My students and our curriculum

We’re taking a break from school for a few weeks while I help Steph get prepared for college and do a massive reorganizing of the house.   Since we’re also getting ready to start a new school year, I figured this is also a good time to tell a little bit about my lovely students and what we are using.

Georgie just turned 7 this week.  He is the main reason we started homeschooling.  He is gifted and quirky, with some sensory issues and possible ADHD.   He would definitely not thrive in a typical school classroom but he does great here at home.  Other than a year of Early Intervention for speech delays, from 3 to 4 years old, he has never been to school.  His favorite things are playing Wii, Minecraft and other computer games, and Pokemon.

Georgie would be entering 1st grade if he went to public school.  Due to his late August birthday, he would not have started kindergarten until he turned 6.  In practice, he is working between a 1st and 4th grade level.

For Language Arts, he is currently using:

All About Spelling – we will be starting level 2 when we start up school again next week.  Georgie is very visual so AAS with its cards and tiles works very well for him.  This is also serving as his only phonics program since we finished Explode the Code 5 and I decided ETC was just busywork at this point, at least for him.   We usually do one Step a week.

Spectrum Reading Grade 2 – Georgie tested with a reading comprehension equivalency of 4.9 but other things come up in this workbook so I don’t want to jump him ahead and leave gaps.  He does one lesson a day and they often incorporate rhyming, alphabetical order, homonyms, contractions, etc.

Spectrum Grammar Grade 2 – This is going slow probably because we never completed a Grade 1 grammar curriculum.   We started with capitalization and he’s getting hung up on the difference between a proper noun and a common noun, so we are taking things very slowly and supplementing with extra worksheets from Evan Moor’s Teachers File Box as needed.

For handwriting, he is using Handwriting without Tears – Grade 1.  He actually just finished the Grade 1 book but is definitely not ready for the Grade 2 book yet.  He still tends to use mostly capital letters so I’m going to start back at the beginning of the Grade 1 book and review all the lowercase letter formation.

I’m hoping to add some free writing this year since Georgie always loved to write stories and I feel he doesn’t do it enough anymore.   I will probably just go with a general journaling plan using writing prompts from Pinterest occasionally.

I’m also hoping to add some vocabulary work using Vocabulary Word-A-Day Cards from Scholastic.

Last, but not least, I want to encourage Georgie to spend more time reading this year.

For Math, he is using:

Math Mammoth 3A/3B – he does pages from all different chapters each day.   This helps keep his interest since he gets bored easily.  Math often seems to come almost intuitively to him, yet he’ll still complain that it’s too hard if he doesn’t understand something new the very first time it’s presented.

Since Georgie is also not a kid that likes flash cards or drill, we use a lot of fun games and resources to cover facts.   His current favorites are Solve the Riddle Math Practice: Addition and Subtraction from Scholastic, and Algebra Readiness Made Easy – Grade 2 also from Scholastic.  I have a ton of other resources for when he finishes these thanks to the regularly scheduled Scholastic Dollar Deals.

Beast Academy – we are using this as a fun supplement.   We didn’t get to it too often the past few months so I’m hoping to start using it at least once a week, maybe instead of Math Mammoth.

Vicki just turned 5 in July.  She has never been to any school and has been doing kindergarten for a few months already.   Her favorite things are playing outside, painting and other crafts, and playing Wii.

For Language Arts we are pretty much just doing phonics and very occasional handwriting.

For Vicki’s phonics, I am using Ordinary Parents Guide to Teaching Reading but not directly out of the book.  I usually set up the lessons on the white board using extra AAS tiles, on large foam puzzle pieces on the floor, or on index cards.  She pretty much has short /a/ words down and we will be reviewing and starting short /e/ words when we start back up.

I have the Handwriting without Tears Pre-K book for her.  She strongly resists doing handwriting, never colors beyond scribbles.  I don’t think it’s a lack of ability or coordination.  It seems to be more impatience with having to take the time to do it.  We use the wooden letter pieces from HWT and I’m trying to encourage more using the white board or a chalkboard.

