Growing WarriorsJust your typical family…

I made a few changes. Minor. Lately the kids have been sorta wild. Allison has been rather mean lately – flashing some attitude and lots of disrespect, and not playing nicely with Meredith. I decided to try adding additional structure into our days in the hopes of nipping this in the bud. So starting on Monday (yesterday), I declared that we would have two read-aloud periods a day, one independent reading period each day, one outside play period each day, and some small chunks of free time each day. Add that to our regular school time, mealtimes and clean-up times, and that pretty much fills a day. Eventually I will add in official arts and crafts times. If things get chugging real nicely, I might assign certain days to certain things..like my friend Gina has science Fridays. I would also like to have science/nature Fridays, and maybe a day where we play games all afternoon….who knows. I am starting simple, see where it takes us. If the kids even respond to the increased structure…if I can even keep up with it myself! We’ll see.

Yesterday was our first day implementing this, and so far it has gone really well. Allison says that she would like to have this as a schedule- with set times, which I may try to put together at some point. She is really noticing time and loves assigning times to various things. Like for a while she has been saying that we eat breakfast at 9AM. Although last night she pointed out that sometimes they go to bed at 10, so she wants that to be their bedtime. Um, NOT. She has gone to bed at 10 maybe once or twice in the past month Anyway….

In addition to my attempts to put more structure in the day, I also revamped the reading lesson a bit. I was getting tired of her dawdling and lack of attention, so I tried to use a timer. I set it for 20 minutes (to allow for a bit of dawdling, lol), and told her that once it beeped, no matter where we were, even if we were mid-lesson, we would stop. In exchange, I wanted her full attention during that time. If she starts playing around, I will add a minute to the timer. Wow. I have never seen her so focused! It was great! So I told her today that if we can get through the 20 minutes tomorrow without adding any minutes to the clock (we only had to add two today and three yesterday), I would lower it down to 15 minutes from that point forward. I hope this keeps up. My only really problem with the CM methodology is the dawdling aspect of the short lessons. I love the idea of keeping lessons to only 15 minutes or so, but during that 15 minutes, I want complete attention! I think that CM would suggest that if dawdling or inattentiveness occurs, that we should move on to something else, and come back to that lesson later. I think I read that somewhere – a book or an email list or something..I could be wrong. Please correct me if I am! But anyway, that’s nice, but if I don’t structure my days in such a way, we won’t come back to it. I feel that we HAVE to do schoolwork in the morning. That is when it is easiest to find something else for Meredith to do, that is when the baby is the happiest, and that is when it seems that Allison is the most clear-headed. So if we were dealing with a case of the wiggles, coming back to it later in the day…well I dunno. PLUS, Allison is a smart girl, and I think that if we stopped every time she displayed inattentiveness, then she would learn to display inattentiveness just to control the situation! SOO, I feel that this requires some habit-building. She needs to develop a habit of focusing on her studies for a small period of time. The time seems to help her to do just that! Maybe when she is older and more of her education is done independently, we can leave a subject to come back to later. We’ll see.

In other news, she had a “test” today in math. This was her first one. We went through it once together just to make sure she understood what a test meant, and that I wouldn’t be helping her, etc…went through all the questions once to make sure she understood what they were wanting, and then she completed it on her own (I still read the problems to her) and aced it with no missed questions. Whoo hoo. That girl ROCKS!

Just a quick school update, since I haven’t updated in a while on specifics. Today went really well. We switched from 100EZ lessons for reading to The Ordinary Parent’s Guide, and seem to be liking it a lot. We also toss in a bit of CM reading instruction here and there. Allison is reading really well, and reports that the new reading lessons are very easy. I backtracked some, just to make sure that there weren’t any holes left by switching programs. We have been doing two lessons a day because they are so quick and easy.

Now math is currently really impressing me. We are using Right Start Math, level B and I LOVE IT LOVE IT LOVE IT LOVE IT. I can’t speak highly enough of this program. It really focuses on the foundation of math UNDERSTANDING, and believe it or not, my little five year old daughter has been adding 4 digit numbers, including carrying! Today she added three numbers like 1847+2685+3792 – I am TOTALLY not kidding you! Now granted, she is doing this with manipulatives, and I am sure that if I were to write the problem out like I just did here, she would be totally overwhelmed until I explained that it is really one-thousand, plus two-thousand, plus three-thousand, plus eight-hundred – get the idea? But anyway, with the manipulatives and the way the lessons are presented, she is totally getting how ten ones equals one ten, and ten tens equal one hundred and ten hundreds equal one thousand, and with that knowledge, along with some visual representations, she is able to do the most amazing things!

In Language Arts, we are still using First Language Lessons, and they are STILL on the noun! We have skipped a lot of lessons, and really are using it more for the other stuff – like in the discussion on the proper noun, we have been talking about cities, states, addresses, etc., and now Allison can tell you our address (which is a LONG one), as well as why we capitalize the name of our street We did our address for copywork today. Also, this program does do some memorization and narrations, so it is a good introduction to that, even if I do skip a BUNCH. Both Allison and Meredith have two poems completely memorized.

We have started reading Story of the World, just as a read-aloud, not really doing any of the activities or anything. Just as an introduction to history stories, more than anything. So far we have only read a few sections and we both find it pretty boring, so I don’t know that we will stick with it. It just came highly recommended, and I picked it up free via a trade transaction. We plan on starting Ambleside Online when Allison turns six, so I am not really concerned about it right now.

And today, I pulled out James’ Herriot’s Treasury for young children or SOMETHING like that (LOL, yeah, I could go out in the other room and look), I started reading a story while Allison was doing her copywork. She replied that it was BORING and she wanted to read something else. This was during the first few paragraphs, which I admit are pretty flowery, and a HUGE emphasis on setting the stage, so to speak. Anyway I kept on reading, and by the end of the story she was BEGGING me to read another one. We wound up reading three stories from the book, and both the kids wanted to continue, but my voice was tired (plus, two of the stories made me bawl like a baby, and I was feeling a bit emotionally drained as a result, lol).

Then the girls played play-dough, cleaned up their messes, ate lunch, and since I had told them earlier that after lunch I wanted them to clean their rooms, as soon as they finished eating, Allison asked if they could go clean their rooms now. Um, yeah! I was surprised, but an hour later, she came down and said that she had been cleaning Meredith’s room and Meredith was doing her room because they were playing Trading Spaces! LOL Whatever works, huh? So Allison decorated Meredith’s room with a beach theme and Meredith was SO surprised

Now the neighbor boy is over, and they are all playing. Meredith scrapped her ballerina outfit for a swimsuit (to go with her beach themed bedroom).