in some MEP math, which is a (free!) British program based on a Hungarian one, and is one I've heard wonderful things about.

Sofie's also had a breakthrough in her reading, and as of this week is reading short picture books that aren't phonetically-controlled, for the first time. Last night she was reading The Runaway Bunny, and I'd planned to do her next lesson in The Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading when she finished, but it turned out that everything in the lesson appeared in the story itself, so we skipped the lesson. I flipped through the rest of the book, and I think we'll actually put it on hold indefinitely. With Oscar I definitely wanted to hit every lesson, but now that we're using All About Spelling, which covers almost all of the same concepts, and since she's doing so well regardless, I think we'll just keep on reading living books and practicing the rules with the spelling program, checking OPGTR every few weeks to make sure we haven't missed anything. It was at about this point that Oscar took off with reading, as well, and in the space of one year went from not reading at all to reading Sherlock Holmes unabridged. I'm relieved to see that milestone on the horizon for Sofie, because it'll open up some more interesting curricula for her and will allow her to be slightly more independent in her work (total independence is most certainly not a goal for us, however, at this age). Oh, and it also means that she can start doing the copywork in Writing With Ease instead of my having to make up copywork for her.

I'm almost totally convinced to switch Oscar to MCT grammar when he finishes grade 2 in First Language Lessons, because FLL3 apparently uses its own conventions in some areas, whereas MCT uses traditional ones less likely to cause confusion later on. MCT also includes poetry and Latin-based vocabulary study, which would be nice additions. I've actually already ordered FLL3, though, so I'll probably go through both programs and combine them in much the same way that I did with SM and RS.

And I think that's about it for us this week/month. We're having our first Field Trip Friday in several months today; it's nice to be back to it. Have a great weekend!

How We Do It

2012-01-05T19:30:00.000-08:00

Due to the fact that both Brandon and I are full-time students ourselves, we're frequently asked how we manage to homeschool as well. I touched on our method a bit tangentially in this post on our current schedule, but given the interest that that topic tends to generate, a dedicated post seems to be indicated.

I've mentioned before that we're a three-parent family: that's Richard (my former husband and the goblins' father), Brandon (my (very!) soon-to-be husband and the goblins' bonus dad), and me. We're a very close-knit family, and function as one unit rather than as two factions. All three of us contribute to the homeschooling, in different but equally valuable ways. Richard's arranged his work schedule so that he works from afternoon-evening, and his days off are Wednesdays and Thursdays instead of weekends. This means that we need no childcare that we wouldn't have needed if the goblins were in school. He does some of the academics on Mondays and Wednesdays, and this quarter will be spending Tuesday nights at our place so that he can be here when we leave for school at 7:30 on Wednesday mornings. He then takes them to his house and to their activities, then they spend the night there. He does art with them on Thursday mornings and takes them to their afternoon activities, then brings them home. He also takes them to their Friday morning activity.

Brandon and I tag-team the academics on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. I do most of the math instruction, but we split the rest and he often plays math games with Sofie or listens to her practicing her reading while he's cooking and I'm doing work with Ozzy. He's also quite handy/crafty/arty, and involves them in lots of projects. I have a Friday afternoon class, and every other Friday, after the goblins come back from their morning class with Richard, we all go to the university and Brandon homeschools the goblins in the café while I'm in class, then we go on a field trip.

I do all of the planning, researching, and the choosing of curricula. I also do the scheduling, and am generally the director (I suppose that's the best term for it) of the homeschooling. I sort out what we're teaching, when we're going to teach it, and how we're going to teach it. I do a slight majority of the teaching, though the dads help out with the open-and-go curricula, and I take sole responsibility for the subjects, like math, that are either unscripted or ones I've modified beyond easy recognition. I also do all of the editing and rearranging of curricula that aren't quite what we need, very often combining the best elements of multiple programs.

We're extremely fortunate that my parents are supportive both of our university pursuits and the goblins' homeschooling, though the latter took some convincing in the beginning. We arrange our school schedules in whichever way means we need the least childcare, and thus far haven't ever needed more than one day a week, usually only in the afternoon. This coming quarter will be the first time we've needed care in the morning, because I have a class that begins at 8:40. My parents live about 20 minutes in exactly the opposite direction (from the position of our house) from the university, which is a further half hour a way, so they've offered to make the mornings easier by having the goblins spend the night with them on Sunday nights, and will have them on Mondays until evening. Richard will come for 2.5 hours in the morning so that they're not "on duty" for quite as long, and also to do the morning's homeschooling. We never ask my parents to contribute to the academics, though they do drop them off and pick them up at the jujitsu dojo on Monday evenings (which is just five minutes' drive from their house). After the goblins come home after dinner, we cover a few more subjects before bedtime.