For Math we are using Mathematics Enhancement Programme (MEP) Year 1.   I usually demonstrate using a magnetic white board rather than just using the workbook pages.

Since Math isn’t nearly as intuitive for her as it is for Georgie, I’ve started gathering more manipulatives.  So far we have Judy Clocks, Base 10 blocks, Cuisenaire rods, magnetic foam shapes (tangrams).

Things we do together:

We play lots of games to work on math and reading concepts.  Some of our favorites are:

printables from Kelly’s Kindergarten
Money Bags
Very Silly Sentences
Scrabble Jr.

For Science, we are using REAL Science Odyssey with lots of supplementation from Magic School Bus, encyclopedias/books and field guides.  We are currently working on rocks & minerals in RSO, but we also do nature studies, and various topics together with our 4-H Cloverbud group.

For History and Geography, we are getting ready to start a US History and Geography study.  We will be using the Complete Book of US History, History Pockets, Road Trip USA (from Confessions of a Homeschooler) and lots of books and encyclopedias.

We are also participating in a Flat Stanley exchange and a State Cultural Exchange.

My Goals for this year:

Do formal school at least 4 days a week consistently.

Take less than 4 months to complete a science or history unit.

Start Spanish utilizing The Complete Book of Spanish and free videos and lesson plans from Instant Replay.

Do more art study using Come Look with Me books and various What Your x Grader Needs to Know books (that I already have).  Encourage more use of our Draw Write Now books.

Do more art and craft projects in addition to the ones we do at 4-H.

Start music instruction on electric keyboards using Kid’s Keyboard Course Book #1.

Start typing instruction for Georgie using Dance Mat Typing.

General Social Studies, Health and Character education using Studies Weekly.

Less computer, less television and more PE for everyone.

Weekly Wrap-Up 9/6/2010 - 9/10/2010

We had a short week thanks to the Labor Day holiday and the clean-up from last weekends camping trip in Mystic.  The Mystic Aquarium and Mystic Seaport were pretty educational field trips so maybe we can call it a long week.  ;-)

George:

For Reading:  Georgie picked up where we left off in Explode the Code.  He knows most of the cvc words so this is  review but I want to do it in order to make sure there are no gaps and also because it's good writing practice.  We also read a variety of Emergent Readers and Leveled Readers.

For Writing:  Georgie is doing handwriting sheets from Donna Young and Learning Page.   Georgie does very well writing upper case letters but I want him to work more on proper formation and lower case letters.  We're just going to take the alphabet in order for now and do 2-3 pages a week with additional practice using lined wipe-off boards or the chalkboard.

For Math: We are continuing MEP Year 1 and are on Lesson 13.  We started by playing Greater Than/Less Than/Equal To War since I was afraid Georgie might have forgotten a lot of it.  He remembered but when doing his worksheets I had to convince him the "mouth" is always open toward the larger number.  He kept deciding the alligator wasn't really that hungry so wanted to "eat" the lower number.

Once we finished our MEP lesson he wanted to do more so I gave him some addition worksheets to do for fun. 

Vicki:

For Reading:  I got Get Ready for the Code for Vicki to do while Georgie did his ETC.  She did okay with it but wasn't really that interested.  I had her do some bingo dabber pages from Making Learning Fun with the letter F (which is the first letter in GRFTC).  Georgie wanted to do them also so he ended up doing one of the ones I printed for Vicki.  I'll have to remember to print out pages for him to do for fun.  She sat in as Georgie and I read the Emergent and Leveled Readers.

She put face stickers on a letter F outline.

For Math:  We did some counting of Unifix blocks and she put one sticker on each number 1 on a worksheet. She really wanted to do Georgie's MEP lesson with him but it is way too advanced for her.  I was thinking of starting MEP Reception with her but decided not to.  I may have to rethink that if she keeps wanting more.

