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The Homeschool Review: Spring 2018

31 Saturday Mar 2018

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Ever wondered what homeschooling looks like in our family? Here’s a peak into what we’ve been up to since ringing in the New Year.  Since this is the first post of its kind, I’ll include a bit more detail about our usual daily routine.  Just make sure you scroll to the end to find out about some of our more exciting learning adventures since they don’t quite fit into a “usual day”.  😉

A Graceful Start

This semester began much like fall of 2017–with me landing on my rear.  Literally.  There’s just something about that first day back to school that makes me miss my step, aparently.  Or maybe it has something to do with fuzzy socks on a carpeted staircase at dark-thirty in the morning.  At least I wear shoes to go down my stairs now.

At any rate, once I’ve picked myself up off of the floor at the bottom of the staircase and limped into the kitchen to make coffee, our day moves along fairly smoothly:  from quiet time for the parents, to breakfast and Proverbs as a family, then to chores and personal Bible time for the kiddos (while Mama gets her homeschool game face on).

My boys have enjoyed listening to The Jesus Storybook Bible and the free dramatized audio bible available from Faith Comes by Hearing.  In the past few months, C-age-8 has begun to read about a chapter a day from the New Testament in his own bible, so the transition from bible listening to bible reading is going pretty smoothly so far!

Then there’s this lovely thing called Morning Time.  A dear local mommy friend who’s a little further down the road of motherhood than I am turned me onto this idea several years ago.

“Do things together as a family first!  Then split up to do independent work.  That way you’re not having to corral everyone back together multiple times throughout the day and you can start with things you value and enjoy most.  Like prayer, music, poetry, a fun read-aloud…”

 

I latched on to this idea and went searching the interwebs, eventually finding further inspiration from Pam Barnhill’s Your Morning Basket podcast and resources (and she has a new book available on the topic if you’re interested!).

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That groundwork having been laid and tested over the past couple of years, we usually start out our school day with lighting a candle, going over our calendar and plans for the day, prayer, singing a hymn, reciting from our memory work binder, poetry reading, and currently reading aloud from Story of the World Volume 2 and a children’s adaptation of Pilgrim’s Progress.

This week, I’ve also re-attached our Preschool Prodigies Music lessons as well as 5-10 minutes of Spanish to our Morning Time routine.  I tried to shorten Morning Time by moving these things to the afternoon, but found that they simply didn’t get done!

music lessons homeschool

Confession: there have been many days in the past quarter that I have skipped Morning Time to dive right into math because we were just short on time, but I have been finding lately that when life has gotten heavy and my energy reserves are running thin, starting the day with Morning Time ministers to my soul, helping me to take a deep breath, enjoy the time with my kids, and humbly move forward with my heart more focused on the Lord.

Turns out biblical truth and delightful learning are a great way to start the day.

The Three R’s

Moving on to math, D-age-6 finished Right Start Math Level B in February and has moved on to Level C after a well-earned week of playing math games.

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My older son, C-age-8, is half way through Level D, currently working on mastering multiplication facts and applying them to solving area problems.

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As for me, I’m learning to read ahead in our math books and plan our lessons accordingly.  This subject has been the hardest for me to keep to short lessons.  Partly because my kids just take longer than expected, and partly because the lessons sometimes require two days rather than the one day suggested by the book (or more realistically speaking, the one day expected by their mother).

I started out last semester working with a timer, keeping our math lessons to 20-30 minutes.  That worked well until I stopped using the timer (oops).  This quarter, I still haven’t been using the timer so much, but I am learning to repent of the pride that drives me to want to push my kids further and faster.

I’m teaching my kids, not a lesson.  This is not a race.  Our math curriculum itself is built upon understanding and enjoying math, not racing through to the next thing.  Embrace the time it takes to grow.

When I keep things in perspective, it’s a lot easier to see how much work is reasonable for a given day (it’s a lot less than what I used to think!).

For language arts, we’re continuing to work through First Language Lessons levels 1 and 2. My oldest could have been into level 3 by now, but I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do after level 1, so we stalled out for a year.  That means his brother is only one book behind him.  Oh, well!  They’re both learning and enjoying their lessons on basic grammar, poetry, story and art narration, copywork, and dictation for my oldest now in level 2.  I love that this curriculum has been a gentle introduction for me to these classical methods of teaching.

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We also have enjoyed these free copywork resources from Simply Charlotte Mason this quarter.  They include scripture, poems, and hymns.

Overlapping a bit of reading and language arts, C-age-8 reads aloud to me from McGuffey’s second reader about once a week, narrates the story to me, and then says and spells the words listed at the end of the lesson.  D-age-6 is reading aloud to me almost daily from McGuffey’s pictorial primer in order to continue progressively practicing his budding reading skills (we used Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons to start the process).  I use these readers because they’re progressive, they use older English so that we’re starting out in the direction of classic literature, and because they were hand-me-downs (read: free).

