Rowing our first book

Well, this week I decided to try to row a book with my two youngest, Cassie, 5 and Eric 8. What does it meant to "row a book"? Five in a Row, or FIAR, is a very relaxed curriculum that has you read a particular book, 5 days in a row, with an emphasis on something different each day. I had gotten a great deal on FIAR volume II from a homeschool friend, and about 8 of the related books. So I picked "Mirette on the High Wire" to "row" this week (read each day).

I have to say it was a lot of fun, for me and Cassie anyway. Eric, is a different story.

Monday we began at about 10:30am only about 1/2 hour behind the "schedule" I had set for myself. I've put quotes around that word to help emphasis how much I hate having to follow a schedule. Appointments, that is different. But having to do something like learn at a set time just seems off to me. Must be the unschooler in me. Cassie wanted me to set up the Story Time Felt Calendar for her to do each day, like we did at GICA last year. For her, our coming to the office to do school is like a great game to play and she is eager every morning to get up and go to school.

Eric, doesn't like all this reference to "school" and starts to whine right away. I made the mistake of really catering to Cassie's excitement about starting school, that I forgot to figure out how to make it exciting for Eric. The only real change in our whole schedule/routine is that I want to get to my office 2 hours earlier, with just me and the kids, to spend some quality time together, reading books, exploring together, doing art projects. Fun stuff.

It wears one down to hear a child constantly whine about school when he isn't doing anything different than what he had been doing for the past year or more. The chief difference is little sister is giving a name to what is normal for Eric. Freedom to learn, study, draw at his own pace, is suddenly being called school. The horror.

All kidding side, we did have a productive week. Eric didn't enjoy the story as much as Cassie - and so wasn't keen on us reading it everyday. But after encouraging him to sit beside us while I read, I have compromised to letting him stay where he is in the room as long as he doesn't interrupt. Twice today he had to be reminded to save his non story related questions to the end of the story.

On Tuesday I bought the kids 3 ring binders, a pack of paper and a set of dividers and we put together notebooks for the school year. The dividers were to divide the notebook into sections for the typical school subjects. In our case it is Math, Reading & Writing, Science, Social Studies, and Art. Eric asked if he could decorate the dividers in his notebook, so I told him yes, and he carefully made his subject sections. Later, Cassie asked for help to spell all the subjects and then Eric helped her draw pictures to help her remember what section was what. Numbers on the math section, a globe on the socials studies page..... Cassie is very proud of her notebook.

For Art day we made color wheels and the kids learned about primary, secondary and complimentary colors. Cassie cheerfully colored her color wheel and attached it to a page in her art section of her notebook. Eric made a color wheel of sorts too. In his own order. He's a non-conformist and I'm never going to change that. But he did understand and ask intelligent questions about the color wheel.

Today we did Science and after reading the story we discussed copper and why they used copper pots to cook with. We then looked up and read some about copper, found some copper pennies and put them in a cup of vinegar to see if they will shine up, and Cassie colored a picture of a copper pot and read and spelled "pot" and then put that in her notebook under science, and wrote copper above it.

We also found Paris, France on the world map and we explored all the different places that the book mentioned.

Aside from the reading, and calendar time, we also did a bit of Math-U-See, starting with the Alpha books. I had used this in my class last year and Cassie had good success with learning her numbers and math facts. So I want to continue this with her. She asks to do Math if I forget.

Eric is being allowed to work on his numbers as he wants, but he's watching Cassie and I know that soon he'll want to join her. If I force him, he'll balk, so I have to entice him into wanting to show what he knows. Which is way more than I thought. I haven't done any formal math program with him, and yet he has figured out facts on his own and shares them with us as he learns. He actually has a firm grasp of place value and adding and subtracting. He can't stand it when Cassie calls it "take aways".
"It's minuses!" He'll exclaim to her as she sings, "8 take away 2 is 6," while she fills out her paper.

Let's see, we also started reading together "A Child's Story of America" by Christian Liberty Press. Just reading a few pages with them has already resulted in lots of discussions about why people used to think the world was flat. Science and Social Studies is being covered there.

I'm also trying to review Cassie's phonics. I picked up a copy of "A Writing Road to Reading" and like the way they present the phonemes necessary for reading. I started with the first few letters for Cassie and she practiced her writing. Eric needs to work on his letters and numbers as most of them are backwards due to bad writing habits, starting from the bottom, not paying attention to which direction it should face. Nothing dyslexic, I don't think, as he's perfectly capable of writing them all correctly if he tries. We made a deal with him. If he can write correctly "his way" then it's a good way. If he continues to make mistakes, then he has to agree that maybe "his way" isn't the best way and to try to do some of my suggestions. We find that gentle coercion like this works better with him than any other forms of correction we have tried.

Tomorrow is the last day of our first week using this new plan and I think this will work for us. Gentle, relaxed, with something tangible (the notebook) to show for all our discussions and learning.

