Growing WarriorsJust your typical family…

An article in the OU paper – both hubby and I went to OU. GO OU!

I know I get defensive over our choice to homeschool. Its just that it is SO misunderstood, and in misunderstanding comes disapproval. So excuse me if I sing its praises here on my blog. It isn’t that I am dissing those that make choices different from mine, really it isn’t. Its just that I am defending the (unconventional, outside the box) choices we have made for our family.

And on that note, here is a poll on MSNBC: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6862172/#survey – the last question is “Is homeschooling the same; better; worse than public schools?” When I visited the results were, out of 1772 responses:

Equal to public schooling
7%

Better than public schooling
71%

Worse than public schooling
22%

Something someone posted to an email loop I am on. This is from a Newsweek article, “The Mind of an Inventor” – not a homeschooling journal:

“Are inventors born, or are they made? Danny Hillis, who can’t
remember a time when he wasn’t trying to make mind-blowing stuff,
comes at the question, as usual, from an unexpected angle: potential
inventors are UN-MADE.’In some sense, every kid is inventive,’ he
says. Without encouragement, a child’s gleeful penchant for
experimentation becomes endangered.’Kids invent things all the time
until they get to school and adults tell them they shouldn’t be
wasting their time doing silly stuff,’ says Bran Ferren, Hillis’
partner at Applied Minds….”

that reminds me of the percentage of great people…leaders, noble peace prize winners, etc., etc., etc., that were homeschooled. Its high. A great deal of great minds, great people, great leaders, were educated at home…where their curiousity was nutured. Where they weren’t told, “you can’t learn about physics right now, we cover earth science in this grade”.

Ok here goes…on paper (SCREEN??) – my plan for first grade! (Allison, not me)

- Phonics/Spelling/Reading – Spell to Write and Read – 4 days a week

- Math – Right Start – gonna finish up level B maybe start on level C (she did about half of level B in kindergarten) – 3-4 days a week with a day of games.

- Handwriting – copywork from AO selections, 3-5 days a week (gonna start a copybook) – I may start her on cursive..I’ve been reading a lot about doing cursive before teaching print, and some of it really makes sense. My only consideration is that Allison already prints, using HWT’s methods, so I don’t want to confuse her. I do think that I will start the other kids out with cursive, when their time comes.

- Foreign Language – Spanish – La Classe Divertida (did I spell that right??), Lyrical Language, and may add in Rosetta Stone. Not sure how I will work it all….Lyrical Language we just do in the car, I would like to do La Classe 3 times a week, If we do Rosetta Stone, I may make it supplementary, if the kids want to do it, they can.

- Science – Classical Home Education’s REAL Science – 2 days a week (I’m thinking) with one day a week dedicated to pure child-led nature study (even though the curriculum is basically nature study)

- Literature – Ambleside Online!

- History – Ambleside Online!

- Geography – Ambleside Online!

- Art Study – Ambleside Online – 1 day a week, although I may sorta start doing Drawing with Children 1 day a week as well.

- Composer Study – Ambleside Online – 1 day a week

- Music – piano lessons 1x a week, practice 4x a week, and Music Ace Software 2x a week.

That’s it! I think.

I do have a plan for Meredith as well. Sorta. (she will be four in Sept) She will sit in on Spanish study (she has already learned a lot from Lyrical Language, and seems to pick it up MUCH quicker than any of us…probably because she is so young), I plan to start teaching her phonograms using the Spell to Write and Read program…just informally, with games, etc. and only if she wants to. She will sit in on the art stuff and the composer stuff, she will continue taking piano, and practicing through the week. I will try to figure out some games to help with her speech problems, and I may introduce Right Start level A when she is 4.5 years old (so that would be in March) but only if she wants to and only if I think she can handle it. I do NOT want to push She will also probably participate in the science (the curriculum is mostly experiments) and nature study (she has her own nature journal), but that will be up to her. And I HOPE to fit in more picture book reading aloud time. Seems like now that Allison has moved up to chapter books, I am more drawn to read those, and Meredith just isn’t ready for that type of sustained attention, so she misses out (Lydia too)…so I am going to try to schedule in a reading aloud time for the younger kids using quality picture books, etc.

I hope to keep Friday free for the most part. In my mind, on Friday we do co-op stuff, I think that the homeschool swim class meets on Friday afternoon, and we make Friday a game day for math and phonics, and Friday would be our nature day as well…..ok, that doesn’t sound like Friday is free at all! I may have to rethink that one, lol.

In the past couple of weeks, I have noticed a bit of a trend with regards to postings on my email lists. I belong to several lists, most being homeschool lists. I mostly lurk, often not even reading the messages. Lately, in the messages I have been reading, I’m noticing a LOT of posts saying “I just started homeschooling this year, and am apalled at how little my children has learned in their years of public schooling.” And these messages are getting responses from many other people who share their experiences, and report further disturbing experiences, like not only do their children not know much, but their children do not know how to learn. They don’t know how to question, research, or work.

Boy can I relate – that is my exact experience with Jess when I pulled her out in the 7th grade. Between homeschooling her in Kindergarten and resuming homeschooling in the 7th grade, I had lost her. She didn’t know how to learn. To her, education was something that was given to her, rather than something she worked for or sought out for herself.