Because we're all so busy, we do frequently do history or math/science read-alouds during dinner, and sometimes the goblins do pen-and-pencil work during breakfast. We also ramp up the intensity academically during the university winter and summer breaks, to cover just a little extra ground and to "make up" the spontaneous days off we sometimes take and the week off we generally take before/during our final exams each quarter. Despite this, we do make sure that the goblins still have at least as many unstructured hours in the day as do most children in school with homework and extracurriculars.

Wordless Wednesday--December 21, 2011

2011-12-21T10:37:00.000-08:00

We went to the archery range yesterday, so Sofie wore her Boudica costume (it's pretty far off, of course, but we call it a "Renaissance interpretation").

Ozzy went as himself.

Second Grade Math Restructuring and Map

2011-12-20T22:30:00.000-08:00

We only used one curriculum for math for kindergarten and first grade (RightStart Math A and B), but while planning our second grade line-up for Ozzy I read many accounts from parents who found that RS, while top-notch for K and first, lost a bit of its luster in second grade and had more serious issues later on. I decided to continue with RS, but to supplement with Singapore Math (we use the Standards edition), which, like RS, uses Asian-style math pedagogy, but otherwise seemed to be the inverse of RS: its K and first grades, while good, were not necessarily among the most highly regarded programs for those levels, but beginning with second grade it reached the front of the pack, and it uses a mastery approach instead of RS's spiral approach. I expected to use RS most heavily for second grade, supplementing with SM, and then reverse those positions in third. So I ordered both, and when they arrived I compared the two.

Upon a cursory inspection, I found that RS C and SM 2A/2B (both programs' second grade curricula) covered the same scope (though RS covered more geometry), just in a different sequence. I considered feeling as though I'd wasted my money, but decided that having SM's workbooks would give me the option to let Richard or Brandon facilitate a math lesson on occasion, and extra flexibility is always a good thing. That did work out nicely, and as we progressed through RS C I was very happy with our setup.

When we began RS C, we did the first three weeks' worth of lessons in three days, which I was relieved by because ordering curricula through our charter school had taken much longer than I'd anticipated and we were getting a late start. We then slowed down to two lessons at a time, and I expected to stop doing double lessons quite quickly. This week, however, I realized we were fully a third of the way through and hadn't slowed down any further, nor (after looking through the rest of the book) did I continue to expect to. Out of curiosity, I checked out the next few chapters of SM and found that while my initial assessment that RS and SM covered the same topics with similar methods was correct, SM was now assigning much more challenging problems and more review than RS. I briefly considered putting RS aside entirely, but when I compared the methods used to introduce topics, I found I still preferred RS.

Since we're moving at a doubled pace through RS, we have time to fully utilize SM as well. I ordered SM Challenging Word Problems some time ago but have yet to receive it; we'll use those probably once or twice a week, depending on time. We're also skipping RS's review lessons because we'll do SM's instead. Because RS and SM use different sequences and I've decided I prefer SM's, I've mapped out the rest of second grade according SM's scope, but using the RS lessons to introduce each topic. We're also using a computer game called Timez Attack, which uses quite respectable graphics and a very clever and engaging premise to teach and drill multiplication. I prefer it enormously over our previous game (Math Rider), though at the moment the game is only available for multiplication and division, with addition and subtraction allegedly becoming available this week (Oscar doesn't need those, but Sofie does). Oscar's already used it and made excellent progress, but since we're now following SM's scope we're spending some more time on subtraction before coming back to master multiplication.

The rest of our second grade math map now looks like this:

1) Subtraction: RS lessons 48-57, 86-94, 100, 110, and 113. SM 2A chapter 2.

2) Multiplication: For two weeks, all of math time will be devoted to Timez Attack, which will then drop to 10 ten minutes daily until mastery is achieved. After those two weeks, we'll do RS lessons 101, 103, 109, 119, 120, 122, 124, 131, and 142. SM combines multiplication and division, so we'll wait to cover those chapters until we've introduced division in RS.