Creativity amidst Tiredness

I've had a tiring couple of days. Just felt yucky and tired on Monday and very drained of energy. Yesterday was better and today was so-so. I haven't had a full class of kids all week. At least one or two kids have been absent, each taking turns, so it's kind of been nice and not too stressful.

We've been working on a lap book in phonics, courtesy of the lapbook page I mentioned in my last post. There is a lot of cutting and pasting involved so to offset the tedium that could result from lack of variety, I have been teaching them to recognize the color words by going through a workbook I put together of the various color names.

For art I've been getting a bit more creative. Monday we made fish out of paper (I drew, they cut and decorated their fish) and I made them each a fishing pole out of string, a magnet, and either a chopstick or a straw for a handle. (I only had 3 chop sticks). Then I attached a paper clip to each fish and they got to take home their fish and fishing poles.

Yesterday we made tic-tac-toe games out of foam board with foam shape pieces to play the game. I stapled a little pouch out of cardstock for them to store their game in. They decorated and personalized their pouches and then each got to take home their own game of tic-tac-toe.

Today I made stencils from the scraps of foam board from the previous day and we "stamped" the images onto card shaped card stock, using tempra paint and painting sponges. It was a challenge to keep them from putting the templates down into the paint dish and to stop some of them from mixing the colors. Not that it would be so terrible, except for the conservation factor. I can't really reuse mixed bleh paint. You know what I mean. The color you get when ALL the colors get mixed together. The final product of our painting endeavor was each child had a 6 card set to play games with. There was a heart, a star, a sunburst, a hand, a diamond and a twirly thing for the shapes. I'm going to combine all the sets and play some games with them tomorrow.

Maybe this is what is tiring me out.

Just so you don't think I'm a genius of creativity, all of these ideas came from a book that I found around the house. It pays to be a book junky sometimes. This one is called something like Paper Fun for Kids. I'll get the correct title and info tomorrow and update this.

Lap Books

Wow, after a busy weekend fighting a beast (see my other blog at Stampinstories.blogspot.com)
I decided to spend the rest of the weekend relaxing and browsing the net looking for ideas for school. Only one month to go now, and the days are counting down.

I've been at a standstill, trying to figure out how to get through to the kids. They can't seem to remember from one day to the next what they learned the week before. Not all of them, mind you, but they all seem to take turns at selective memory. Makes for a frustrating last few days of teaching.

Hopefully, my research has payed off, as I stumbled across homeschoolshare.com. Here I found a wealth of resources to teach lapbooking. And they have FREE ones!

I've always been fascinated by lapbooks and the professional look they give to a project. So I have decided to help my class finish the school with a bang, and two or three lapbooks. We are going to make one concentrating on phonics and phonemes sounds (pl, bl, sh, ck, etc.), a Fact Family one for their math, and then a butterfly book for science and literature.

Over the summer, I want Eric and Cassie to collaborate on a Tiger lapbook, and maybe even a penguin one, to finish off and tie together all they learned over their years of fascination with these two creatures.

So here is the confession. As an unschooler, I really don't like the rigid form of school, and would rather follow a more delight driven education path. At the same time, I know that radical unschoolers wouldn't even consider introducing a "project" to their kids. Yet, I have learned that what children love are "projects" and sometimes they need a little help to get interested in one.

So please don't mind me if I do carry on with my own kids doing some cool projects. I'm actually looking forward to what we can do, when working together. Hopefully I'll be sharing some great lapbooks here soon!

Finding the perfect Reading Curriculum

Christmas break was over much too soon. January 2nd we were back at school. I've been negligent in updating this. Must be a sign I've been a diligent teacher or something. Truth is, I just run out of steam by the end of the day, and blogging gets put on the list somewhere after sleeping.

This year's #1 goal is to get my girls to read.

I needed something to use with my K5 girls to start putting together the sounds of the alphabet they learned last year, into actual reading. While browsing my school shelf I once again pulled out the American Language Phonics K book 1 that I had looked at and rejected several times over the past few months. Finally I figured the girls were ready for this.

Lesson one covered the short sounds of "o" and "a" and combined them with L for "la" and "lo" words. Soon "i" and "e" short vowel sounds were added and the consonant blends of "m", "d", and "t" came soon afterwards. Five days into this book, M. looked up from her paper and said "P...a....m....PAM!" and a reader was born!

I really wanted to find an actual book for M. to take home and share with her parents. I spent the better part of art time looking through my books, browsing online in between glue emergencies, and wondering where those easy phonics books were that I knew I had seen somewhere. Just before the end of the day I found them. Frontline Phonics books! I knew that program would come in handy someday.

My problem is that I look at all these "programs" out there and like bits and pieces of them, but have never found one I can embrace completely. I really need to sit down at the end of this year and put together what I used and try to create my own "perfect" curriculum for reading. Or Math. But that is another blog topic!

In the meantime, M. and even A. and my own daughter, Cassie, are slowly but surely putting the pieces of the puzzle together to read. A major milestone in any child's learning life.