A year or two ago, the trend I noticed was that a lot of people who choose homeschooling for their children had been teachers in either the public or private school system…and even from that vantagae point – within that system, they knew that they wanted different for their own children.

We have moved back to our original reading lessons – 100EZ lessons, and scrapped Original Parent’s Guide for the time being. We liked the stories in 100EZ lessons – and Original Parent’s Guide seemed a bit forced. Plus Allison just didn’t seem to get as much from the way the material is presented – phonograms/pure phonics rather than the distar approach of 100EZ lessons – so I made an excutive decision. We are going to finish 100EZ lesson, and then we may do the last 20-30 lessons in Ordinary Parent’s Guide (it seems to go a bit further than 100EZ lessons), and then move on to spelling, ala Writing Road to Reading and lots of just reading out loud. SO, this week we shifted back and I realized something, Allison seemed to be struggling with reading before we moved to Ordinary Parent’s, and seemed to continue to struggle even more with Ordinary Parent’s – not really struggling in her ability, but more in her desire…and some in her ability too…but now that we are back with 100EZ lessons, it is apparent that she was struggling because she was about to make a MAJOR jump…I can’t believe the difference in her reading! She is so much more fluent now! It is incredible! I am blown away. Our reading lessons have been back under 15 minutes, without the timer. Before we shifted from 100EZ lessons, we were breaking a lesson up over two days so that it wouldn’t be overwhelming or too long to maintain focus. And now, here we are, and she is BLASTING through these lessons, and reading the stories with much increased fluency and comprehension. It is like night and day! Today she even asked to do two lessons (I talked her out of it, lol). So we are on lesson 82 – only 18 more of 100EZ lessons!

In other news, we resumed piano with a new teacher, and even Meredith is partaking in piano lessons! She is just basically doing a preschool thing, playing around with pitch, tone, etc. Not really learning to play But their teacher says that Meredith has a great deal of focus for a three year old and should do very well! Allison likes her new teacher a lot. She didn’t think she would, but she does

And, in even more news, I found the Kindergarten level of our math program on ebay for a good price, so now when Meredith is older (probably in a year or so), she has her math all ready to go!

And in even more news, unrelated to education, Lydia has a tooth, talks and is working on mobility! Watch out world! I think she is going to be a dainty gentle little thing She doesn’t seem as destructive as Meredith:

But time will tell

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).

I just know that many people don’t understand homeschooling, or feel that we are harming our children by making this choice. I found the article below from the “Journal of College Admission” – so not even a Homeschooling journal or anything. The audience is College Admissions Officers!

Here are a few paragraphs I snipped from the article.

From:
Homeschoolers on to College: What Research Shows Us
Journal of College Admission, Fall 2004 by Ray, Brian D

……………..

Several colleges think so well of home-educated students that they have been actively recruiting them for several years (e.g., Boston University, Nyack College). Christopher Klicka’s (1998, 3) survey of college admission officers found a Dartmouth College admission officer saying, “The applications [from homeschoolers] I’ve come across are outstanding. Homeschoolers have a distinct advantage because of the individualized instruction they have received.” This individualized instruction, combined with homeschooled students’ experience in studying and pursuing goals on their own, may be showing long-lasting effects. Admission officers at Stanford University think they are seeing an unusually high occurrence of a key ingredient, which they term “intellectual vitality,” in homeschool graduates (Foster, 2000). They link it to the practice of self-teaching prevalent in these young people, as a result of their homeschool environment.

A few researchers have examined adults who were home-educated without necessarily linking them to the college scene. J. Gary Knowles (Knowles & de Olivares, 1991; Knowles & Muchmore, 1995) was the first to focus research on adults who were home-educated, collecting extensive data from a group who were home-educated an average of about six years before they were 17 years old. He found that they tended to be involved in entrepreneurial and professional occupations, were fiercely independent, and strongly emphasized the importance of family. Furthermore, they were glad they had been home-educated, would recommend homeschooling to others, and had no grossly negative perceptions of living in a pluralistic society.

……

Yet, to date, it appears that almost a dozen investigations address home-educated adults and the research shows that the home-educated are disproportionately involved in community life, civic activities and in democratic processes, decent, civil, respectful, and disproportionately exhibiting leadership traits. This is not to say, of course, that every homeschool graduate is brilliant, attractive, and destined for success. It simply means that, on average, they appear to be doing well in the “real world” because the environment in which they were educated-in the broad sense, academically, mentally, morally, and aesthetically-gave them sound academic skills, a solid and confident social and emotional nurturance, respect for others, a stable worldview, and a zest for learning.

……………..

Research and probability show that the home-educated college applicant is very likely to succeed in college, both academically and socially. Consider that the home-educated typically have strong self-discipline, motivation, and self-initiative. “These kids are the epitome of Brown students,” says Joyce Reed, who became an associate dean of the college twelve years ago. “They’ve learned to be self-directed, they take risks, they face challenges with total fervor, and they don’t back off” (Sutton, 2002).

………………

Recognize that you may hold biases and prejudices you do not recognize. After all, about five American generations have been attending age-segregated, institutional places of learning for 12 years of our lives, and most reading this article spent at least 16 years in these institutions. Most Americans (and those in many other nations) have no idea of what it would be like to be home-educated and how we might be different, for better or worse, had we experienced this age-old practice.

So it counts as school if all we did was draw pictures and watch three episodes of The Magic Schoolbus, right?