3) Division: RS lesson 132, followed by SM 2A chapters 5, 6, and 2B chapter 8. We'll also begin the division part of the Timez Attack game.

4) Mental Math Strategies: SM 2B chapter 7.

5) Money: RS lessons 44 and 45, followed by SM 2B chapter 9.

6) Fractions: RS lessons 133, 135-139, 141, and 143. SM 2B chapter 10.

7) Time: We've already covered all of the RS lessons on time, so we'll breeze through SM SB chapter 11.

8) Capacity: This is the sole area not addressed by RS, so we'll just be doing SM 2B chapter 12.

9) Tables and Graphs: We covered these concepts at the end of RS B (first grade), so we'll have a quick review in SM 2B chapter 13.

10) Measurement: RS lessons 96, 126, and 127. SM 2A chapters 3 and 4.

11) Geometry: RS C covers much more geometry than does SM 2A/2B. We'll do the SM 2B chapter 14 first this time, followed by RS lessons 60-81, 97, 114-118, 121, and 129-130.

Finally, we'll cover a few bits and bobs RS throws in in lessons 84-85, and 144-150. We'll be covering all lessons in RS except the review ones, and all chapters of SM. I also plan to complete SM's Challenging Word Problems, but until it arrives I won't know for certain what our pace will be like.

Week in Review--December 16, 2011

2011-12-16T07:36:00.000-08:00

Being productive was a little difficult this week, at least at the beginning, due to Sofie's performances in The Nutcracker. She was a mouse, and was in three shows last weekend and two on Tuesday. Oscar's decided that he doesn't want to miss being in the show next year; he was the first of the two to be interested in ballet, actually, until shyness overcame him when he was four. He's over that now, largely in thanks to jujitsu and his wonderful sensei. I'm very glad he realized now that he wants to get back to it, while he still has time to make good headway before reaching the ages of the parts he hopes to play, instead of going back in a few years and being too inexperienced to play the more interesting roles.

In the end, though, we did still manage to do school each day. We won't begin using the winter quarter schedule that I posted this week until the quarter starts in January, so for now we've been taking advantage of my extra time and doing a slightly heavier load, which we also do during the summer break. Instead of doing three long math lessons and two short drilling sessions, we're doing math lessons each day and dropping the drill until I go back to school. We're also doing writing four times a week instead of three.

This week in:

Math: Oscar's covered the beginnings of multiplication, reviewed time, and reviewed adding multiple many-digit numbers. Today, we'll practice subtraction. Sofie's practiced multiples of ten, counting by fives, and using the two-fives strategy for adding numbers whose sum is in the teens. As we approach mental addition of two two-digit numbers, I'm working out a backup plan in case she's just not quite mature enough. We'll still continue as scheduled until/if she has a problem, but if she does need more time before working on that I'm planning to cover some of the later lessons on geometry first.

History: We've finished our tour with the Vikings, having studied the settlements in Iceland and Greenland last week, and the invasions of Britain this week. Last night we also covered the origins of the English language and an overview of feudalism.

Writing: Oscar's done copywork and narrations from The Jungle Book, and of course his "poetry analysis". I'm still delaying Sofie's beginning Writing With Ease until she's most of the way done with the reading curriculum, so she's done her usual copywork from her phonics readers each day and does WWE-style narrations (which are only a sentence at the first-grade level) with the history material.

Spelling: We're still waiting on the delivery of All About Spelling levels two and three for Oscar, but Sofie's done simple short-vowel words in Step 5 of level 1.

Reading: Oscar's reading Merlin: The Lost Years and the fourth book in the Enchanted Forest Chronicles. Sofie's covered all the letter pairs that make the long and short-oo sounds, and today will begin the letter pairs that make the "aw" sound.

Science: I need to ask Richard to get some good picture of the projects they work on in their Lego engineering class.

Logic: They're both nearly done with their current logic books and are waiting on the arrival of the next ones. I'm thinking, though, of possibly switching from classical to mathematical logic for a while, just for a change of pace. It would also be fun for them because I'll be covering some of that in my discrete math class this quarter, and they'd love to be able to recognize the symbols and have a frame of reference for what I'll be doing. I'm looking into Tarski's World; does anyone have experience with that with young kids?

Spanish: Our tutor is on an extended winter break to spend time with her new grandson, and we're taking a break, too.

That's pretty much everything for this week. I've found myself wishing, now that we've been officially homeschooling for over a year, that I'd kept a record like this before so I could look back and recall more precisely how things went. I don't know if I'll actually be able to do this weekly once the next quarter starts, but we'll see.