Science:

We do Science and History together.  We will be doing just one or the other each week and, in general, alternating between them.  This week we did the Gravity lesson from Building Foundations of Scientific Understanding.  We discussed why things fall down and read I Fall Down by Vicki Cobb and Why Don't Things Fall Up. We also watched the Magic School Bus episode The Magic School Bus Gains Weight.

I didn't like the oil and water experiment in BFSU so instead I did an experiment that I found in both The Usborne Book of Science Experiments and online at www.kids-science-experiments.com called The Clown That Won't Lie Down.  I modified it slightly and made two different clowns using a paper craft printout from http://www.dltk-kids.com/.  One had playdoh weighing down the bottom and the other didn't.   We discussed why the weighted clown always stood back up and why the unweighted clown kept falling over.  I'm glad I set this up ahead of time because I found that the stand-up clown didn't work unless the play-doh filled up the ping-pong ball completely and was completely level.

George drew a notebook page for our experiment and colored in a cover for our Science notebook.

Not too bad for our first week.

Getting Ready For School.

We've been taking it pretty easy this summer but it's getting close to time to start school again.  Georgie is going on vacation next week with Granny Franny and I'm hoping to start when he gets back.  We mostly played around with school last year, trying out different things and seeing what worked well and what didn't work at all.  Georgie is technically kindergarten age this year (although the public schools have expressed the preference that he not come to kindergarten until he was 6) so we are going to get a little more structured now.  He is actually doing a mix of kindergarten and first grade work.

I have all my core lessons filed for the year.  There was an extremely long thread on TWTM forums outlining a crate filing plan.  I modified it slightly since we are doing History and Science in a block schedule, rather than doing both daily or weekly.   My Core crate includes 35 hanging file folders, each containing two manila folders - one for Georgie and one for Vicki.   Each week a folder will be taken out and the contents distributed among our magazine holder workboxes.  I do weekly workboxes since I know better than to think I will set them up every night.   Only the Language Arts (reading/phonics, spelling, writing) and Math are in these folders.  The entire years curriculum was divided up into these folders. For things like AAS and RS that I didn't want to take apart the book, I made a check-list of lessons that will be moved from week to week.

For Language Arts:
Georgie will be finishing up Explode the Code book 1 (probably very quickly judging by past performance) and starting Explode the Code book 2.   We're also starting All About Spelling 1.  Georgie always asks how to spell words so I think he will enjoy this.  It will also help reinforce the Phonics/Reading we're doing. We will continue to use emergent readers from Hubbards Cupboard.  I've also added a checklist of literature selections I want to do as Read-Alouds this year. 

Vicki will be starting Get Ready for the Code. She already knows most of her letter sounds thanks to Leapfrog videos but she doesn't seem ready for putting sounds together into words so Get Ready seems a good place to start. She wants a workbook just like Georgie's, so this should satisfy her.   She also has a variety of letter activities including collage pages, dabber pages and coloring pages.  I'm sure she'll be observing Georgie's AAS lessons as well (hopefully we'll be able to keep her hands off the tiles).

Mathematics:
We are continuing with MEP Year 1 for Math.  This worked well and Georgie usually enjoyed it.  We are adding in some exercises with the RS Abacus and lessons on Time and Money since these are two topics Georgie is fascinated with.

I thought about starting MEP Reception with Vicki but decided to not press my luck for this year.  I did print off a variety of activity sheets, coloring pages and dabber pages on numbers for her to do.

As always, we will continue to play lots of games together.

For History and Science, we will do these in a block schedule.  We will do one or the other every afternoon (core subjects will be done in the morning).  The kids will do these together since a lot of it will be fun activities, experiments and read-alouds.   I have a second file crate for History and Science (and will at some point add Art/Music and Language).  Each hanging file folder is for a specific topic and contains all printouts, activity descriptions and a supply list and book list.   I have four large plastic drawers that I will use as workboxes for these topics.  At the beginning of each week I will divide the books and activities into the four drawers - one for each day and add all the non-perishable supplies that are needed for that day.  I'm hoping not having to search for stuff will keep us on track.