Living Books

Any further discussion of reading blends into everything else we’re learning:  history, literature, nature/science.  C-age-8 has recently finished The Tale of Desperaux, The Secret Garden (with some guided discussion on the ideologies presented), Old Yeller, Where the Red Fern Grows, The Great Brain, Julie of the Wolves, The Little Prince, Because of Winn Dixie, and The Burgess Animal Book, among most of the books in the Boxcar Children series (these are free reads).  I can hardly keep up for record-keeping purposes!  Nathaniel decided to give him a more challenging read to slow things down a bit:  G. A. Henty’s For the Temple, historical fiction covering the Roman sacking of the Jerusalem temple in 70 AD.  We just covered this event and the diaspora in Story of the World, so he’s got some points of connection with it already.  He’s also reading a chapter a day in Seabird by Holling C. Holling for geography and natural history.  I ask for him to narrate, or tell back in his own words, what he has read on days when I’m paying attention.  Admittedly, there have been several days (weeks perhaps?) in the past quarter that I have been too busy to ask for a narration for every bit of school reading!

D-age-6 has recently enjoyed moving from Frog and Toad readers to The Boxcar Children and Amelia Bedelia books.  He’s enjoying reading more fluently for himself, but soon I think he’ll be ready for more assigned books.  I think Whinnie the Pooh is in order next.  We’ve read it aloud many times over, so I think he’ll be delighted to read it for himself!

Learning from Life

This section could be a post all its own, so I’ll try to let pictures do most of the talking with a few extra words here and there for things not pictured.

We enjoyed a Little House book club party with a local Charlotte Mason group.

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Exploring historic Ft. Smith after mama read True Grit.

 

 

New strategy games: Risk, Battleship, Ticket to Ride

We took in a stray German Shepherd dog that followed me home last fall–right after the 500th anniversary of Luther posting of his 95 theses, so naturally we named him Luther.  C-age-8 had almost full responsibility for feeding him each day.  There was plenty of character development in caring for a dog, and even more when we decided he needed a family who could care for him even better.  It was hard to let go of Luther since he had been a part of our family for three months and had in that time doubled in size and made it through the coldest winter we’ve had in years.  It was hard to let go, but we all learned a lot and are thankful for the part we had to play as a doggy foster family.

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Hiking in 20 degree weather to see this 95 foot waterfall when it was mostly frozen.  Petit Jean State Park.

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Bird poster and Calendar of Firsts helping us to learn to pay attention and take note!

 

Gardening, listening to classical music, watching the ants in our ant farm.

Our four-day backpacking trip on a 24-mile section of the Ouachita Trail in the Winding Stair Mountains of eastern Oklahoma.

 

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Field trips to animal shelters and to learn about hippotherapy (that’s with horses).

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Ice and roller skating and get-togethers with our Schole Sisters group–watercolors, poetry and tea, fish feeding and nature walk.

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Homeschooling through Chaos

The past two months have been a bit crazy.  There were many times I said to my husband, “I just don’t think we can do school next week with all we have going on.”  He gently encouraged me to try.  And we did.  We kept going through sickness (though we did take a week off when it was really bad), a job change and consequent change of insurance and all other such things, two grandmothers in the hospital, a car wreck, among other things.  I think I would have given up somewhere along the way, so I’m thankful for my husband’s gentle encouragement to just keep going.  Like I said above, our scripture and praise-filled Morning Times were a balm to my soul during a such a hectic season.

Up Next

I suppose in terms of the average school year, we should be wrapping things up in about two months.  We plan to keep going with our current routine, and we’ve got some fun activities planned with our homeschool group, including Field Day which my husband and I coordinate.  Should be a fun spring!

How about you?  What’s up in your homeschool world?

Reformation Reflections 2017

31 Tuesday Oct 2017

Posted by in Christian Encouragement, Home Education

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October 31st is usually just another day for our family.  At times, when we lived in a city neighborhood, we’ve passed out candy and gospel tracts to costume-clad visitors at our door, and other times we have happily forgotten the sugar-coma-inducing festivities of the day all together.

We’ve also not necessarily done much in the past with the notable historical event that took place on this day.  We’ve recognized it as Reformation Day, and perhaps shared a “Nailed it” meme for laughs, but we’ve never, you know, dressed our two boys up as Luther and Calvin.

But today, October 31, 2017, marks the 500th anniversary of the day Martin Luther famously drove the nail that cracked Europe—and mainstream church history—forever.

This seems to call for more than just the usual nod.  Cosplay may not be necessary, but a deeper consideration of its importance certainly is.

As a history major in college, I took particular interest in two very world-changing narratives:  the World War II era and church history.  Having studied the Reformation in some depth over ten years ago (ahem, yes, it’s been a while!) and consequently having forgotten many of the details, now has seemed as appropriate a time as ever to refresh myself on the subject, especially as I have considered how to teach my children about it and determine what celebrating the Reformation looks like in our family.

As I’ve dusted off a few of my college texts, done some reading online, and discussed the subject with my husband, I’ve refined my thoughts and priorities when it comes to understanding the Reformation and passing on that understanding and perspective to my children.

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Guiding Principles of our Discussion of the Reformation

Most of us know that the first three rules of buying a house are “Location, Location, Location”.  Similarly, the first three rules in rightly understanding history, the Scriptures, or anything we learn by written language are “Context, Context, Context”–both textual or historical.  The Protestant Reformation was in no way a stand-alone event.  One of my college texts is called Europe and Its Reformations, plural, because it seeks to demonstrate the continuum of social, political, and religious “reformations” surrounding the events of Luther’s life.  Despite the obvious fact that Luther’s actions and teachings set off a figurative bomb that changed the landscape of Europe forever, neither church nor political history were homogeneous, unchanged, or unchallenged before 1517.   And as we are probably more aware, neither did they remain so after the fact.  There have been throughout history pockets of believers, often persecuted, holding to the true gospel before the posted paper at Wittenberg, just as there were other movements from within the Catholic Church seeking to reform it, as well.  I believe it’s important that my children understand from the beginning that Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses and the Reformation they sparked didn’t take off in a vacuum.  Rather, in God’s providence and by His grace, Luther was at the right place at the right time to shed light on prevalent errors and bring the gospel of salvation by grace alone through faith alone into mainstream discussion.

