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Kept and Keeping

~ Rest in Grace, Labor in Love

Kept and Keeping

Tag Archives: Right Start Math

Cyber Monday Homeschool and Homemaking Deals [expired]

30 Monday Nov 2020

Posted by Lauren Scott in Home and Family, Home Education

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Tags

Cyber Monday Deals, Home Education, Homemaking, Homemaking Deals, Homeschool Deals, Music Education, Right Start Math

This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase through one of these links, I may receive a commission at no additional cost to you. 

This is not at all an exhaustive list, but I wanted to pass on a few deals for things that I myself use and deeply appreciate!

Prodigies Music has steep discounts on memberships during their Cyber Monday Sale [sale is now over]. As a reader of Kept and Keeping, you can get an additional 5% off with coupon code KEPT.
Our family has enjoyed the Lifetime Membership for four years now! We started learning on desk bells and are now dabbling in recorder, ukulele, and piano! The Prodigies team keeps adding more colorful sheet music and more fun instructional videos. My family’s music education library keeps growing and growing!

Playing a Right Start Math Game
Exploring Geometric Solids

Right Start Math is having a sale on gently used curriculum, manipulatives and instructional/tutoring kits [sale now over]. We’ve used Right Start in our homeschool for over six years, and it is giving my kids a fantastic, hands-on foundation for understanding and enjoying math. If you’re not sure if this program is for you, they have tutoring kits that you can use to supplement your child’s math education or use to get a feel for how Right Start teaches math–it is different, but I have found it is worth it!

Grace & Truth Books

Check out Cyber Monday discounts at Grace and Truth Books–a great source for Christian books. We have especially enjoyed the Little Lights Biographies (for early elementary school) and the Christian Biographies for Young Readers series (for upper elementary) in our homeschool. They also carry Teaching from Rest–a great encouragement for Mom!

Mystie Winckler over at Simply Convivial is offering her Homemaking 101 Course for only $17 (regularly $36) [sale over]. All of Mystie’s courses are such a blessing. This Homemaking 101 course is practical and purposeful but definitely NOT perfectionistic! You’ll find real Christian encouragement for managing and enjoying your home, not someone else’s.

The Homeschool Review: Spring 2018

31 Saturday Mar 2018

Posted by Lauren Scott in Home Education

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Books, Charlotte Mason, education, Home Education, homeschooling, math, Music Education, Nature Study, Right Start Math

This post contains affiliate links. If you purchase something through one of these links, I may receive a commission at no extra charge to you.

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!).

homeschool morning time books

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.

homeschool math games right start

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.

homeschool right start math area

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.

homeschool language arts mcguffey first language lessons

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.

IMG_20180122_122951970.jpg

Exploring historic Ft. Smith after mama read True Grit.

 

 

ft. smith picture
DSC_0148

 

 

risk battleship game
IMG_20180101_211151691.jpg

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.

german shepherd dog boys

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

petit jean cedar creek falls frozen

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

 

 

homeschool calendar of firsts bird poster
IMG_20180117_091112504.jpg

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?

Embracing Short Lessons

27 Tuesday Sep 2016

Posted by Lauren Scott in Home Education

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Charlotte Mason, children, Children are born persons, education, For the Children's Sake, homeschooling, motherhood, Right Start Math, Short Lessons, Struggling Learner, Teaching Math, Teaching Reading

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?

195

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?

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Lauren Scott

Lauren Scott

Christian. Wife. Mother. Homemaker. Home Educator. Blogger. Book Addict. Outdoorist.

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