Wordless Wednesday--December 14, 2011

2011-12-14T13:52:00.000-08:00

We covered the Viking invasions of the British Isles this morning, so naturally, we then did Oscar's first *ahem* "poetry analysis".

Weekly Lesson Schedule--Winter Quarter 2012

2011-12-10T09:45:00.001-08:00

Note: We homeschool year-round and don't use a quarter or semester system for our homeschooling, but Brandon and I are both undergraduates (for physics and math, respectively), so our own schedules change with each quarter and the homeschooling schedule is adjusted accordingly.

Our winter quarter schedule is actually very similar to the one we had this fall, so we don't have to make many changes. The only significant change is that instead of leaving at 10:30 on Mondays and Wednesdays, Brandon and I will now need to leave by 7:45. The goblins will spend Sunday nights through Monday afternoons with their grandparents, and Richard (their dad) will stay over at our place on Tuesday nights. I'm the primary homeschooling parent, but now that I'm at university full-time Richard's taken on some of the more open-and-go curricula on the days I'm unavailable, so I've structured our homeschooling schedule with that in mind.

History is only listed twice, but it's a favorite subject and we often do "More history! Can we do more history, please?" as our bedtime reading on other days as well (I'm planning to balance that with more science and math read-alouds as well after our library trip this week). Similarly, reading is only listed M-F but happens daily. Our writing curriculum (Writing With Ease by Susan Wise Bauer), calls for four lessons per week but we do two lessons at a time, three days a week instead. Likewise, instead of doing a short math lesson five days a week, we do three long lessons and two short drilling sessions per week. Music doesn't appear on the schedule this time; I've had to put it on hold while we sort out the whens, wheres, and hows. I'll update this post when that's settled. We also practice Spanish informally daily, and have dropped Latin until the Spanish is fluent. Lastly, we're a fairly science-minded family, so while science is only listed once, we do informal science projects and discussions much more frequently.

Also, a note on unstructured time: the goblins always have at least three-ish hours a day when they don't have tasks or activities, and they have two hours each afternoon for quiet time, when they can listen to any audiobooks they like, read, draw, daydream, nap, or play very quietly. We also have frequent playdates, in which case we shuffle our lesson schedule. Friday evenings, Saturdays, and Sundays are free of formal lessons, although we do still read and do fun projects (unless we feel like doing nothing, which definitely happens).

Monday
Richard spends 2.5 hours with the goblins at their grandparents' house in the morning, and covers:
Writing
Penmanship
Reading
Grammar

Brandon and I pick the goblins up from jujitsu, and after dinner I cover:
Math
Spelling (five-minute review)
History

Tuesday
In the morning, I cover:
Math
Writing
Penmanship
Reading
Grammar
Spelling (five-minute review)

After quiet time, Sofie goes to ballet and Oscar goes to jujitsu. Every other Tuesday evening, we also have a Spanish tutoring session.

Wednesday (Richard's day)
In the morning, Richard covers:
Writing
Penmanship
Reading
Grammar
Math Rider
Logic
Spelling (five-minute review)
Art history/appreciation/imitation.

After quiet time, they both go to jujitsu.

Thursday (also Richard's day)
In the morning the goblins go to an engineering class, then after quiet time they go to jujitsu. After jujitsu Oscar has ballet (starting in February), and during his class Richard covers Sofie's:
Penmanship
Reading

After they come home at dinnertime, I cover Oscar's:

Penmanship
Reading
And for both:

Timez Attack (drilling software)
Spelling (full lesson)

Friday
In the morning, I cover:
Reading
Penmanship
Geography
Spelling (five-minute review)

The goblins go to an engineering class, then after quiet time I cover:
Math
History

For those who appreciate a good old-fashioned breakdown, the frequency per week works out to be:

Reading: 5 lessons (officially)

Penmanship: 5 lessons

Writing: 3 sessions, 6 lessons total

Spelling: 4 five-minute review sessions and 1 full lesson

Grammar: 3 lessons

Math: 3 long lessons and 2 short drilling sessions

History: 2 lessons (officially)

Science: 1 lesson (officially)

Geography: 1 lesson

Spanish: 1 lesson every other week (officially)

Logic: 1 lesson

Art history/appreciation/imitation: 1 lesson

Ballet: 1 lesson

Jujitsu: 4 lessons (3 for Sofie due to a conflict with ballet)

It's days like this one...