Connected to this idea of context, it’s important to remember that Catholicism isn’t the same today as it was in Luther’s day.  Seeing the reformation sparked by Luther’s Theses as one of many efforts to reform the Catholic Church and/or Christianity and discussing this fact with my children will (I hope) help them to grasp that ideas, institutions, and people change over time.  I want them to be able to have meaningful conversations with their Catholic friends because they have some understanding of what Catholicism is today.  In the United States of America.  To this end, we watched a video covering the main differences between Catholicism and Protestantism.  It was mostly over my kids’ heads, since they are only 8- and 6-years-old, but we paused the video when necessary to discuss and understand along the way.  I hope I can instill in them a desire to ask questions to get to know what others believe and not merely spout off what they think they understand from one video they watched and a handful of discussions they had with their parents.  I have a hunch this will be a long process…

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For laughs.  Both in what this depicts and in how poorly depicted it is.

As the picture above seeks to humorously remind us, while technologies and power structures change, mankind is very much the same throughout the centuries.

Getting a bit more practical now, primary sources are a great way to look more directly into the past.  And they’re not just for college history classes!  Here are a few we’re using with our elementary-aged kids:  the book of Romans (which the Lord used to bring Luther to the understanding of salvation by faith); quotes from Luther himself, particularly a few lines from his Ninety-Five Theses and his defense at the Diet of Worms; and Luther’s hymns “A Mighty Fortress is Our God” and “Lord, Keep Us Steadfast in Your Word”.  As our kids get older, it’s my aim that we’ll look more into Protestant, Catholic Church, and political documents and counsels, among many other sources and including many other key players and precursors to the Reformation.

As we engage with several kinds of source materials, I want us to remember that bias is ever-present and history is never simple.  While we can see glimpses of the hand of God weaving together the events of time into the meta-narrative tapestry of His choosing, we can only ever see a few of the threads at a time.  So we should be humble with our own narratives, recognizing that God’s truth doesn’t depend upon me spinning the events in a way that I think is favorable.  A single group’s human narrative can be helpful, but only if it recognizes it is incomplete.  (Yes, this definitely has application to the current state of upheaval in our society today.)

Confession:  Luther isn’t really on our list of personal favorite Christian heroes.  He did some really great things and God clearly used him mightily for His purposes.  But my husband’s favorite heroes of Christian history are the faithful, quiet plodders—you know, the type of people who aren’t flamboyant or famous enough to have a day set aside to celebrate them—and who maybe don’t ever make it into the history books.  This is a pretty good personal antidote to our world’s (and often the church’s) emphasis on “changing the world” and “doing big things”.  So often it’s difficult to see the line between godly motivation and mere self-promotion and glory-seeking.  Those of us who recognize this do well to slow down and consider the lowly servants of Jesus throughout the ages, or those who played a support role to the “main actors” on the stage of church history.  I’m thankful that my husband is leading our family in valuing the faithfulness that sometimes only God can see.  It’s spiritually healthy, and it’s right.

While our family certainly doesn’t care to over-emphasize Luther’s heroism, his stand for truth and for conscience is an example to be admired.  We may never find ourselves in such a life-or-death test for our faith or our trust in the Word of God as when Luther stood before the Diet of Worms in 1521 and gave his most famous declaration.  But we nevertheless need courage on a daily basis to do what is right, to share the gospel of grace, to serve and love the lowly, to choose faithfulness in the small things no matter the outcome, to say no to delusions of grandeur or inclinations toward comfort and safety that would bring us to self-preserving, self-exalting compromise and complacency.  Luther’s legacy is not only in the truth he taught, but in the courage he had to “stand, and … do no other.”

Reformation Books Hymns Romans

We’ve selected a few children’s biographies to read this morning along with singing hymns and possibly watching a movie on the subject this evening as a family.  But more even than the particular books we read or the media we consume are the discussions we have as a family.  Discussions of what the gospel, or good news, of salvation in Jesus is—and has been from the beginning.  Discussions of how the Catholic Church was in error in the past and which of those errors have been abandoned and which have been maintained to this day.  Discussions of error on the other side of the line and how we each must seek to faithfully follow the Word of God, being willing to stand even amidst pressure from “our own” institutions.  Discussions of how we should treat those with whom we disagree (hint:  we like the example of Jesus and His disciples better than that of either the Catholic or Protestant state-churches!  Eek!).  Discussions of how we can see God’s hand at work throughout history—preserving His word and His people, using imperfect men and women to accomplish His purposes, and His provision for the gospel to spread to the ends of the earth—to every tribe and tongue and nation.  These discussions contain far more than mere information—they include love for the Lord, for His word, for others, and for our children themselves as we help them understand their own place in the line of history and the world of people and ideas.

