Semester Wrap-Up

We have now completed 74 days of school and are out for winter break! I am so pleased with how well our first semester of homeschooling went. I'm also glad that we decided to start the homeschooling process with only one child this year. It has been a daily learning process.

Most of the curricula we chose worked well. We particularly liked First Language Lessons, the Math Mammoth (blue series) worktexts to supplement Math in Focus (which was okay but we're not moving on with it), Story of the World history, and Getting Started with Latin. Singapore Math worked so well for Em that I've ordered the next semester of El's math through Singapore instead of MiF. Discovering Great Artists has been a great art "spine," but lately our Friday art sessions have turned into architecture sessions.

Some of our choices didn't work as well as the others. Writing with Ease never really clicked for us. El preferred the cheapo Spectrum Writing workbook and I added daily copywork or dictation. Third grade "classical education" science is supposed to be chemistry only, but we decided to do chemistry on Thursday and a standards-oriented science program through Evan-Moor on Tuesdays. That seems to work better.

In the coming semester, I would like to begin an actual vocabulary program (likely to be Vocabulary in Action from Loyola Press but I haven't yet figured out what level to put El in.) We will do more literature and we will dial a lot of the other subjects back. December was kind of rough, with three flus and an ear infection. We spent several days doing math, then doing one or two other subjects, followed by reading to each other on the couch. It was very low-key and very inspiring. I want to have more days like that. This is still grammar stage, I continually remind myself. They have so many years of education ahead of them, learning at this age should not be stressful. Especially with a kid like El, who is certainly more and studious and eager to learn than I ever was.

In summary: Homeschooling is AWESOME. That is all.

Architectural sketching practice

Friday's final sketch: Big Ben in London

It's kind of like a wrap up, I guess...

Weeks 12 and 13 were combined out of necessity. Week 12 was a 3 day wk for Em, due to parent-teacher conferences and wk. 13 was a two day wk. due to Thanksgiving break. So, for week twerteen (thirtelve?) we did the basics (math, writing, reading, etc.) Latin & art were totally neglected (sorry, culture. No time for YOU this week!) We meandered through more Minoans since I wanted to start ancient Greece after turkey day break.

Cooking happened, but I don't have pics to prove it. The kids helped out with the Thanksgiving dinner preparations for a while, until their father lured them away with a set-up and plugged in microphone and electric mandolin (which is apparently waaay more fun than slicing eggplant.)

(I totally cheated. This is Em's from last year.)

As usual, I made entirely too much food.
 
Em ended the day with a fancy-hair happy dance:

The end.

Wordless Wednesday

Science: The goopier, the better.

Let's Talk About Math: Playing Catch-Up

This post has been a few weeks in the making as this is a success story in the making. I don't feel like we're "great" in the math department yet but I do feel like we are on the way.

Where we came from:
I feel like Eliot should be very good at math. There is really nothing holding him back. His perceptual abilities have stunned me since he was little and he did, in fact, test highly gifted in that area and the "Working Memory" area. Dad is mathy. My mom tells me I was once mathy too (I think those days have passed.) Anyway, El just had a lot going for him. I divulge this information not to brag, but rather as a prelude to my caveat: What we did worked for El because he was fairly high-potential & fairly low-performance. I don't think it would work for everyone.

Where we went wrong:
I never taught him to read, he just started doing it one day. I guess I thought math would come the same way. Apparently it does not (in our case, anyway.) El's first years at public school offered little to no math instruction and I didn't do any afterschooling. I just didn't want to push anything on him.

When I began placement testing El for homeschool last summer, I had to go all the way back to the Singapore 1B test to find a test he could successfully complete. Even then, he barely passed the 1B level.

Making a Plan:

The WTM, my "everything" spine, suggested third grade should spend 50 minutes a day on math, so that's what I planned for. I purchased Math in Focus: The Singapore Approach 3A and vowed to just try to struggle through it as best we could.El would work on MiF on M, T, Th & F and on W he would work on our other math book, Primary Grade Challenge Math. I also planned to work on multiplication tables for 5 minutes a day. The first day we would count by ones, then the next day I had him fill in the ones table and the remaining days he worked on flashcards of 1X1 up to 1X12. The next week I had him skip count by twos and review the ones flashcards. The third week he would skip count by threes and do twos flashcards, and so on and so forth. This part is going pretty well.


