A Sputtering End To The School Year

Life is funny. Around the beginning of April, I had this schedule all ready. I was going to be done with school before Memorial Day, it was going to be great.

Then our house caught on fire.

It is so hard to get back into your life's groove when everything is so suddenly interrupted. We missed a couple of weeks of school, and the lessons that were so easily begun at 9 have now become afternoon classes.

But I'm finally starting to see the end. We have 3 more math lessons. My dd's birthday is coming up very soon and I'm not teaching reading past that date. Those are our most difficult classes.

I really enjoyed BJU's Vacation Stations last year. It only took about 15 minutes a day, and last summer dd seemed to blossom under the program. At the beginning of the summer she could sound out individual letters, but she couldn't blend them to form words. By the end of the summer, just by reviewing what she already knew, she had gotten blending, and I was confident enough in her abilities to put her right into Reading 1.

So we're getting Vacation Stations 1 this year, and we'll start that the week after her birthday. We won't be finished with Bible or history (we have 10 lessons of each left), but both history and Bible are not intensive classes, and they have information that I'd like to teach before we hang it up for the summer. I'm hoping that Vacation Stations will reinforce all the addition and subtraction facts that dd has been learning all year, as well as reinforce all the reading that she's been doing.

We picked up the items for the summer reading program at our new local library today. Dd's all excited about that.

I wrote earlier today about the faithfulness of some of Judah's kings... or in their case, how their faithfulness sort of went to a sputter in the latter years of their lives. I think that homeschooling requires a great deal of faithfulness. You just have to keep plugging away at it. It takes faithfulness, especially when things are going well. If I hadn't been on schedule when our house fire happened, it'd be very difficult to catch up, or I'd have to teach reading and math all summer.

Last year, we were able to end our school year in April, for a very long and enjoyable summer. This year is seemingly ending in a sputter. First the math goes, then the reading goes, then we slowly morph into our summer schedule while tying up the loose ends of history and Bible. But I guess one great thing about homeschooling is that you can be flexible in this sort of way if you want to.

End of the Homeschool Year in Sight

About this time of year, my dd starts getting towards the back of her textbooks, and I start to wonder when we'll be done for the year. I put together a lesson plan for the remainder of the school year this week, and it looks like we'll be done with everything (except reading) somewhere around May 21st or so. We won't be finishing the reading textbook... I'll be ending that book at the beginning of June after completing lesson 141. I doubt that I ever got to lesson 141 in any of my public school textbooks when I was in school, so I figure that's good enough. All the other subjects I will be completing the entire book. Something that we NEVER did in public school.

Since my daughter is 5, if we were in Public School, she would be in Kindergarten. I remember a little bit about Kindergarten. I remember some things that happened in Kindergarten. With my daughter this age, I am able to see differences in her life up to this point compared to my life at age 5. I'm pretty happy with how she's turning out so far.

She still likes relatively innocent TV shows like Dora The Explorer and Wonderpets. Considering what some kids her age are watching, I'm pretty happy with that. She has lost a lot of interest in Sesame Street and Calliou. She likes to play games on children's web sites.

I remember counting to 100 with my mom in Kindergarten. My dd can count to 100 as well. She can read a lot of words, and add and subtract some numbers. So I feel that academically she's doing pretty well as well.

There are some things with homeschooling that don't translate very well to the public or private schools. Such as doing schoolwork at the dining room table with your baby brother in the room. Sometimes she gets distracted from her school work and will play with him while she's supposed to be doing something else, or she'll be fiddling with a toy when she's supposed to be listening... but she's 5. That's something I suppose I can live with.

She does get the practice of having to sit quietly in a group setting... although sitting quietly has always been a challenge for her. She likes to talk with her friends, even when she's supposed to be quiet. That's another big difference between her and I. It's hard for me to find friends, but she's always meeting new friends. You could say that it's a downside to homeschooling to not be able to socialize with her friends all day every day, but it's probably a positive. She probably would get in trouble a lot in the regular schools for talking, and would probably listen less in class as well.