While much more could be said (and probably has been said elsewhere in this vast space called the internet), I hope these limited thoughts of mine have been coherent enough to be a thought-provoking blessing to you today as you contemplate the Reformation and remember it with your family, friends, or church.

And as for costumes, I think my kids might currently be more interested in dressing up as Calvin and Hobbes than Luther and Calvin.  And I think I’m ok with that.

In closing, I’ll leave you with the Five Solas of the Reformation, because I didn’t manage to fit them in anywhere else and it seemed wrong to leave them out:

Sola scriptura – Absolute authority for Christian faith and practice comes from God’s word alone.

Sola fide – Salvation is through faith alone.

Sola gratia – Salvation is by grace alone.

Solus Christus – Salvation is in Christ alone.

Soli Deo gloria – All of this is for the glory of God alone.

Amen.

How are you remembering or celebrating?  What’s your favorite take-away from your contemplation of the Reformation?  Do you have an angle on it that I didn’t cover in this article?  I’d love to hear it!

Finding Cheap or FREE Resources for Bird Nature Study

25 Tuesday Jul 2017

Posted by in Book Reviews, Home Education, Nature Studies

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Amazon links are affiliate links, meaning that if you make a purchase through that link, I will earn a few pennies, nickels, and dimes.  I only link to products I would happily recommend even if no compensation were possible.  🙂 

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Our family doesn’t completely follow the Ambleside Online (AO) free curriculum, but we pull heavily from it for our book list, among many other things.

One of those other things is their Nature Study schedule.  If I want to pick a particular topic of nature study for us to focus on for a while, why not start with their suggested schedule and tweak it along the way, if need be?  This way there is less choice-fatigue for me and I can find some community around what we are studying, whether with other AO families I know in real life, on the AO forums, or on the Facebook group.

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This summer and fall is for the birds, so I’ve been doing a bit of research and collecting materials that will prepare me to assist and inform my children in their own observation and enjoyment of our feathered friends over the next several months.

I’ve seen a lot of materials for purchase on the interwebs, and many of them were quite tempting, but I wanted to see what was available to me for free before punching in credit card numbers.

First, I searched my own shelves. 

We already own the Handbook of Nature Study, which will serve us for many years and topics to come, making the purchase price slim over the long haul.

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Birds are covered on pages 27-143.  The pictures are not the most impressive, but this book is chock full of information so that you, the parent, can be a literally walking resource for you children on the trail.  Types of birds, parts of birds, migration of birds, lessons with suggested questions, pictures, diagrams, and even related poetry are included.  I plan to read this section for my own knowledge and make a few notes on particular questions or topics to raise while I’m out with the kids.

Remember, the purpose of Nature Study is to get the child in touch with the world and creatures God has made and to enjoy it.  The Handbook of Nature Study is NOT a textbook of information you have to cram into your precious children’s little heads.  It’s a tool to aid the work of observation that the kids ought to be doing and delighting in on their own.

I found another volume that I may reference over the next few months:  Living with Wildlife: How to Enjoy, Cope with, and Protect North America’s Wild Creatures Around Your Home and Theirs.  I don’t think there’s much to say about this book now since the title is so descriptive!  We found this gem at a library cast-off sale for probably about 50 cents.

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The point here isn’t so much that any of you need THIS book, but that if you keep your eyes open, you may find something similar.  If I didn’t have the Handbook of Nature Study, this book (or some other like it) would suffice quite nicely.  Birds are covered on pages 180-252, if any of you by chance come across this guide or find it at your library.  There aren’t so many pictures or diagrams, and it’s not aimed at teachers or parents to instruct their children, but the information is valuable and would do the trick of providing a parent with both a general and some specific knowledge of birds.

My oldest has read many chapters in The Burgess Bird Book for Children, one of the great selections found on the AO booklist.

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It’s a narrative introduction to all kinds of birds, with animals talking and acting consistent with their particular habits and personalities.  Each chapter covers a different bird, and we may just read one here and there for fun if we’re interested.

My mom gave us a laminated Pocket Naturalist Guide of Arkansas Birds for Christmas several years ago.  This guide isn’t particularly detailed, but it does provide color pictures of a variety of birds, including their Latin names, size, and an occasional special note.  Listed on the back are bird viewing areas and sanctuaries, as well as a state regional map.

For very young children, a laminated field guide is almost a necessity!  Even when they can’t read, they love feeling like real explorers with a guide in their pack that they can pull out at will.  And you as the parent love feeling like it won’t be destroyed on the first expedition!  If you don’t live in Arkansas, you can look up the Pocket Naturalist field guide for birds in your state.

Even just one or two of the above resources is more than enough to get started with nature study.  Actually, all you really need to do to get started is step outside and pay attention, and maybe take along a notebook and a pencil!  But we’ve been at this for several years now and I wanted to add to our resource collection (and convince myself that I didn’t need to buy anything new or shiny in order to do so).

So…where did I go for new FREE resources? 

I went online.

Many of the paid resources I’ve seen lately were all ebooks and video courses anyway, so I thought I’d search in the same format–starting with websites specific to my home state of Arkansas.

The Audubon Society of Arkansas and the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission have a wealth of free resources for studying birds, among many other kinds of wildlife!  There’s a searchable database where you can find pictures, details, and songs of birds when you search by color, size, habitat, and more.  The Game and Fish Commission provides free printable brochures on birds and so much more, but they will also send you a hard copy for free if you send them your mailing address!