Setbacks:
The first week of MiF was okay, but a few days in we hit "mental math" and it sent us both into a small panic. I frantically consulted my mom (teacher extraordinaire) and the entire WTM forum for help. I thought MiF 3A was too hard: We needed something different, something non-Singaporean. Everyone else disagreed. So we decided to stick it out after taking a week off of the MiF program. So, the following week we put away the MiF book and I downloaded Math Mammoth Add/Subtract 2A. I watched every math video I could find about teaching subtraction. I pulled out the manipulatives and workmats,

the base ten blocks, the Khan Academy practice map. (In the meantime, I decided Em had to do math at home. She tested easily into 1A so I purchased the Singapore textbook and workbook. I worked through some of it with El so that he could gain a better understanding of number bonds.)

He spent two weeks in a "math intensive" with no text book. Just manipulatives (and Math Mammoth worksheets, occasionally.) To keep it interesting, we did continue with the Challenge Math book and we did some problems out of another workbook, Beginning Algebra Thinking. As long as it didn't involve subtraction, he could handle it.

At some point, I heard about xtramath.org, a free math fact practice site. I had El do this 4X/wk. I found a third grade math workbook at Goodwill and used it for drills a couple of times a week.

Carry on:
We started back in with MiF and worked our way through. Some of the extra things worked beautifully and we continued on with them (xtramath) and some have been forgotten (algebra.) Once we got to multiplication, I could practically hear Handel's "Hallelujah Chorus" playing in the background as we left subtraction by the side of the road. I still have El work on subtraction a couple of days each week, and he is currently working on mastering subtraction facts on xtramath, so it's not like we've totally abandoned subtraction, you know? We're just seeing other people for a little while.

What did math look like by Week 12?
4 times a week we work on MiF. Somedays we work for 25 minutes and make it through a section, easy peasy. Other days we have to spend two 60 minute days on one section. We still do Challenge Math on Wednesdays, followed by a Math Mammoth worksheet or some Khan Academy random math learning for fun.

El does xtramath 3 or 4 times a week, with each time taking 3-10 minutes (depending entirely upon how lazy he feels like being. It shouldn't really take longer than 4 or 5 minutes.) I have him practice subtraction with borrowing and multiplication with regrouping a couple of times a week. We have some second grade math games from my mom which we play a couple of times each week. We have a homemade multiplication game which we will probably play once this week. He does beestar.org math twice a week because he likes it.

So, for anyone who likes lists as much as I do:

• MiF textbook and workbook- 4x/ wk
• Zaccaro- 1x/ wk
• math games- 3x/wk
• xtramath.org math fact practice- 3-4x/wk
• worksheet practice (Math Mammoth or other)- 3x/wk
  
• beestar- 2x/wk (although I don't ask him to do this: He chooses to do it.) 
• Khan videos/ practice 1x/wk (again, he does this because he wants to. I don't require it.) 

Overall, I would say we do spend more than the WTM classical education recommended 50 minutes a day on math, but not as much as you would think. We probably average 6-7 hours each week on math when you add in all the math games and extra practice. Considering he doesn't have "homework," I think this is a very reasonable amount of time for a third grader to spend on math.

Where's the success story?
Oh, hey, I almost forgot that part. Well, prior to day 1 El struggled through placement for Singapore 1B. After working through multiplication, he now slowly but surely made his way through the 3A placement test. Fifty five days of math and he has improved his level by 3 semesters. I feel like half of the problem was confidence (for both of us) and the other half was that he needed the material presented over and over in a variety of ways. When he found a way that worked, he needed drills at least 3 or 4 times each week.

He has gone from: "Yeah, math makes me kind of nervous" to "I love math!" and, to me, that is the biggest success of all. :) 

Oh. One more thing. If you ever hear me mention my math arsenal, I'm not foolin' around, my friend.

Wrap Up: Week 11

Week 11 (hey, which I just realized contained the day 11-11-11) was birthday week for Dad. Monday morning, before school started, we made our handmade birthday cards. Tuesday we had to think of something sweet to make Dad since he's a cake-hater (I know, right? O, the audacity! The heresy!) We came up with some handheld apple pies from one of the vegetarian cookbooks I checked out from the library last week. They were GONE within an hour of being finished (We made sure Dad got 2.) So good. 

Kids' cooking project: Handheld apple pies... Mmmmmm.

Yeah, they look a little weird but they tasted awesome!

El was ecstatic when he heard Monday's history project: Build an Assyrian siege tower out of Legos. He didn't really know where to begin, but luckily I found another hs blogger working through SOTW and we looked at her kids' towers for inspiration. Here is El's finished tower:

On Friday, we had Em with us so she worked on some Singapore math pages, a GDI printing page, this math sentence practice page recommended by Math Mammoth's Maria Miller and some Tumblebooks.