2011-12-01T21:06:00.001-08:00

All day Monday through Tuesday morning was mostly un-fun on the homeschooling front. Tonight, Sofie begged to do a second spelling lesson and Oscar actually ran over when I said it was time for writing. Both kids shouted with joy I agreed to do a history lesson, even though we'd finished history for the week. It's days like this one that remind me how worthwhile this is.

Wordless Wednesday--November 9, 2011

2011-11-09T23:31:00.000-08:00

Ozzy's choice for breakfast reading: the American Physical Society Newsletter

Standards and Grade Levels

2011-11-09T22:29:00.000-08:00

Kindergarten isn't mandatory in California, so last year, which would have been Ozzy's kindergarten year, we didn't file an affidavit with the state or register with a charter school. I researched curricula and settled on a plan, then we implemented it. I didn't worry much about how he compared to public school kids, though I did try to pay extra attention whenever friends with kids in school mentioned what their kids were required to do, in an effort to make sure we didn't miss anything important. This year, having registered both goblins--Ozzy for first, Sofie for kindergarten*--with a charter school just to take advantage of the funds available for curricula and activities, I'm required to fill out a form throughout the year, indicating when they reach certain milestones in various subjects. I sat down with it at the beginning of the school year in August, and checked every.single.box. Everything Ozzy was supposed to be able to do by the end of first grade, he'd been doing for months. In fact, Sofie, at 4.5, was halfway through the list herself, and every box on her kindergarten form was checked.

By my standards, Ozzy wasn't quite finished with first grade because he had about 6 weeks left of our first grade math curriculum, and about as much left of first grade spelling. Likewise Sofie wasn't quite finished with kindergarten because she had five weeks left of her penmanship book, which she needed to complete before she could begin first grade writing (writing=composition, as opposed to penmanship). That was almost three months ago, and they've both since "leveled up". They are still enrolled in their charter school as being in first grade and kindergarten, however, because we do plan to send them to school to do an International Baccalaureate program for their last two years of high school. So currently, Ozzy is doing second grade work and Sofie is doing first. They both (but particularly Ozzy, at this point) read above those grade levels, but again, defining reading levels is difficult. Tests usually rate decoding skills but can't distinguish between levels of comprehension and insight. For instance, Ozzy became fascinated by The Odyssey and read a good bit of the adult, unabridged version, which is considered a tenth grade level book, but he couldn't possibly have gotten out of it what a tenth-grader (hopefully) would. As a result, I don't find the tests and rubrics to be very useful. Based on the books he reads with full comprehension and appropriate insight, his reading is on about fifth grade level.

This isn't intended to be a "The public schools are a disgrace! Save the children!" diatribe. While the public schools most assuredly could be doing some things much better, and could use more government assistance in some areas--far less in others--all of that has been and will continue to be the topic of many hand-wringing conversations that are certainly not in need of additional participants. Rather, I do occasionally forget to define my terms when discussing grade levels, and this post is intended to mitigate confusion.

*With an October birthday, Sofie would, in most states, not be eligible for kindergarten until next year. California is in the process of rolling back its cutoff to September 1st to align with the majority of states, but fortunately for Sofie, that process won't be complete for several years.

Keeping up

2011-11-05T19:57:00.000-07:00

Another question we're frequently asked about homeschooling is whether we plan to keep ahead or even just keep up with the goblins in each subject we cover--i.e. do we plan to keep our knowledge of each subject ahead of or at least equal to the goblins' progress? This question comes up frequently in homeschooling groups or forums as well, and I'm continually surprised by how many respond that they don't feel any need to stay ahead or keep up after a certain point, often the beginning of the high school years. This seems to come up most often in regard to math, and many parents (but not most) freely admit that their children have surpassed them so they just buy the textbooks and leave the kids to it.

We certainly do plan to stay ahead of the goblins' progress in all subjects. For the most part, we don't need to remediate ourselves because we're well past high school level in the standard subjects (English, math, science, and history), but I'm teaching myself Latin in advance of their beginning it because that subject is new to me. I also taught myself cursive italic, partly because I feel strongly about the importance of mastering a subject before teaching it and also because my cursive was somewhere between terrible and non-existent at the time.