If you’re outside of Arkansas, check out the corresponding organizations for your state.

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All I asked for was the Arkansas Backyard Birds booklet, but they sent the other three as well!  I suppose they figured someone like me would eventually ask for more booklets and they could save on shipping by sending them all at once.

There are two more ways I’d like to complement our focus on birds, and both can be achieved without spending a dime.

I’d like us to improve our artistic abilities in the area of drawing birds, so that our nature journal entries can better represent what we see out in the field.  Enter YouTube.  There are TONS of FREE video tutorials to help us hone our skills.  I think we’ll get a start with watercolor painting a saucy little wren like the ones we see every day around our house.

Finally, one of the greatest gifts I can imagine giving my children when it comes to nature study is to tie God’s truth to what they see.  The heavens are declaring the glory of God, and I want them to see it.  I just read the Sermon on the Mount this morning, and I think we’ll incorporate Matthew 6:26 into our memory work as we observe the winged creatures around us:

Look at the birds of the air, that they do not sow, nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not worth much more than they?

I hope this has been helpful to you, my friends.

Do you have any other super awesome free resources for bird nature study?  If you’ve studied birds already with your kids, what did your family enjoy most?

Books Read in 2016–The Wrap-up

31 Tuesday Jan 2017

Posted by in Book Reviews

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In past years I have shared the books I’ve read based on an academic calendar, because when I started recording what I was reading I was using a planner that followed that format.  I’ve since decided it makes more sense to post my micro book reviews as a round up of all the books I’ve read in a calendar year.

Which brings me to this post.  The transition had to happen sometime, and it’s happening now.  So, without further adieu, I give you the books I’ve read in the latter half of 2016.  If you’d like to see the eight other books I read in 2016, they are at the bottom of my 2015-2016 post.

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austin  I made the mistake, dare I say, of picking up this novel around 4 o’clock one afternoon when I heard that it would soon be discussed on the Circe Institute’s Close Reads podcast; and, since my husband was traveling and would not be home that evening, had the opportunity (and by compulsion took it) to read the entire thing in one night.  Once upon a time five or more years ago I had tried to read Pride and Prejudice, but found it to be nothing more than the screenplay of the A&E film version of the story, so I didn’t make it more than a few chapters before I felt there was no need of reading it.  Having not seen the movie adaptation in several years, when I picked it up this time the banter and character development of the film which was even more prevalent in the book drew me in at once.  As Miss Elizabeth Bennet learned, so have I:  some things, upon second evaluation, are found to have much more merit than we may judge them to have at the first.  Plainly stated:  I very much enjoyed this book and regretted having not read it in its entirety much sooner.  (The article that provoked my reading was “Don’t Follow Your Heart”.  I highly recommend it and the podcast discussion of the novel.  It was great fun!)

Courtesy in Christ: An Ettiquette Handbook for Christian Teens by Diane Pickup  I found this on our shelf one day and my curiosity got the best of me.  I have little boys, so training them in courtesy is on my bucket list for them.  I enjoyed how the author tied acts of courtesy and consideration to scriptural attitudes and commands to put the needs of others before our own.

The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame Listening to the Close Reads podcast also led me to this interesting read.  It’s a children’s story, but not just a children’s story.  Some of the vocabulary is very challenging for a children’s book (or for the adult reader, if I’m honest).  But I enjoyed the challenge of figuring out new words as I followed the wanderings of Mole and Ratty and the mischievous escapades of their foolish friend Toad.  The discussion on Close Reads explored similarities between The Wind in the Willows and The Hobbit, The Illiad, and even Shakespeare.  Grahame’s skill in writing and thematic depth make this a thoughtful book for adults, and maybe especially young adults ready to leave home for the first time but who find themselves longing for it once they’re gone.  I do have a major caveat, however:  chapter seven “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn” involves Mole and Rat finding a lost little friend with the pagan deity Pan—and they worship him.  While I think some generalized lessons can be drawn from this chapter with its wonder and awe, and while I think that it’s placement by Grahame in the center of the book is perhaps significant, the rest of the story line can be enjoyed without it.  My husband and I agree that there is so much wealth of children’s literature out there that we don’t feel any urgent need for our children to read The Wind in the Willows.  If we do read it out loud as a family while our children are young, we will skip chapter seven.  Most likely, however, we may save this as a fun return to childish anthropomorphism when our boys are in their late teens, where the themes may be particularly meaningful and when our boys could take on chapter seven as an exercise in practicing discernment.

Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi  On a much lighter note, we listened to the audio version of this classic on a road trip this year.  Our boys, 4 and 6 at the time, gobbled it up!  What does it mean to be a real boy?  What are the consequences of having your own way and ignoring those who give you wise counsel?  These questions are addressed in a very outrageously funny, though sometimes violent story.  I highly recommend this story, though parents should consider the age-appropriateness of some of the darker elements (Pinocchio kills the cricket, a cat’s paw is bitten off, Pinocchio is hung by his neck from a tree, etc).  For our kids, these were effectively shocking—they grabbed the attention—without causing any bad dreams or inspiring violent play.

Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder  We read Little House in the Big Woods in the first half of 2016, so naturally we moved on to the next in the series.  We enjoyed following Laura’s family as they traveled to Kansas and set up their home and everything they needed from scratch.  We all gained some perspective from imagining a life in which all of your family’s belongings fit on a simple covered wagon.  And since we live in the country, there have been ample connections for us to make—they set up a garden, and we started our first garden last year; they had to dig a trench in order to protect their home from a prairie fire, and we have discussed fire safety measures like that as well. All in all, this is a series that no child should miss.

What was your favorite read from 2016?  What’s on your list for this year? 

Embracing Short Lessons

27 Tuesday Sep 2016

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I had an a-ha moment today.

And who would have thought that it would come from two very different experiences happening on the same day?

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I’ve posted before about the initial struggles I had with our math curriculum.  Since that first-year learning curve, it’s been pretty smooth sailing.  Until this week.

Our curriculum made some huge leaps this week, as far as I’m concerned.  My oldest son struggled with two separate lessons that took his addition skills and subtraction skills up a few notches.  And by a few notches, I mean like FIVE.  There were some tears, and I decided to split his work for one lesson over two days.  “Short lessons” is one of many principles of education promoted by Charlotte Mason, a British educator at the turn of the 20th century, whose methods I have been reading about in For the Children’s Sake.

We would revisit his worksheet tomorrow, I said. In the mean time, I did some digging.

Looking back over our lessons, I realized that while the jump in addition may simply be larger than I agree is appropriate (at least for a child who is young-for-grade-level), the leap in subtraction was mostly difficult for two reasons:

  1. I didn’t exactly understand what I was to be teaching, since it is something that simply isn’t taught in a traditional approach to elementary math (let me know if any of you are used to learning to mentally subtract two-digit numbers with borrowing BEFORE learning the pencil-and-paper algorithm, k?).  Once I did MY homework, however, and began to really understand the strategies for myself, I realized that I had made things more complicated than they were intended to be. 
  2. The curriculum did not focus on subtraction for nearly 30 lessons!  Sure, there was occasional practice in a warm up or on a review sheet, but the concepts were not discussed in the slightest.  I had to realize that the lessons alone were NOT sufficient to prepare my son for the challenge of mental subtraction with borrowing.  But, as I examined my text book, they weren’t intended to.  Our curriculum, you see, is more than lessons–it includes many suggested math games and facts practice sheets.  The lessons introduce new material.  The games provide the bulk of the practice.  But we rarely played the games if they weren’t already included in a lesson’s activities.

My conclusion from this negative experience is that I’ve been too focused on getting to the next lesson.  Or to the next child on a given day.  My son is slow to get his work done, so we’ve not had time leftover for games.  Instead of seeing that as a hint to slow down, take a day off for a “Game Day”, and build the skills that would help him work faster, I’ve plowed forward, getting us further in the book but not necessarily further in skills and understanding.

As all of that was sinking in this morning, I had the pleasure of a very positive experience with my younger son.

Today I got to introduce my five-year-old to “one-thousand”.  Place value may not seem that exciting to adults, but when you’re five, and you’re the little guy, it’s pretty exhilarating to finally feel like you are catching up with your big brother.  After the concepts were introduced, one of the exercises was to write in his math journal “5000 dogs”, “8000 pigs”, “3000 cats”, etc.  This little man is just beginning reading lessons, and we’ve been stuck pretty much at the beginning.  He often forgets his letters and their sounds, and the idea that sounds, once identified, can be blended together to form words has been pretty much lost on him.

But today…

I helped him say each sound of each word in turn, then write the correct letter.  He actually guessed the letters correctly most of the time.  Then we worked on sounding out the words he’d written.  He blended sounds together rather painlessly for the first time ever!

We were both thrilled!

He happily copied his name and the words “can read!” right next to where I had written them on his paper.  A math lesson turned into our most successful reading lesson yet!

We were so excited and felt so full that it seemed silly to do anything more!  In the past, if we had made some progress on reading I would have thought “more is better” and pressed on to do the next lesson–or at least tried to re-focus us on finishing the math lesson.  But today I realized that the joy of learning is the ultimate goal.  And I saw very clearly how pushing for more would have ruined the moment for both me and my son.

It made me wonder:  How often has my son had a “moment” in his learning, but I didn’t detect it?  How often have I squelched his joy in learning by trying to move ahead too quickly?

With my oldest’s recent painful math lessons, I saw how my desire to “finish this today” and “check off a box and move on” over the past several months has done him a disservice.  We would have done much better to have played more games by insisting on less arbitrary “progress”.  Behold, the negative effects of ignoring Charlotte Mason’s concept of short lessons.

Once I got around to my second-born, I was ready to put the rubber to the road, and we had the incredibly awesome experience of seeing the joy of learning spill over into the rest of the day because we didn’t bury it in any more school work.

Less is more.  Especially when you’re five.  And maybe even in your thirties, but that’s another post for another day.

We are forging ahead, but our destination is now a more distant consideration.  Stopping to smell the proverbial roses along the way is now on my list of “objectives”.

I have learned today that I am teaching a child, my child–not a subject or a curriculum.  I’ve heard others say that before, but now I own it by experience.

Any other teachers or homeschool mamas out there?  Have you had this “a-ha” moment, too?  If you’re into Charlotte Mason’s philosophies, how has implementing the principle of short lessons helped you and your students?