Once the weather starts cooling off (it has been a brutally hot and humid summer) I hope to integrate more Nature walks (which will also count as PE) into our days.  Georgie will be starting soccer in a couple weeks and both kids will be taking a homeschool gymnastics class.

I'm looking forward to our first full structured school year.

Summer School

I have been planning to homeschool year round to account for the frequent breaks we take but so far we haven't achieved much.  Between all the year-end stuff we have to do for Stephanie's school and dance, camping trips and preparing to go to South Carolina for Nationals, things have been chaotic.  But, I did manage to pull out a couple of things for the kids to do.

I recently purchased the Crayola Dry Erase Activity Center for each of the kids.  These come with a set of templates but you can also use in your own, which makes it a very versatile tool.

Georgie started by tracing his letters.  This is a sheet I printed out for him to practice lower case letters.  After tracing the letters he wrote his name at the top and a few random words at the bottom.

He was having a lot of fun with the wipe-off board so he wanted to continue playing with it.  Using one of the templates that came with the Activity Center, he thought of words that began with each letter of the alphabet.  He was able to think of words on his own but couldn’t spell many of them so I would spell them for him to write.

After the word hunt, he decided to write a story.  The picture at the top is a clock (his current fascination) which has nothing to do with the story itself.  This is another one of the templates that came with the activity center.  The story is “The dog with polka dots plays with the cat.  The End.”

The kids played with our balance scale and Unifix cubes for a little while….

and then I was brave enough to pull out our rice bin again.  I finally managed to color some rice which made a nice pretty rainbow…

which lasted about 10 seconds.  About how long it took for rice to get off the towel I laid down and onto the carpet.



I’m still going to try and get in the occasional school activities during the summer but I’m letting go a little bit so we can enjoy ourselves as well.

Art Part I - Primary/Secondary Colors

We started our Art Unit by talking about Primary and Secondary Colors, and color mixing.   We read the stories A Color of His Own by Leo Lionni and Mouse Paint and discussed how red and blue make purple, red and yellow make orange, blue and yellow make green.  Then we did a dabber paint rainbow (from Making Learning Fun) using only the Red, Blue and Yellow dabbers.  The only bad thing about the page was there wasn't a arch for purple. 

Then we made pictures using only Red, Blue and Yellow paints.  Georgie painted..."a dancing alien.  That's why his foot is up, he's doing a dance with one foot up then the other.  Like a penguin.  He's a penguin alien."

We used color paddles I had from Oriental Trading to make different colors (red paddle and blue paddle make purple, etc.) and also to view different parts of the room and see how it looks.

We watched Magic School Bus Makes a Rainbow which discusses how white light shines through a prism and is separated into all the colors.  It also shows how light will bend when it hits a mirror or reflective object and how objects are different colors because only that color is reflected for us to see.

We played with a prism trying to make rainbows on different parts of the walls and table.  It wasn't easy to shine it in a specific place since we were using the sunlight from a skylight but we were able to shine it so we could observe the rainbow.  We discussed how many colors we could see and what order they were in.  We discussed whether the order of the colors changed when we moved the prism around.   Georgie kept sticking his hands (and face) in the rainbow.

We finished up by doing a science experiment from Science Experiments for Young Learners about categorizing objects based on how much light shines through.  We looked at: a clear plastic cup, a light colored plastic cup, a dark plastic cup, aluminum foil, plastic wrap, waxed paper and tissue paper.  We held each item up to the light and decided whether it let through a lot of light (transparent), a little bit of light (translucent) or no light (opaque).  We then looked around the room to find other things for each category.  Transparent (windows, fish tank) and opaque (just about everything) were easy.  Translucent was harder.

