End of the Year Review: The Changes We Made

Here we go again with another year end review.  This time I will be talking about each individual child and the choices we made for them this year.  Like I said in my last post, we ended up making quite a few changes through out the year.  Be sure to check out my other posts about Classical Conversations and our all together subjects.

Zach- Age 5  Kindergarten

For Zach, I really thought he would be ready to learn to read at the beginning of the year, that was not the case.  We tried for a few weeks and he just was not getting it, and that is ok.  He had just turned 5, he's a boy and his attention span at the time was really short.  At that point I just put everything away and we just did Math, which was all hands on.  Slowly as the year went on we made some changes and added things in.  We added in The Ordinary Parents Guide to Teaching Reading instead of All About Reading, Zaner Bloser Handwriting the kindergarten book instead of the Italic handwriting, and Plaid Phonics A.  I love all of those choices!  Zach has just been thriving in all aspects.  He is really beginning to understand some phonics concepts, his handwriting is improving and his reading is really coming along.  During the summer we will continue on with his reading and maybe the phonics book.  All of these books we have been working through super slowly, so we will continue with all of them next year.  The one thing I did stick with for Zach is the Saxon Math K, we really enjoyed it.

Noah- age 8/9  3rd Grade

Noah has made tremendous strides this year with his reading.  He went from reading hardly anything to devouring everything he gets his hands on!  Honestly the only thing that is the same for Noah is his math.  He just finished up Teaching Textbooks 3, he did really well with it.  Although these last few months I have noticed his need for me to help him through the lessons, so next year we will be switching up our math choice for him.  For handwriting I also switched him to Zaner Bloser the 3rd grade book instead of the Prescripts from Classical Conversations, he has been working hard on his cursive writing.  We dropped All About Reading Level 3, and All About Spelling Level 1, I just felt like they weren't working for Noah anymore.  For a replacement we added in First Language Lessons Level 2.  That is going really well, we won't finish the book this year, but I hope to work a through it a bit this summer.  We also added on Nessy Online learning, we haven't been very consistent with it but I can tell its going to be a big help for him.

Elijah- age 12  6th Grade

Elijah worked so hard this year!  He made amazing progress in his spelling and grammar work.  I really didn't make any changes for him this year.  Although he didn't finish his Fix It Grammar book or the Phonetic Zoo.  We will hopefully work through them more over the summer.  I did drop the Prescripts handwriting for him and we switched to Zaner Bloser the 6th grade book.  I am not sure how much he actually got out of it, his handwriting is just not improving as much as I would like.  He is left handed and a boy and his father has really terrible handwriting so I think I will just concede that it's as good as it's going to get.   He also did not do any of the reading books I had picked out.  He just does not like to me to force books on him, on the other hand he will pick up random books and just start reading, so I guess I don't need to worry about him.  He finished up his Teaching Textbooks 6 and did really well, although it was a tough road at times!  I really feel like the Essentials program through Classical Conversations helped a lot with his writing and for a final project for him he is writing a five paragraph paper all on his own with very little help from me.  I am requiring this of him because I want him to know that he can do it!  Next year will be a big leap of independence for him and I know he needs this boost of confidence.

My final thoughts on this year:

This was an amazing year of tremendous growth for all of us!  I am so excited that we made the decision to use Classical Conversations and I feel that after five year of homeschooling we have finally found our thing!  I have been reading a lot about the Classical model of education, and I am hoping to dig more into it this summer.  Reading The Well Trained Mind is what helped me make my mid year changes for Zach, I took most of the recommendations from that book and surprisingly they worked for him!  Here are some books on my summer reading list, The Question, Teaching the Trivium, and The Life Giving Home .


**The links in this post are given to make it easy for you find the items I mention and are not affiliated links.**

Curriculum Choices for the 2016- 2017 School Year

Well it's that time of year again, back to school!  Every year I enjoy the iHomeschool Networks  back to school blog hop!  I figured that even though my blog has sat extinct for the past, I don't know how many months, I still wanted to contribute.  To kick off this month long event it is Curriculum Week!

Today I will be sharing what we will be using for our curriculum this year.  Just to catch you up a bit, this year, 2016-2017, I will have a 6th grader, a 3rd grader and a Pre-K 5/ Kindergartener. We began our school year on August 15, so we are about 4 weeks in right now.

Something new that we will be participating in this year is Classical Conversations.  I am so excited! Our community has not started yet, so I have no idea how this will alter the choices I have made.  I have tried not to add too much more than what was already provided through Classical Conversations.

All three of my boys will be participating in the Foundations program through Classical Conversations which meets one morning a week from 9:00-12:00.  This includes Grammar, Science, Math Facts, Latin, Fine Arts, History/Timeline, and Bible.