Things I’ve Learned in Our First Year of Homeschooling

19 Friday Jun 2015

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My husband and I each knew we’d homeschool our kids before we ever met and married. And while in one sense you could say we’ve been “homeschooling” all along since our first child was born, it has only been this past year—when my oldest turned five—that we have “officially” begun to get our feet wet with more intentional schooling. Having looked forward to teaching my children at home for many years, I felt quite confident and had certain high expectations. Below, I reveal how it all has panned out.193

Things I’ve Learned in Our First Year of Homeschooling:

Homeschooling is both easy and hard. It is both delightfully fun and, at times, painfully stressful. It seems it is like any other worthwhile pursuit. It takes time.   It takes work. Blood, sweat, and tears. And prayer—lots and lots of prayer. I knew it would be work, but now I know it is work!

Daily discipline is probably the hardest thing. We don’t exactly at this point have our days perfectly laid out. I don’t even have our meals ready at the same time each day (working on that)! But this work is worth it, and I know the discipline will come in time, with practice. That’s essentially what discipline is, isn’t it? Practicing the right things over and over and over. Training (myself, in this case) to do what is right and to do it at the appropriate time. I’m learning right along with my kids.

I have so much more respect and appreciation for classroom teachers. I volunteered to teach a Spanish class for our homeschool co-op. I only had a class of about 14 children, but they ranged in age from five to nine years old. I can now sympathize with my public and private school counterparts on a few things:

1) Lesson planning takes a lot of work! I only had to plan five 45-minute classes—and they were spread out with at least a week between each one—but it was still a lot of work! I’m sure it gets easier to find a rhythm once you’ve done the same class for more than one year and have already done much of the preliminary planning, but I now have a small taste of just what goes into preparing for a class (minus any regulatory paperwork—you have my deepest sympathy, there).

2) Even when you think you’ve made the perfect plans, kids can highjack your attention and throw you all kinds of wrenches! Not the least of which is simply saying straight-up, “I really don’t want to do that.” I know how to handle those kinds of situations with my own children, but in a classroom setting?!?!? Which leads me to…

3) Maintaining discipline and order in the classroom is extremely challenging. I’m not sure if the fact that these were young homeschooled kids made this aspect more or less difficult.

4) Maintaining the interest and attention of students, especially when each one may be at a different level of development or understanding, is quite difficult.

5) It is truly a delight when you hear from parents that a kid loved your class, has been practicing what he’s learned, thinks you’re the best teacher ever, and can’t wait for the next class! Yeah, so that one isn’t a negative. That’s what every teacher wants to hear! And it makes those moments when you want to pull your hair out worth it.  Whether it’s in a public, private, or co-op classroom, consider this my hat tip to you, my teacher friends.

Sometimes my personality and preferences will clash with what my child needs. I was excited at first about the math curriculum we had chosen because it offered so much hands-on learning, which both my husband and I thought was important for forming a basic understanding of math and how it works. What I didn’t expect was the semi-scripted lessons telling me I had to cut this out, make copies of that, and grab a small pile of different manipulatives or stacks of cards each day to accompany our lessons. Nor did I foresee the fact that my desire for efficiency would struggle with the concept of doing something with manipulatives just for the sake of “experiencing” math. Yes, I get that the purpose is for the child to have a greater understanding, but is it really necessary for him to make nearly forty “hundreds cards” that he will only use once?

The concepts and strategies taught in this curriculum are different than I learned growing up, and they feel a bit extraneous at times.   I’m a bit more of a math traditionalist, and I liked math just fine that way. Numbers and symbols are concrete to me, so working with abstractions early on just seemed insane.  But, I’m learning that…

Math is more than facts and rules. And it’s more fun this way. The goal, I have slowly come to realize, is to learn the concepts and the facts while simultaneously gaining a deep understanding and appreciation for them—and we’re even learning to do more mental math than I’m used to doing as an adult! So I now see the value in all the “extras” that fill up our lessons.

It is an opportunity to die to myself in service to another. I’m not particularly patient, and I like to get from point A to point B in the shortest amount of time possible. So the lessons still sometimes annoy me. And while homeschooling certainly affords me the freedom to build or find a curriculum that works for both my teaching style and my child’s learning style (read: I don’t HAVE to stick with this curriculum!), I am also responsible to do what I truly feel is best for my child, even if it means I have to swallow my pride, deny my own tendency toward laziness and high efficiency (the two go together, don’t they?), and press on with a program that my child enjoys and which is indeed challenging him to think in new ways and make his own discoveries as he explores the world of mathematics.

I can’t wait until we can switch over to Saxon 54 (our plan all along) and my boys can work independently on math in a more disciplined and traditional way, but what we’re doing now will give them a great grasp on the how and why of math, which I think will be a great foundation on which to build! The struggle is worth it. I can learn to adapt for their sakes.

A little stick-to-it-iveness goes a long way. I started and stopped this particular math curriculum twice already (“trying” it the first two times involved one two-week stint in the beginning before giving up on part-whole circles, and another four-day “trial” five months later). This third time around, I’m motivated by the fact that if we’d just paused at part-whole circles, given it a week to be mastered, and then jumped right back in, we’d be on to the next grade-level by now.

