Hanson's Ridge
We're off!
We started school on July 10 this year for our first year of year-round schooling. We will have six week terms, with one or two weeks off in between. It gives us flexibility to take days off here and there. I also have a little boy who thrives on consistent routines. AW will be five in September, so she could enter kindergarten if she were going to brick and mortar school. However, we would defer kindergarten for a year in that case. So we are calling this year Junior Kindergarten (I got the idea from a friend's preschool that has a special class just for these "gap year" kiddos). So what have we been up to for the first few weeks of school? During the summer, we are keeping things simple. Our minimum daily lessons are just reading and math. For reading, we've been using Logic of English. AW asked to learn to read a year ago, and we tried out How to Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons. In Homeschool World, it's one of the top three literacy programs I see recommended, and it's the cheapest because all you buy is the book. However, the lessons were not very engaging and it bored both of us to the point of frustration. We tried twice before I decided it wasn't a good fit for our family. I spent some time comparing All About Reading and Logic of English, the other two common recommendations. I ended up choosing Logic of English because it deals with all the unusual rules of English phonetics and spelling. The price points are similar (both pricey because they come with many supplemental materials). We have really been enjoying the lessons, which are engaging and multi-sensory with lots of opportunities for movement. I also like that the handwriting option is flexible. Writing with a pencil is optional, for example. Since AW is a perfectionist when writing on paper, sometimes to the point of shutting down, some days we just practice writing with cornmeal, shaving cream, or in the air. One favorite activity so far was "Phonogram Hopscotch." (Phonograms are the basic units of the sounds that make up words. A letter can be a phonogram, or a phonogram can be made of multiple letters. T is a phonogram. TH is also a phonogram). I drew a hopscotch board, and AW wrote in the phonograms. Then we played hopscotch, naming each phonogram as we hopped on it. DC got to play too, but of course I didn't expect him to name phonograms. We are 13 lessons in (with two assessments under our belt). I'm thrilled with the program and highly recommend it. For math this year, I'm making things up as I go. Once we get into September, I'll be picking up activities from A Year of Playing Skillfully again. I'm using a couple of books: Family Math: Comparing and Preschool Math at Home. There are age-appropriate math activities in each month's Ivy Box. I'm also relying heavily on Pinterest and the library. I took a look at the kindergarten math standards to decide what to focus on for the year. In some cases, it might be just working on the building blocks of a kindergarten concept, and in other cases, we might be working on mastery. For the most part, she's on grade level for kindergarten math. It's not because we spent a lot of time working on math explicitly in the kindergarten years. It's because of what I mentioned earlier: we just noticed math and incorporated it into daily life. Now things are getting a bit more explicit. We spent most of July working on telling time. Public school kindergarteners are expected to tell time on the hour and half hour. We did a few lessons about how reading a clock works, and now I just pull a little practice into daily life. There are now clocks, digital and/or analog, in every room she uses regularly. She already knew how to read the hour on a digital clock. We talk about time because certain things have a scheduled time each day. We checked out books from the library about telling time, several of which had built-in clocks to manipulate and played tic-tac-toe with clocks. I do a calendar math time, even though I hated it in public school. We don't do a full session everyday. Instead I focus on something specific. Right now we are working on using the calendar itself, making tallies, and telling time. Once we've mastered reading the calendar, I'll do something different. The Ivy Box theme for the month was ladybugs, and we began working on even/odd numbers and addition concepts using lady bug dots. I'm not expecting mastery at this point, as we will return to these concepts throughout the year. We've also started doing Poetry Teatime. It's a basic concept: read and enjoy poetry while eating/drinking something special. On fancier days, I put out a table cloth and a china doll tea seat with home baked goodies. Other weeks, we do our heavier duty mugs and store bought cookies. For my pre-reading kiddos, I put out poetry anthologies with pictures and they choose based on the illustrations. Each kid gets a little pad of mini sticky notes to mark the pages they want me to read to them. Some of the anthologies are from our personal library, but I also try to check out poetry books from the public library so we have a fresh book of selections. I aim to have Poetry Teatime once a week. Sometimes we do it more than once a week because the kids love it so much (the snacks definitely help!) We did a bit of a focus on patriotism as well. We read about American symbols and sang some patriotic songs. I introduced the Pledge of Allegiance, but it didn't get fully memorized. To be perfectly honest, I didn't like saying the Pledge of Allegiance in public school either. I think these are important for cultural knowledge, but they aren't central themes in our home school. Community service, activism, and kindness are more important elements of patriotism than a scripted religious pledge for our family. I plan on coming back to the songs, symbols, and words each July. We listened to patriotic CDs, colored pictures of American symbols, and read a few library books. We learned about the lady bug life cycle from our Ivy Box. I learned a few things as well. I didn't know newly emerged adult ladybugs are yellow and lack spots. We kept active too. We had playground trips, library trips, family walks and hikes with friends, and the kids had plenty of opportunities to play outside. They also took swim lessons. So what's next? I made a last minute change to my list of topics for the school year, because home educators have that flexibility. I decided we would study space instead of the human body in August, to prepare for the solar eclipse. It also worked out well because one of our backlogged Ivy Boxes had a space theme. I also kept coming across solar system activities when I looked up ideas for teaching ordinal numbers (1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc). We're a few days in, and having a blast (har har). Our American history lessons will start soon. I don't expect the kids to absorb too much but I'm hoping they will enjoy the activities. It's a bit of a selfish plan on my part: I want to see my own work in action and test things out. If they learn anything, great! If not, we'll be coming back to it later in a four-year history cycle.
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AuthorHi! I'm Stephanie Hanson. I live with my husband, Himself, on Hanson's Ridge in Virginia. Archives
September 2017
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