All Together Subjects:

History:  

I know that Classical Conversations does  timeline and history sentences, but last year we worked through The Mystery of History Vol. 1 and absolutely LOVED it!  So I wanted to continue on using it, and it just so happens that we will be in the same time period as CC.  We will be using The Mystery of History Vol. 2 which covers the early church and the Middle Ages.  Along with the textbook, I am adding in notebooking pages, coloring pages and timeline figures from Homeschool in the Woods.

Morning Time:  

Another new thing we are adding in this year is morning time. In the spring of last year I began reading Teaching From Rest by Sarah Makenzie, that book totally changed how I thought about our homeschooling. From there I found Pam Barnhill and her idea of morning time. The ideas I gathered from both of them led me to a desire to implement a time into our day for truth, goodness and beauty. For our morning times we will be doing quite a variety of things. We will be using the book The Ology for the first quarter, this is a great book that is teaching us simple principles from Scripture. We are also learning The Gettysburg Address, The Nicene Creed, and the hymn How Great Thou Art. We will also be using our morning time to review our memory work from last year (Scripture passages that we learned), our CC memory work, science, history and doing our read aloud during this time.

Read Alouds:

This year we will be doing a few different groups of read aloud books.  One group will go along with our history lessons, and the other is just a group of books that I am wanting to read to the boys.

Group of fun read aloud books!

History Read Aloud Group

Elijah- 6th Grade

Math: Teaching Textbooks Math 6

I love Teaching Textbooks!  This has totally transformed math in our home!  My favorite part about this program is the self grading aspect!  I used to get so behind in grading math papers and not catching mistakes until it was too late.  This has absolutely solved this problem!

Spelling:  Phonetic Zoo Level A

Last year we abandoned our All About Spelling program because I didn't feel like it was working for him.  What I learned from that was that this kid still needs a spelling program.  So we will be adding Phonetic Zoo level A from IEW.  What I like about this program is that it is self taught, he listens to the CD and takes his test.  With All About Spelling, although I loved that program, it got to be a little too teacher intensive.

Grammar:  Essentials, IEW, Fix It! Grammar

Along with doing the Foundations program of Classical Conversations he will be doing the Essentials program that meets during the afternoon of our community day from 1:00-3:00 pm.  This is a program that is intended for 4th through 6th graders and they cover the same information every year.  Since he will only be getting one year of it I expect that this will be a challenging year for him.  This program includes Grammar such as diagramming sentences, Math games to practice speed, and Writing.  The writing program that he will use is IEW's  Medieval History Based Writing Lessons.
We will also be adding in Fix It! Grammar from IEW, in this program he will work on editing one sentence a day.

Reading:  

Elijah will be reading a selection of books this year.  I have chosen the books for him but am letting him choose when he reads them.  His first choice is A Wrinkle in Time, sorry I didn't get that added to the picture.  *sigh*

Handwriting:  Prescripts History Sentences

We will be using Classical Conversations Prescripts program, where he will be copying the history sentence each week.

Typing/Coding:  

This is an area that usually gets lost in the shuffle as the year goes on.  I am really hoping to push it this year.  Since he will be doing a LOT of writing I think learning to type proficiently will really help him. We use Typing Instructor which is downloaded onto the boys computer.    I am also very interested in my boys learning simple computer programming skills, so we will add in some of that as well.  Along with this book for coding we use a variety of different websites that offer coding lessons for free.

Noah- 3rd Grade

Math: Teaching Textbooks Math 3 

 *see explanation above as to why we love this program!* He began this last year, and was about 14 lessons in. So he will most likely finish it before the end of our school year. In that case we will just move right along to Math 4.

                                            

Reading:  All About Reading Levels 2 and 3  

He has just recently finished level 2 and so we have begun level 3.  In April of last year we had him diagnosed with Dyslexia, and have been working SUPER hard to remediate this.  We worked all spring and summer with a program called Lexercise, where we had a meeting via web video once a week and worked on skills through out the rest of the week.  He made massive improvements!  As of right now we are taking a small break and will begin again in the middle of October for another month.

Spelling:  All About Spelling Level 1  

We began this towards the end of last year (before we realized he was dyslexic) so we will finish this up this year.  If we finish we will move on to level 2 of All About Spelling.

Handwriting:  

Classical Conversations has a handwriting program called Prescripts, basically is uses the history sentences for copy work.  He will work through this as he feels like it.  Our main handwriting program will be Logic of English cursive.  We have the workbook and the tactile cards.  So far its been a really hard thing for him to pick up on, so we will see if I stick with it.  I have heard that cursive is a great thing for dyslexics because there are no letters that can be reversed!   So I really want to push cursive with him.

Typing/ Coding:

Noah will also be using the same typing program and coding book and websites.