My attitude changes everything. I let on right away my disgust for the cheesy little kids songs used to teach some early math equations, how to write numbers, etc. For the record, I’m not a fan of most little kids’ music. I found that very quickly my children shared my sentiment, and we gave up on the songs. When the program introduced part-whole circles before introducing written math equations, I stiffened up, made a bewildered face, said, “What?!?”, and then my son didn’t like them either (and probably lost any interest in trying to figure them out). And this is why we threw in the towel the first time. I think my attitude made all the difference in the world.

Now, having reintroduced things a second and third time with a much better attitude, and having worked with my son to conquer part-whole circles (we did introduce equations first), he now comments on how much he loves part-whole circles (and now we all seem to love those cheesy math songs! Both my boys beg for me to put the cd on!). I set the tone. I can be the greatest help or the greatest hindrance to my child’s learning. Attitude is everything.

What I assumed would be the easiest subject turned out to be the most difficult. I’m not done with that math curriculum yet! Can you see that math has been my Achilles’ heel this year? I sure didn’t expect that when I started the year with a child who loved math and seemed to be pretty good at it! But neither of us had done a formal curriculum, so we each had quite the learning curve. That boy still loves math and is indeed good at it, but I have had to learn that just because he’s got a good mind for it doesn’t mean he will pick everything up on the first try (or even the second). He’s only five for crying out loud! The process is still line upon line, precept upon precept, a little here, a little there. My prideful expectation that my son would be a supernatural wiz kid in math and always understand everything the first time I introduced it to him had to be slammed down. Not because my son is any dummy, but because I was being the dummy! Math has been the hardest subject for me, not for him, because it has been the thing that has most upset my expectations. Praise God for upsetting my expectations!

Treating this as a practice year has been incredibly important for my sanity. My son’s birthday falls right on the cutoff date. He could have started kindergarten this year in the public schools, and if we were sending him there, we’d have signed the waiver to keep him home an extra year so that he’d be the oldest in his class rather than the youngest. So, that’s just what we did as homeschoolers—instead of filing an Intent to Homeschool form, we just filed our paperwork to waive kindergarten. But as far as I was concerned, we were starting kindergarten at home. So I jumped in with a great reading program, that math curriculum I have already loved on so much in this article, and a plan to read lots of good books together. While we’ve really had a successful year, and there was math learning going on in the five months after we initially dropped the curriculum (mostly learning and practicing addition and subtraction facts with dollar store workbooks—not a bad method, might I add), I still felt like I had cheated my son of so much more in math since I didn’t stick with the program. I wish I had just done it. Take a break where needed for extra practice, but then keep going. But I didn’t. And here we are starting up again in lesson twenty-something at the end of the school year. Never mind that it’s at an advanced kindergarten/traditional first grade level. Never mind that many kids would be starting kindergarten at five and half or nearly six years old—so the only reason I feel behind is because of where my son’s birthday falls relative to an arbitrary start date. I still felt like I was behind.

Then Nathaniel and I discussed what we should do with the paperwork this year. I had already been treating my son as a kindergartener in our homeschool group, even though we waived kindergarten as far as the state was concerned. We could file our first Intent to Homeschool form this summer with a kindergarten designation or a first grade designation. Our homeschool group wanted us to give them the same designation. So I was torn. But as we discussed it and as I heard from another mom who has all her babies in either July or August, she just always signed them up as the lowest grade level that fit their age. That way, they could go at their own pace, as far ahead as they needed to be, but if they weren’t advanced or were even a little slow in some areas, they could also proceed at their own pace without undue pressure. So we made the decision then and there to declare our son as starting kindergarten next year.

It’s such an arbitrary designation, really, but it has taken a huge weight off of my shoulders! Instead of feeling like I had to scrap any hopes of picking up where we left off with the math program because we were already too far behind, it freed me to evaluate the situation in terms of: What do I really think would be the best course of action so that my son will really get it when it comes to math? What will give him the best foundation? Taking the pressure off of me to keep up with some mythical standard I had set up for myself allowed me to focus on my child and take that pressure off of him as well. What a beautifully freeing thing!

Summer Break is there for a reason. I had originally thought we’d school year-round. I thought if we kept at it all year, then we could just take breaks whenever “life” happened throughout the year. And while that is a wonderful blessing of homeschooling, I have found in this our first year that, as we move into the summer months, “life” just tends to happen more often. There are more outdoor activities, swimming lessons, late family evenings, road trips to take, and home projects demanding our attention. So, even though we are somewhat continuing our more formal studies (math and reading, in particular), summer has broken up our routine of its own accord, and I am just going to roll with it and enjoy summer as a fun time to learn especially by doing, and by doing fun things together as a family. And I certainly don’t mind the down time beside the pool while the boys learn to swim. 😉

Even when life slows us down, we still have put in a lot of work this year. My oldest son has learned to read. My youngest has decided he knows how to read, too, but that’s another story. The boys have developed a love for science and history and telling stories and building their own enormous creations out of their train set and Legos and blocks and toilet paper rolls. We have enjoyed and memorized several poems and passages of scripture. We have settled into our math program and are enjoying it, firmly committed this time, and growing in our understanding together. We’ve gotten plugged in to our local homeschool group and have thoroughly enjoyed the new relationships it is providing. And, to whom it may concern, we have logged well over 180 days of school. Not bad for a “practice” run. 😉

How about you? What do you remember from your first year of homeschooling? And what lessons have you learned along the way since then? I’d love to hear from you!