I consider dialog to be one of the most important aspects of education. It's certainly possible to self-teach in isolation (as I am in teaching myself Latin), but it seems to me to be the least ideal method due to the lack of discussion. Without a mentor or partner with at least equal understanding, a student's understanding is limited to what the student can make of the material themselves. Very often, particularly in math, students think they understand a concept, but without without oversight might actually just be going through the motions, not developing true understanding. Math concepts build upon one another endlessly, and a weak spot in the foundation will lead to difficulty later.

Again in math, but applicable to all disciplines, the need for multiple perspectives is great. Almost all problems in math can be approached in more than one way, and while it's possible to master one approach and use it in all situations for a while, it is done at the expense of deeper understanding and will eventually require remediation. What truly sets those with great mathematical ability apart is their ability to approach the same problem from multiple perspectives: being able to look at a terribly difficult problem and break it down into many smaller and more manageable problems, then solve those and reconvene, is absolutely essential to achievement in higher mathematics.

There are always examples of kids for whom self-teaching works just fine, but those students are rare and I'm not convinced that most of the time they wouldn't do even better with a mentor, especially in skill areas such as math and writing. The drive to learn, even in the absence of a mentor, will serve those students well all their lives but can't entirely make up the difference. I don't mean to suggest, however, that students left to self-teach in the later years are necessarily worse off than they would be in a school. I certainly don't believe that a bad teacher is better than no teacher, and would vehemently argue the opposite. Not all teachers are suitable, and not all homeschooling parents can successfully teach the more advanced subjects. One of the great advantages of homeschooling, however, is the option to outsource material that the parent isn't qualified to teach, or for whatever other reason chooses not to. With my own school schedule I currently don't have the time to properly teach science, for example, so the goblins take science classes; I don't know jujitsu or ballet, so off they go, etc. Homeschooling is not and should not be an all-or-nothing choice.

Kindergarten Curriculum

2011-08-29T20:07:00.003-07:00

With Sofie having a just a few weeks left of kindergarten penmanship and having started first grade in all other subjects, this seems like a good time to write about what worked and didn't work for us for kindergarten. Our main foci in kindergarten are reading, penmanship and early math, balanced by a picture book tour of ancient history, lots of projects, and playtime. The goblins took very different amounts of time to do kindergarten due to starting at different ages, which I'll discuss in another post. I'll do a set of curriculum review posts soon, as well, with more details and descriptions of how we used the materials, if our methods differed from the recommended ones.

For letter recognition, Oscar used Sesame Street's Alphabet Jungle Game DVD*, but Leapfrog's Letter Factory was more appealing to Sofie and also taught the letter sounds so it's the one I recommend. For reading instruction, we used The Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading, which I can't recommend highly enough. The scripted approach was essential for me, because I learned to read via the whole language approach and, though I can't honestly say that I'd suffered any for it, didn't know any phonics at all and could never have taught the subject without the explicit guidance the book provides. We also had the first set of BOB books, which Ozzy found to be simultaneously condescending and bewildering in their utter plot-lessness, but that was no deterrent for Sofie, probably because she was younger when she was reading them. Modern Curriculum Press' Phonics Practice Readers were the perfect beginning readers-- phonetically controlled, nicely illustrated (at least when compared to the BOB books), and a comfortable length.

For penmanship, I'd bought and planned to use Handwriting Without Tears, but found the script ugly and the workbooks to be less engaging for the goblins than the much cheaper Kumon lettering books. I had Oscar finish the Kumon while I looked around, and found an ideal curriculum in the Getty-Dubay Italic Handwriting series. The italic script is easy to learn, very attractive, and best of all, is absorbed directly into the cursive script instead of becoming redundant. I did, however, find the Handwriting Without Tears chalkboards and chalk bits (which can be purchased apart from the workbooks) to be the best way to form good implement grip habits, and would recommend them for use prior to any letter-formation curriculum. Sofie used them as well, and also practiced her fine-motor skills with the Kumon workbooks before beginning the Getty-Dubay series.

For number recognition, Sofie used Leapfrog's Numbers Ahoy DVD; Oscar acquired his number recognition through osmosis. Once solid on recognition, we used RightStart Math to begin math instruction. Oscar was older when he started (5.5), and he started with the first grade level, of which the first twenty or so lessons are review of the kindergarten material anyway. Sofie started at four, and she used the kindergarten level, which covers less material at a slower pace. The Rightstart method is a combination of the Japanese and Montessori methods of teaching math, and provides a rock-solid understanding of mathematical concepts. The emphasis is on true, deep understanding rather than drilling, the ability to derive rather than the speed with which math facts can be retrieved. I think this is an ideal approach to the earliest level of math instruction, but I've started supplementing with Math Rider, a downloadable game, because there does come a point when derivation of a math fact every time one is required becomes inefficient. I consider drilling to be appropriate only after a concept has been fully and completely understood and the derivation is intuitive.