I remember when I was in Kindergarten I had a boyfriend. He got held back for hyperactivity, so that was the end of that. My daughter doesn't seem to have any interest for now. While I know the time will come eventually, I think that it's good that she doesn't think of boyfriends now. I think that public school often places a great importance on that, and I'm glad that my dd is away from the pressures to get involved with boys before she is actually genuinely interested.

So the school year only has about three months left and I think it has been a success. Next year there will be more work for her to do, but she'll be able to have a little more independence than she has right now as well. I'm looking forward to the break... but I'm also looking forward to this fall and seeing my daughter learn and grow more.

Everyday Mathematics Makes My Head Hurt

An internet friend of mine who had previously been homeschooling her 9 year old decided to send her child back to public school, at least for a semester. On the message boards she remarked that her daughter hated her new public school math class, and had even cried during math. She was using a textbook called Everyday Mathematics.

I had heard of the book before, but I didn't know anything about it. I visited some web sites to learn more about it. Wow, it's quite scary. I was looking through the K-3 glossary to see some terms that their book used:

mental arithmetic Does not require all computations to be done in one’s head. Rather children develop a variety of flexible solution strategies, including drawing pictures and doodles, counting jumps on a number line or grid, and so on. Children devise their own solution strategies.

Doodles? Drawing pictures? Children devising their own solution strategies? That's just looking for trouble in a math class. You can't devise your own solution strategy for something that you barely know how to do in the first place.

number grid A table in which consecutive numbers are arranged in rows of ten. A move from one number to the next within a row is a change of one; a move from one number to the next within a column is a change of ten.

Huh? Say that again?

Fact Triangles Triangular cards that use the members of fact families for practice with addition/subtraction and multiplication/division facts. Two one-digit numbers and their sum or product (marked with an asterisk) appears in the corners of each triangle.

What was wrong with flash cards?

power of a number The product of factors all of which are the same. For example, 53 (five to the third power, or 5 x 5 x 5) is another way to name 125.

I understand this term perfectly well, but this was something that was taught in 7th grade when I took pre-algebra. I might have learned it in 6th grade math, but certainly not in 3rd grade math.

In case you think that these third graders are geniuses, though, the K-3 glossary fails to include definitions for improper fractions, mixed fractions, subtrahend, addend (not an item in the glossary by itself, but the definition of "number family" assumes that you already know what an addend is), or minuend. Not that most people use those terms in their everyday life, but if you are going to be teaching mathematics at as high a level as powers of a number, I would think that you would want to teach fractions first... and I would guess that if you taught fractions properly, some of those terms would end up in your book's glossary.

MJ McDermott, a meteorologist with a degree in atmospheric science, produced this 15 minute YouTube video talking about Everyday Math, as well as TERC math. It's pretty interesting:



It's amazing how anybody other than someone with a really high math aptitude already would be able to go through a program like this with a good grounding of mathematics.

Curriculum I Am Loving This Year

We started school officially on September 5th (even though dd asked to do school early so we did a couple of lessons the week before). After looking through my new curriculum, I was really excited about trying out Bob Jones University Press's Bible course... but after teaching it for a week, I am sure that it is a curriculum that I am going to love.

It's been really easy to implement this program. The questions are all laid out for you, they have child-friendly paraphrases of the Bible accounts to read if you don't want to read straight out of the Bible, and the worksheets are simple and fun (they do one page a day).

I also really like how BJU Bible 1 ties in other subjects to help extend the learning. We have been learning songs in our Bible class (currently we're doing This Is My Father's World). We also are doing BJU Music K, so she gets to sing a lot. I'm glad she gets to learn all these songs, because a lot of times she'll be in church with us and she doesn't know the hymns, so this will help her.

They have a science connection where we've been doing some fun things as well. During our lesson on God making the sky, we made a cloud in our kitchen. We looked at the difference between salt water and fresh water when we talked about God making dry land and seas. These were easy to do but fun. We also learn a different Bible verse every week.

I am teaching BJU music, reading, history, and science as well, but Bible is my favorite out of all the BJU courses. The rest of them are good too :).