Zach- Pre-K 5/ Kindergarten

Zach is a newly turned 5 year old and ALL BOY!  His attention span is not that great, but on the other hand he is super smart!  So this year we will be working on his Classical Conversations memory work, math, handwriting, and reading.

Math:  Saxon K  

I have never used Saxon before but I really like that its not a workbook and uses manipulatives instead.  So far he is really enjoying it.

Handwriting:  

We will be using the Italics handwriting Book A.  I like the idea of teaching an italics version first which will lead nicely into learning cursive later on.

Reading:  All About Reading Level 1  

We will take this program SUPER slow!  Once again this kid is super smart, but also super wiggly getting him to sit and listen to a lesson or read some words is proving to be quite a challenge!  So we will take this as his interest allows, I really am not too concerned if he learns to read this year or not.  I think by the middle of January or February he will be mature enough to really catch on to these concepts.

Well that just about sums up what we will be doing this year!  Be sure to hop on over to the iHomeschool Network and see what others are using this year for their curriculum!

Where have I been?

In case you were wondering, yes I am still alive!  These past almost 6 months have been insanely crazy at our house and blogging was put on the back burner.  I did want to come and give a brief overview of how our schooling went the our second semester though.  So here it is!

For Elijah, we finished up Adventures in U.S. History by studying the 50 States and when they came into the union.  We also studied some inventions and inventors that were important to our country.  In math he continued in Math U See Gamma, learning his multiplication facts.  We stopped about half way through the book, and will pick it back up next year.  He finished out his school year very well, and we look forward to all that we will learn next year!

Noah finished up his Kindergarten work in April and for the last few weeks of our school year we focused on learning to read and improving his handwriting skills.  At the beginning of the school year he just wasn't quite ready to read yet, so I put off the reading lessons.  In about January we picked up with Hooked on Phonics Learn to Read, and that worked really well for us, for about a month.  After that it was a struggle to get him interested in doing his reading lessons.  So I picked up Ruth Beechick's book A Home Start in Reading, it gave me a lot of great information and tools to use in helping him learn to read.  After implementing some of her ideas he began doing really well.  We played sight word games and used our letter tiles from All About Spelling that Elijah is using.

We finished up our official school year on May 21, and I must say that we were all ready to be finished for the year!  All in all I think our school year was a success.  The boys both learned a lot and finished strong.  I am very proud of what they accomplished this year!  I look forward to see what the Lord has in store for us next year.  Stay tuned to see what we will be using next year for our curriculum.

To stay with tradition, here is our side by side comparison pictures of the first and last day of school.  Enjoy!

Good Bye 2013!

This has definitely been a whirl wind month for my family and our town as we settle into our new "normal" and move forward to rebuild.

What you see driving around my town!

Today I will update on some of our school work that has been taking place and where we are headed for 2014!

In 3rd Grade Elijah is moving right along and I am so proud of him for finishing up his math book so he will be moving on to the next level.  When we began homeschooling last year about half way through the year I realized that he was not catching on as quickly in math as the program was moving.  So last January we switched to Math U See, after taking the placement test we put in him the Alpha level and he quickly moved through that and finished by May.  I could really tell it was clicking for him!  So this year we began using Beta, and again he moved really quickly and was able to finish it up!  For Gamma I am anticipating getting about half way through the book before we end our school year in May, which is fine with me.  I feel like he is finally getting caught up to where he should be in math at the 3rd grade level.

In October we visited a Dairy Farm!  This is Elijah right after he scared the little calf!

Noah and Zach watching the goats.

Spelling has been the same way for him, we are almost finished with Level 3 in All About Spelling and we will be moving on to Level 4 sometime in January.  Once again this is one subject I felt he was falling behind in and we made the choice last January to switch to All About Spelling.  That was a great decision for us, he has been making great strides and really catching on to the concepts quickly.

In My Fathers World Adventures in US History, we have begun to learn about the states, we just finished the first 13 colonies.  We are having so much fun learning all the cool facts about each state!  This week we talked about Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road.  When we come back from our Christmas break we will begin learning about the Westward Expansion.  Have I mentioned before that I love History and Geography!!  Elijah and I are so excited about the things we are learning.

My 3 Little Indians ready for Thanksgiving!

In Kindergarten we have had a rough road this past month.  Back in October we began adding in reading lessons, those were not going well!  Noah was struggling to remember how to put the sounds together and making them into words.  So with much thought and struggle on my part, we have decided to not pursue the reading lessons at this time.  I have heard, and been given the advice, to shelve it and come back to it.  He is just not ready!  On the other hand I found a computer learning program that he loves!  ABC Mouse.com!!  So he loves doing his "school" on the computer!  We are still using a majority of the My Fathers World Kindergarten, we use the Bible lessons, the sound cards and sound discrimination pages, and we are also using the handwriting pages.  I have hopes that he will come around before summer to want to learn to read, but I have heard account of young boys not being ready to read until the age of 7, so I am trying to prepare myself for that!  Its hard to think of because Elijah was an early reader, and loves to read.