We made extensive use of the library for our ancient history study, and the Usborne Internet-Linked Encyclopedia of World History as a spine (there are newer editions, however). We spent the most time on the eras of greatest interest to the goblins, namely ancient Egypt and the Greek myths, and less on the time periods they were less enthralled with. I wouldn't be quite so relaxed with older students, but with very young children I place the highest value on making the assumption that history is exciting and interesting the default.

Beyond these, most of the goblins' kindergarten time was spent in play. We're fairly selective about our toys, and mostly choose toys that require the kids to use their imaginations rather than batteries. Our toys are almost exclusively wooden blocks, puzzles and manipulatives, as well as dress-up clothes and other make-believe accoutrements. And of course, we read and read and read some more, guided by the goblins' own interests, resources such as Jim Trelease's Read-Aloud Handbook, the Caldecott awards list and philosophies such as Charlotte Mason's.

*A note on the DVDs and the math computer game: I'm generally not a proponent of screen time for children, but I find that it works well for passive forms of learning, and the rote memorization of letters and numbers, while essential, is certainly a passive form of learning. Likewise, the Math Rider drilling game is a way to make rote memorization of math facts fun instead of tedious.

Weekly Lesson Schedule--Fall Quarter 2011

2011-08-28T21:00:00.000-07:00

For now, Oscar's lesson schedule is as follows:

Monday

Reading

Penmanship

Writing

Math

Language

History

Jujitsu

Tuesday

Reading

Penmanship

Writing

Latin

Music

Jujitsu

Wednesday

Reading

Penmanship

Writing

Math

Language

History

Art

Jujitsu

Thursday

Reading

Penmanship

Spelling

Science

Jujitsu

Friday

Reading

Penmanship

Math

Language

Logic

Geography

Spanish

And Sofie's, which won't include writing until she's finished her first penmanship book:

Monday

Reading

Penmanship

Math

Language

History

Jujitsu

Tuesday

Reading

Penmanship

Music

Latin

Ballet

Wednesday

Reading

Penmanship

Math

Language

History

Art

Jujitsu

Thursday

Reading

Penmanship

Spelling

Science

Jujitsu

Friday

Reading

Penmanship

Math

Language

Logic

Geography

Spanish

We don't time our lessons--we just complete the day's assignments--so some lessons are shorter some days and longer on others. Also, some lessons, like the language lessons, are always shorter than others, like the math lessons, so the number of sessions for each subject is not necessarily indicative of the amount of time spent on each subject. I am planning on reducing the number of penmanship sessions in favor of increasing the math and science sessions at some point, probably at the third or fourth grade level.

The time per session for each subject (just the ones I teach) averages thusly:

Math 30-60 minutes

Penmanship 20 minutes

Language 5-10 minutes

Spelling 20 minutes

History 30 minutes

Art (history/appreciation of, and making) 60 minutes

Reading 20 minutes (challenge reading; free reading happens outside of lesson time)

Latin 20 minutes

Logic 20 minutes

Geography 20 minutes

Long-Term Plans

2011-08-27T11:34:00.000-07:00

One of the first questions people ask when we say we're homeschooling is "How long are you planning to do that?" We've always planned to homeschool through at least middle school, but we weren't sure how we would proceed after that. Many homeschoolers that continue through high school enroll their kids in classes at community colleges, which I myself did when I was in high school. Having gone that route myself, however, I'm unconvinced that it's the best option for my own children.

My situation was different from most homeschoolers' because I had been at a public school before I left during my sophmore year, and as a result I lacked the community that most homeschoolers have in place. My friends in high school forgot to include me in plans (out of sight, out of mind), and most of my classmates at the college weren't interested in socializing with me once they found out how young I was. The socialization problem wouldn't be an issue for seasoned homeschoolers with good communities in place, but the college culture was sometimes an inappropriate environment for me and being younger than everyone else gave me an inflated sense of my own fabulousness. I also feel like I missed out on some aspects of the high school experience--specifically graduation and senior projects--though I did get to go to my junior and senior proms.