Friday was also art day and our artist of the week was Henri Matisse. Matisse was a post-impressionist who loved COLOR so he fit right in at our house. The project from our art book was to create a Matisse colored paper collage similar to the art he was making in his later life.

Here's more of our week:

•  Spelling: We are still finishing up SP Level D. I have pulled out every missed word from this level and I'm going to re-test those words over the next couple of weeks. I've divided them into 4 sections and will re-test 17 or 18 words at a time. I know, this isn't SP protocol at all but I'm stalling a little bit before heading into Level E since E (roughly grade 6/7) looks to be much more difficult than D has been.

• Reading: For Ancients, we finished up Six Beautiful Stories of Life by Cynthia Rylant (of Henry and Mudge fame) and I think I can say it has been my favorite ancients book so far. El also flew through Book 4 of Mary Pope Osborne's Tales from the Odyssey series. We also continued on with our On the Banks of Plum Creek unit study. El also read stories about George Washington Carver and Pocahontas. The library was closed Friday so we actually didn't make it to the library last week. That's right, we didn't go to the library last week and the world didn't end! Amazing, huh?
• Grammar: Completed 3 FLL lessons and mastered memorization of the Thackary poem.
• Health, music, Latin, handwriting, sign language... the usual.
  
• Writing: Copywork, dictation, Spectrum pages... the usual. 

•  Math: Finished up Chapter 7 in Math in Focus. This means El heads into long division in the coming weeks. This also means I have 2 chapters left until I run out of math. I've got to decide what I'm doing next for math, since I don't have the full MiF 3B and I'm still not sure I want to stick with it. 
• Science: Chemistry- "enzymes, yeast, and fermentation" in our chem. experiment book and  "rock types and the rock cycle" in our other science book. We also watched some YouTube videos about rock types since I didn't happen to have a geology lab at my disposal.

Wordless Wednesday

Week 10: Wrap Up

It is so difficult to challenge keep up with El sometimes. When I am totally worn out, I have to remember that he spent the past year in public school not being challenged at all. Our schedule, which began with the basics (arithmetic, language arts, social studies, health, science with some experiments, the arts) has grown and grown to include fiction unit studies, Latin, chemistry, geography, ancient history, cooking,

Think I'm kidding? Last week, I actually heard the phrase: "But mom, I need more information about Hatshepsut!" Luckily, there's a PBS doc for that. Whew. Saved by Netflix, once again.

sign language, speech, art history... I don't even know. When I ask him if he wants to give up one of these things so he can spend more time focusing on the others, he inevitably answers: Cursive! Sigh. No you cannot give up cursive. Anything else? What? No! I like it all!

If the concept of classical education was made for anyone, it was made for Eliot. So we are now cramming in a traditional public-school standards education in with a classical education and plenty of child-led unschooling as well. Why? Well, I don't know. I guess because he wants to and I haven't cracked yet. I'm sure the day is coming, though.

My family is just all-around... bizarre! intense. I don't know how to describe it. Okay, here's an example: My husband came home about three weeks ago and declared that, while he loves meat, the world should not be producing meat anymore. If there is meat available in abundance, such as when an increasingly abundant population of fish threatens the survival of other native species, that meat should be consumed by humans. Otherwise, though, we should not be wasting our natural resources on meat production. (To clarify: Meat is fine to eat, we just shouldn't be purchasing as much as we do and encouraging commercial production of it.) Okay. I guess I'll just scrap the menu plan for the rest of October.
(ETA: I don't necessarily disagree. He has a point.)

Then Em- my 38 lb., increasingly superstitious 6.5-yr-old- decides the only foods worth eating are corn, plums, plain biscuits with nothing on them, ramen noodles, and the broth made by one chicken bullion cube in one cup of water. They can't be eaten at the same time, though, because then they would mix together in her stomach and that would apparently be gross. This child came home from trick-or-treating, ate half a Ring Pop, and asked for ramen. I am not even kidding. Exasperated sigh. (This isn't permanent, though. Last week it was canned carrots, almonds, and dried cranberries. Who knows what next week will be?)

Progress! I got her to put pizza sauce on the biscuits and she actually ate them.

So, yeah. We all have our quirks (in addition to our quarks, El would tell you with a grin.) And since I am tired (and quite possibly anemic again) I'm not even going to wrap up our week. Everything. We covered everything. Except for biology or zoology. Shhhhh. No one mention biology or zoology to my kid, okay? Please? Not this year, anyway.