Tot school for Zach has been reading, puzzles, playing with rice, and Daniel Tigers Neighborhood!  The poor kid is going through a lot right now, we are getting ready to remove his "babis" (i.e. pacifier) and he is not too happy about that!  On a good note though I am so impressed at how much that kid is picking up!  He can identify all of the letters in the alphabet and is working on learning their sounds.

Starting today we are on a two week break from school!  We will be starting back up on January 6th! I hope everyone has a Merry Christmas and  a Happy New Year!  See you all in 2014!

My Pinterest Success!  A felt Nativity play set.  This is what it looked like at night.

This is what it looked like by 9 am the next day!  He loves it though.

My Boys getting ready to go play in the snow.

Merry Christmas!

MFW Kindergarten

With Noah we have been going through My Fathers World Kindergarten curriculum.  Its a 6 day program, but I have actually condensed it down to 4.  I know that might not sit well with some, but its what I needed to do.  For one thing, Noah struggles with wanting to do his school work, so 4 days is about his maximum.  I also have a problem carrying over the topic from one week into the next, for some reason I just don't like that concept.  Its hard for my Type A brain to grasp.  So right now we are doing 4 days a week with him.

Over the past few weeks we have covered S-Sun, M-Moon, L-Leaf, A-Apple and N-Nest.  These have all been super fun units, with lots of activities built in.

Beginning with the L-Leaf unit, that was one that I really enjoyed.  Noah got to do lots of hands on learning with it.  We went and collected leaves outside and then examined them, and did leaf rubbings with them.   I have found that he loves doing the salt tray for writing his letters, and that he hates to actually write them on paper!  So there has been lots of salt tray writing going on.

The following unit was the A-Apple unit.  Another one filled with awesome fun!  A few weeks prior we had gone to an apple orchard for a field trip.  In college I was a Early Childhood Education major, so for my final project I had to do a theme unit, which just happens to have been Apples.  So I dug out all of my stuff from that, and the kids had so much fun!  We also made yummy mini apple pies!

Finally last week we were on the N-Nest unit.  I think his favorite part this week was making a bird sequencing book.  He put the pictures in the order they happened and then we put them in a book and wrote a short story to go along with it.  He has also really enjoyed the books that go along with this unit, one of them being The Best Nest by P.D. Eastman.  Sorry no pictures from this week, like I have said before I really need to work on my picture taking skills!

If you are wondering what our homeschooling day looks like, you can check that out here.

Week in Review

Well, actually this is weeks 2,3, and 4 in review.  I've gotten a little behind in the blogging area lately.  This week especially, my hubby has had a few days off lately and we've taken some family time.  So this week has been a field trip on Monday, Zoo Class on Wednesday and then St. Louis Zoo on Friday.

So lets begin back a few weeks to Week 2 of Adventures in U.S. History.  We talked about Christopher Columbus that week, and did some fun activities.  We made boats out of foil, which obviously were the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria.  Then we got to have some fun outside seeing if they would float.  Well let me just tell you, they did not!  Thankfully my boys went with it and had fun anyway.

We also talked about Jesus that week.  We learned that Jesus means the Lord saves.  We started our poster that we will add to for the rest of the year.

In Week 3 we began talking about Jamestown.  We learned about Pocahontas and Captain John Smith. We began reading Squanto, Friend of the Pilgrims.

For our Bible we craft time we made a crayon melting with the name Jesus and then hung them up in our school room windows.

Finally this week we have been working on Week 4 in Adventures in U.S. History.  This week we have been talking about Native Americans.  We have been learning about the different tribes that we located here in the early days.  Our crafts this week have been a wigwam and a teepee.

Our new Bible concept this week has been that Jesus is the Light of the World.  We have been working on John 8:12 which is "I am the light of the world.  Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life."

Moving on the what we have been learning in Kindergarten these past few weeks.  We finished up our Creation Unit, we learned about what God created on each day.  Then we moved on to learning about the Sun and the letter S.  Our first experiment with the sun was making raisins.  That hasn't turned out well for us, they are still sitting in our kitchen, slowly wrinkling up.  The second project we did was making a sun dial.  That actually turned out well, once I got the placement correct.

This week we have been talking about the Moon, and learning the letter M.  Unfortunately with all of our field trips and such this week, we haven't gotten to do many experiments or projects.  We have read some great books about the phases of the moon though.

There you have it, our last few weeks.  I am hoping to do a weekly post on what we have been learning.  So keep an eye out for those!