So I want my kids to have real peers--which means not starting college until they're college-age--and to have the cultural experience of the latter part of high school, but if they maintain the pace at which they're moving through the grades they'll be two or more years ahead of grade level by the time they reach high school. I don't want them to spin their wheels for two years, nor do I want to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a private school, so our plan at this point is to homeschool them until their junior years of high school, and then send them to a public school with an International Baccalaureate program. The IB is a highly rigorous program, and the homeschooling years should prepare them very well for the challenge. I'm a Canadian citizen and am planning to register the goblins as citizens as well, which will open up doors for them at universities in the Commonwealth. The IB diploma is internationally recognized as being among the highest standards of secondary education, and working through the program at a public school will give them the high school experience while still providing a challenge.

This idea could still change, of course, because high school is still years off. I'm a recreational researcher and plan-maker, however, and for now, it's a very comfortable plan.

Fall '11/Spring '12 Curricula

2011-08-25T20:49:00.000-07:00

I've been meaning to make a list of what we're using this year, and I've had questions asked on occasion so posting seems the most efficient option. As it stands now, Oscar (6) is finishing up first grade in a few subjects and working on second in others. He's using:

History: Story of the World Book 2--The Middle Ages

Reading: He's finished with formal reading instruction and working on a balance between easy reading to increase his speed and more challenging material for, you know, a challenge.

Penmanship: Getty-Dubay Italic Handwriting Book D (review of italic printing and continuing cursive, which started in Book C).

Writing: Writing With Ease Level 2

Grammar/Language: First Language Lessons Level 2

Math: Finishing up RightStart Math Level B and beginning RightStart Math Level C concurrently with Singapore Math Primary Mathematics 2A & 2B

Spelling: finishing up Spelling Workout B and switching to All About Spelling Levels 2 & 3, and possibly Level 4.

Science: I'm outsourcing science this year, to Play-Well Teknologies. They'll still participate in the odd project we have going on around the house and read about other aspects of science, but this will do until I graduate.

Art: Meet the Masters Level 1 Track B

Latin: Song School Latin, followed by Minimus: Starting out in Latin, in preparation for Lively Latin.

Logic: Logic Safari Books 1 & 2, and possibly Book 3.

Geography: Beginning Geography K-2, which will probably go fairly quickly; I don't have a plan yet for what we'll use next.

Spanish: outsourced

Piano: not yet started but in the works; also outsourced.

PE: jujitsu, and maybe one day Sofie will stop napping and we can get back to rock climbing.

Sofie (4.5) is finishing up kindergarten in some subjects and beginning first grade in others. I combine the goblins for some non-core subjects and teach both kids at the same time, so a fair portion of her list echoes Ozzy's. She's using:

History: Story of the World Book 2--The Middle Ages. Her comprehension level is a bit lower than Ozzy's, of course, but we'll be revisiting all of these topics many times over the years.

Reading: finishing up The Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading and the Phonics Practice Readers from Modern Curriculum Press. We have sets A, B and C from Series A, which Ozzy grew out of before finishing, but she's started younger than he did and as such her process is a bit slower. I think we might end up going through Series B and maybe even C with her, because her stamina needs developing.

Penmanship: finishing up Getty-Dubay Italic Handwriting Book A and moving on to Book B.

Writing: after she's finished the first penmanship book (likely around the end of September), we'll begin Writing With Ease Level 1. Update 11/10/11: She did move on to the next penmanship book, but her reading needs to continue improving for a little while before the copywork in WWE will be worthwhile for her. In the meantime, I'm having her copy sentences from her phonics readers.

Grammar/Language: First Language Lessons Level 1

Math: RightStart Math Level B

Spelling: All About Spelling Level 1, and we'll probably get through Level 2 in the spring.

Science: also outsourced to Play-Well Teknologies.

Art: Meet the Masters Level 1 Track B

Latin: Song School Latin, followed by Minimus: Starting out in Latin. I'll be leaving it there, though, and just letting those absorb until next year, when I'll get her started on Lively Latin as well.

Logic: Lollipop Logic, followed by Logic Safari Book 1.

Geography: Beginning Geography K-2, which she'll move through at a slower pace than Ozzy will, and should last her the year.

Spanish: outsourced

Piano: not yet started but in the works; also outsourced.

PE: jujitsu and ballet.

I'll update this page as needed.