I'm trying to make sure we do Math and Reading everyday.  I reviewed greater than and less than with Georgie by playing a slightly modified version of War.  We each had approximately half the deck of cards.  We'd each put one down and then he would choose which symbol would go between them =, < or >.  He did really well with this so we moved on to finishing up our MEP Lesson 7.  Instead of having him write on the worksheet I let him use stickers on a large piece of paper to do the assignment.  He had to put the correct number of stickers in circles to make the symbols true.  He did really well with this also. 

For Reading, I took some of the sentences from our current Progressive Phonics book and made a poster to hang on the wall.  We will be able to review these frequently throughout the day.  We also played our Short A sounds UNO that I downloaded from Kellys Kindergarten.

Our final activity for the day was Physical Education.  After 4 straight days of rain, we had a gorgeous sunny day so Daddy took the kids to the park.   I found the first crocuses popping through the mud.

To see more fun Preschool Ideas visit Preschool Corner at Homeschool Creations.

Another Snow Day!

We didn't stick with our new plan for very long.  Thursday and Friday it was snowing pretty heavily and Daddy didn't go to work.  Even though we don't need to take Snow Days when homeschooling, with Daddy home the kids weren't too interested in doing too much school.  We did manage to do a few readings about ants, watch The Magic School Bus Gets Ants in Its Pants, Go Diego Go It's a Bug's World and color a Fact File from The Learning Page, but that was about it as far as our theme went.  So, we pulled out some games.....

I recently downloaded some learning games from Kelly's Kindergarten.  We played Cliffords Words, where you match the words on bones to a mat, and Word Uno.  Her files are Word documents which makes it very easy to customize them.  I changed the words she had on the Uno cards for the short A words we are working on. 

We had a lot of fun playing both games.   The rules were left behind pretty quickly for Uno.  I ended up removing the Wild and Draw 2 cards and Georgie just kept reading the words and putting cards down.  For a while we matched (like your supposed to), then he began just putting words down, then we started trying to find rhyming words.  Since he was reading the words and having a great time doing it, I didn't emphasize the rules.  

When we play Candyland, Chutes & Ladders and some of our more traditional games, we emphasize playing according to the rules much more than with the learning games.  We played Candyland for a while, using plastic bugs as game pieces to go along with our theme.

After Candyland ended, Vicki played one of her foam games - this time it was shapes.  She would jump on the shape I called out.  After a while, she just jumped from one shape to the next.

Then Daddy finally took them out in the snow to play.  We finally (after how many snow storms??) had some snow that was decent for building a snowman.  He ended up with tomato eyes and a celery nose (which disappeared within an hour of them all coming inside).

If it looks like the kids snow pants are huge, it's because they are.  They had so much fun in the first snow storm we had back in December that I broke down and bought snow pants, boots and gloves for both of them.  Since I didn't want it to be a total waste of money if we ended up not getting any more snow, I bought them big for both of them.  Of course, that ended up not being a worry at all.

Valentine's Day

Valentine's Day was a very craft intensive topic but I did try to sneak in some learning activities here and there.   Since I don't remember the exact order we did things in this week, I'll list all the crafts first and then the learning activities.  Usually sticker activities are done right before or after messier activities.  Since the kids can do these independently it gives me a chance to clean up or prepare.

We used foam heart stickers to make our usual wreaths.  Georgie, as usual, was very meticulous in spacing out his hearts. 

We melted down some of our old crayons in a heart shaped muffin tin to make new colorful crayons.  I will admit with this one, I didn't let the kids just put the crayons randomly.  We took selected colors that we thought would look good together - brown and yellow, red and white, red and pink, etc.  Unfortunately, the kids also had trouble peeling the paper off the crayons (yet they never have trouble when I don't want them to peel it off) and breaking them, since many of them were fat crayons.  So, this ended up being more of a mom project but they waited eagerly for them to cool off so they could use them. 

We used more heart stickers to decorate larger foam hearts.  Georgie sorted his stickers and placed the larger stickers on the larger foam heart and the smaller ones on the smaller foam heart.  Vicki did one of her hearts in all purple.

We made hearts for the window using acetate sheets and tissue paper.  Neither of the kids filled up their heart completely which resulted in it not being real clear that they were hearts.  I think when we do these in the future, I'll need to add a frame.

We also colored coffee filter's with markers than sprayed them with water to make the colors run.  Just like the last time we did these, neither kid put a lot of color on the filter.  They spent a lot of time stacking and playing with the markers instead.  I think they still came out okay.

 

We did a V is for Valentine tracing page and V is for Valentine magnet page, both from the blog Confessions of a Homeschooler.   We don't use magnets doing the magnet pages since Vicki still puts things in her mouth.  We usually use dot painters or glue on foam circles.  I recently bought a 3/4" circle punch that I used to punch a bunch of circles out of various scrapbook papers and these are what the kids used this time.

We made cards for the grandmothers using doily's and sticker jewels.  This was the first time we used the stick-on jewels and they were a big hit, although Vicki did have some trouble peeling the backing paper off  since they were very small.

Vicki's been showing a lot of interest in letters and the various worksheets Georgie is doing so I figured it was a good time to start working more deliberately with her on letters.  V was a good one to start with since its what her name starts with (obviously) so I made up a worksheets with little pictures for V is for....Vicki, violin, valentine, etc.  I let her use our big and little V stamps to decorate it, along with markers.  At this point in time I'm going to work with her on whatever letter(s) go along with our theme for the week. 

Georgie was really interested in the V stamps while Vicki was using them (they are new) so I let him use them on his greater than/less than worksheet.   I made up this worksheet using Word.

Vicki also did a letter V search page, where she circled all the letter V's.  She did much better at this - both finding the correct letters and then circling them - than I expected her to.  The sheet we used came from http://www.beginningreading.com/.

We read two fun stories this week.  Valentine's Day is... by Gail Gibbons and The Biggest Valentine Ever by Steven Kroll.  After reading The Biggest Valentine Ever we made our own heart mice like the one in the story.   We also did a short reader from Hubbards Cupboard called The Hearts.

We had another snow storm mid-week and missed our YMCA classes so by Friday we were definitely bouncing off the walls.  I was moving all my bookmarks from AOL to Explorer on our new computer and I saw an idea for Musical Hearts on No Time for Flashcards and thought it looked like a great way to work off some energy.   I used some of our extra foam hearts and wrote a variety of suggestions on them.  Some of them I made things we're currently working on - "count to 20 by 2's", "count to 100 by 10's" - and others just for fun - "hop like a bunny", "spin in a circle".  On the site, she played with just one child and I was playing with two, and some of the cards were definitely going to be too hard for Vicki but I figured it was worth a shot.  The game ended up going pretty well and definitely worked off some energy.  Each kid picked a heart and did what was on it so we sometimes had Georgie reciting the alphabet at the top of his lungs while Vicki and I recited Twinkle Little Star at the same time.    The hearts also didn't stay in a circle for very long but it didn't seem to bother them any.

I took some more of our foam hearts (they were kind of slanted hearts from Oriental Trading Co. I didn't like them that much for crafts since they were kind of a funky shape but they were good for games) and made a number game for Vicki.  She's learning her letters well just through play but numbers seem to be harder for her so I thought this would be fun practice.  I numbered hearts from 1 to 10 and then just called out numbers for her to jump on.  She loved doing this, loved hopping from one to the next counting.  She's not ready for putting them in order but I'm sure that will come in time.

The good thing about the foam hearts is that they should be pretty sturdy and last a while.  The bad thing is they made me realize how badly my floor needs to be vacuumed.  They picked up every little piece of fuzz, hair and crumb from the floor.    These games, especially the musical hearts, also made me realize I need to get some kids music.  I had a lot when Stephanie was young but I have no idea where it may be.  I put on the Kid's Tune channel on Dish Network to play our games.  The kids loved the music but some of the songs were a little bizarre.  I could do without listening to the Bratz song.  So, I think I'm going to download some songs from ITunes and make a CD just for the kids.

Our books and videos for the week: