Benefits of homeschooling...

School in bed! Mane organized her history binder while listening to her history book on audio...in bed!

Notice all the handy items scattered about: water bottle, lamp, speakers, notebooks, colored pencils, hole puncher, books, teddy bear...

Power of Play

I recently finished reading Free to Learn by Peter Gray. The book's subtitle says it all: "Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life." The book has a very unschool-y bent, as it features the democratic school of Sudbury Valley. I don't "buy in" to unschooling, as it has been presented to me, though I've had a couple of other people state that they view us as unschooling. I don't see it that way, since we use curriculum, and I have certain expectations for covering material each week. On the other hand, I work for Mane's "buy-in" with the curriculum. I try something else if the thing we're doing is making her hate the subject matter.

But I do "buy in" to the power of play. Mane has clearly had artistic potential from a very young age. I've signed her up for art classes from time to time, and she's enjoyed them. BUT, she hasn't taken time with her artwork. She hasn't focused on creating a finished product that is truly the best she can do. She simply hasn't been interested. She wants to have fun and didn't see a lot of point in doing a great deal of work to turn out a masterpiece. Until Recently. Recently, she and her friends have developed a fantasy play game that they play regularly when they get together, and they needed a "blueprint" for a bronze dragon. Mane spent the better part of a day drawing a dragon blueprint, using the book cover of one of the Percy Jackson books and several images off the internet. I was totally impressed by what she turned out. I honestly didn't know she had THAT kind of potential. Once it fell into the category of fun, she far exceeded what I even thought was possible. I've also been seeing her read...and read...and read because she wants fodder for the same play mentioned in the above paragraph. Play is fueling her "work."

6th Grade

Here's how 6th grade is shaping up...what we're using for curriculum and how it's working for us:

Mane's every day list is to ALWAYS:

* Read for half an hour (book of her choice).

* Do assignments on Spelling City (words taken from her Logic of English list or whatever she misspelled in her writing assignments).

* Do Xtra Math for practicing speed with math facts.

* Do 3-4 logic puzzles. Right now she's working her way through a book of Perplexors. Previously she was working on Mind Benders. Later this year we'll be checking out other logic/critical thinking puzzles, and we'd love suggestions!

Mane's 3-5x/week list:

* Do a math lesson from her Saxon math book.

* Work through Logic of English lesson with me.

* Work through Write With the Best lesson with me.

* Work through Biology lesson with me, using Prentice Hall's high school biology book. We plan to use this book over this year AND next year. So, we're taking it slow, digging as deep as we can, doing activities and labs. Mane keeps a notebook of vocabulary words from the week's lessons. She also answers some of the questions from the book and does independent projects related to the book materials.

* Attend her homeschool co-op's history class once a week, read emails from her teacher & do the week's homework!

* Listen to Pimsleur Spanish lesson. All I asked her to do was listen to the lessons and participate. She's decided to put together a Spanish notebook and folder with all the things she's learning!

Mane's once-a-week list:

* Participate in Poetry Teatime with myself and some friends. This means bringing favorite poems or her own writings to the table to share, listening to the poetry others brought, and drinking tea!

* Listen to Classics for Kids podcasts about types of music or particular composers. Keep track of where composers were from and where they lived and place them on the history timeline.

* Listen to the Torah readings for the week and participate in conversation about the readings.

Optional List:

* Watch documentaries already in her queue on Netflix.

* Work with Lego Mindstorms.

* And, of course, all the things she does for fun that also qualify as learning: crochet, weave, paint, write letters & emails to friends, origami, etc, etc, etc...


Over all, things are working out very, very well. Mane recently joined the swim team at the YWCA. So, she has less free time and is learning to budget time. We have had a number of great conversations about planning and getting difficult things done while you're fresh. We've also talked about how getting started is often the hardest part, and sometimes it's easier to decide to do a little bit for now and a little bit later. Often she finds that if she "tricks" herself into getting started she plows through to the finish!

Resources!

Peregrin House now has a page of online resources! Check it out here: Resources OR click on the link in the right sidebar!

Homeschool Spaces

I hesitate every single time I use the word "homeschool," lest people believe somehow that we never leave home. I am on a constant search for a better word. And, yet, homeschool is the word commonly understood by the general public to mean that I don't send my child to traditional school...that I am educating her myself (though this isn't strictly true, as she attends classes and also does much to promote her own education).

In any case, although I'm often casting around for another word, when push comes to shove, our home is our school...home.school. To that end, we have several spaces where the bulk of our schooling takes place.

I think Mane's favorite place is the big green chair in front of the fireplace.

This chair has a long legacy, as it used to reside 2 floors above us in my husband's old attic bedroom in his parents house. The chair was purchased at Gabberts. Does Gabberts still exist anymore? My in-laws believe in buying things that will last forever. This chair certainly looks like it will. We used to always keep it covered with throw blankets to protect it from the sun. Since Mane was born and many children make their way through our house on a regular basis, straightening the throw constantly became too much of a hassle.

This chair saw all the years of Mango's late night homework...and then Vespera...and then Niteo. Now Mane moves into it every chance she gets. (Though the arms are too big to make playing guitar comfortable!) It's also the chair I use when I teach childbirth classes in the living room. It's a thinking chair. A reading chair. A sleeping chair. A homework chair. The big green chair.

Then there's the sunroom off the living room. This was the room that made me agree to move to this house, and right now it's where we have Mane's desk. She doesn't keep it nearly as neat as I would like, but this is her space for doing work that needs a desk.

 

When I need to work with her in the sunroom, that rocking chair is all mine - within arm's reach of all the books!The rocking chair goes back a long way, too. It used to be in my parent's house, and it moved with me when I got married!

And then there's the back porch - 3 season, not insulated, full of all the extra things that need to be stored somewhere. (I carefully avoided taking photos of the mess!) When weather permits, this is our very favorite place to study, read, do crafts, picnic, etc, etc...

Of course, we use the kitchen, too, and Mane writes anything she's currently memorizing on the window in the kitchen with window crayons. This is her washing the window, getting ready to write 1 Peter 2:22 on it:

And one can never underestimate the power of sitting almost IN the fireplace for getting work done in the winter:

Makes me so grateful for this house, for the opportunity to homeschool, and for all the great memories we've created right here in our very own home - learning, reading, growing, changing, and working together.

Peace!

NOT back to school

We officially started our school year (without GOing back to school, thank you very much)! This is the end of week 4. We did 3 weeks of relatively "academic" work, and week 4 was a camping trip!

We're using Sonlight this year, though I've made up my own hybrid version. The only things I actually bought from Sonlight were the Instructor Guide and the reading schedule. I have the Instructor Guide for core B/C, which is the World History core. Next year I hope to do core D/E, which is the American History core. I bought many of the readers & read-alouds at thrift stores and garage sales. The rest we're checking out from the library. We're using Saxon math 54, which was given to us. For now, I'm going to keep teaching Language Arts  & handwriting without a curriculum, and I'm working out a science schedule with Mango. 

It's been good so far...very good. The Instructor Guide includes Bible reading and memorization, a schedule for reading the world history books and the read-alouds, discussion questions, suggested poetry reading, and a schedule for reading Aesop's Fables. I love having a schedule mostly worked out for me!

(And did you know you can read Aesop's Fables on-line? They're kind of weird, though. Don't say I didn't warn you.)

And did you know that homeschool means we never stay home? In our first months of school we went to the Peace Games:

We spent some time at Silverwood Park in NE Minneapolis:

We went to birthday parties, parks, libraries, coffee shops, and to DULUTH (where Mane danced at the amphitheater in Leif Erikson Park with her little friend):

So, we're back to school, though not AT school because we homeschool, and not at home because we're almost never home. Peace!

Reflecting

Well, I've been reflecting on the passing of summer and the upcoming school year. This year, I admit defeat. We will not even contemplate "doing school" in the summer ever again. It simply didn't happen. Mane still read me the occasional book, and we played a few math-related games. She's taken to reading a number of things on her own because she wants to know what they say (street signs, t-shirts, billboards, and comics). We read some books related to early American history as the 4th of July approached. And that was that. We didn't do anything else.

Well, we didn't do anything else on purpose anyway...

Mane's education, strangely, continued at a steady pace throughout the summer. Looking back, I remember conversations in the car about speed and acceleration, about credit cards and banks, and about the English language.

Mane is currently carrying out her own experiment with bean sprouts.

She learned about construction while helping Mango with the basement project.

She looked through Vespera's photos of Mexico attentively, learning about Vespera's birthplace and the culture of the Mexican people.

We received a poster in the mail the other day with a timeline of all the American presidents. Mane asked questions about elections, the legislature, congress, the house of representatives, and the various wars, in which the U.S. has participated. She even asked questions that led to a discussion of democracies and dictatorships.

We had long talks about theology, about various religions, about faith and tolerance.

Mane learned about birds, bugs, plants, and weather. We were out in it. We talked about it. We experienced it. She caught tadpoles and frogs, she observed flies (yuck!) and deer and chipmunks.

We saw the science museum film about Arabia.

We went to the Irish fair and learned about Irish dancing, native dogs of Ireland, sheep herding, and the Potato Famine.

The list could go on and on. I see now why some studies show an actual jump in learning over the summer for some public-schooled kids (this was true only of children of college-educated, middle/upper income parents, which is another discussion altogether).

My experience this summer is almost (but not quite) enough to make me believe that un-schooling could work for us. If I could trust the process (and keep up the energy and momentum), Mane could learn everything she needed to know the same way she learned over the summer. The truth is, though, that I think we both appreciate the structure that comes with a new school year. The different form of learning over the summer give us a rest and prepare us for the more focused work ahead. As with so many things in life, we need a balance.

Mane made me a list today of some of the things she'd like to learn about this year. At the top of the list is some family history. We'll be delving into some culture and making some family trees! And we have an excellent FIAR book planned to lead the way....

New website to check out!

I just found this today, and I thought it was worthy of sharing!

Lesson Pathways has free K-5 curriculum & resources for all kinds of subjects - science, math, language arts, and reading. They have structured plans that you can follow in sequence or you can pick and choose your own particular areas of interest and organize them into a planner for your child(ren). I don't know much else about the site, but I've already found some great ideas and on-line resources for our current history studies.

Go check it out!

One on One

Mane has been learning multiplication. And what I've realized is that if she was in a regular school classroom with lots of other kids per teacher, she wouldn't really, REALLY learn this. I have learned that I can set her loose with her math worksheets, and she will return with them finished and correct...but she'll have done all the problems the long way. I want her to learn the "tricks of the trade," so to speak, and that means I have to sit with her while she's doing math and have her talk me through the problem...so the so-called shortcuts actually become shortcuts. Sitting with me helps her to focus, and verbalizing the process helps her to learn.

This is one of the first times I've really stopped and realized that she wouldn't be getting this kind of attention in school, and she needs it if she's going to really learn. She'd be one of those kids who gets by and doesn't cause a lot of fuss, but she would only get to mediocre. I read in the blog of a teacher recently how much she (the teacher) is frustrated with previously homeschooled students because they won't do anything on their own. They require so much attention. And she implored homeschool parents to teach their kids independent study. While I agree that being able to learn independently at some point is important, I think it's entirely possible that homeschooled students are asking for more attention because they really want to understand the process and they aren't accustomed to settling for "good enough." They come to expect themselves to really learn something instead of just getting by.

At least, that's what I hope. I hope that all the time and attention I'm pouring into this means that Mane won't settle for being able to do the work without really understanding. That's what I did through most of school. I was so excited when I got to college and really began to understand how things fit together and why they worked the way they did.

In any case, I'm not going to try to teach Mane to work independently right now at the expense of true learning...no matter what the school administrators complain about homeschooled students. I'm going to take advantage of the opportunity to have her one on one, to provide her with her greatest tool for learning success...my presence.

Goals, Deadlines, and Planning

I once read that the single biggest problem that college professors see with homeschooled students was their inability to meet deadlines. They tend to honestly believe that the rules can and should be bent for them because they've been schooling in such a flexible environment. As this seldom works in college classrooms or in real life, I think it's a worthy cause to develop some goal-setting, deadline-meeting, planning-ahead skills in homeschooled children.

I've been mulling over this dilemma for some time, coming to very few conclusions. One of the benefits of homeschooling is the flexibility, the ability to drop "school" for the day and go to the orchestra or visit friends. I think this helps homeschooled children become well-rounded individuals, involved and informed in their communities and able to develop deeper and more meaningful relationships with their friends.

A friend of mine introduced me to the idea of setting out a series of goals for homeschooling at the beginning of the month and checking them off as they get done. Her daughter is a little older than Mane, and they have been using this system. It allows them to have some change and variation in their schedule, as not everything needs to be done every single day, but it also creates a system for being sure that the things that get done that need to be done. A valuable side benefit: the child learns to set goals, meet deadlines and plan ahead!

At the beginning of March, Mane and I set out to implement this plan. We're using 2-week time blocks, rather than a whole month, though, since she's new to this process and younger than my friend's daughter. I have to say that I'm absolutely pleased with this plan. Mane can be self-directed within the structure. She's able to take some responsibility for her own planning and schedule. I don't have to cajole her to get things done. I just remind her of what there's left to do and how many days she has remaining. We finished our first 2-week plan on Sunday. On Friday Mane looked at what she still needed to do and made herself a chart for how she was going to get it all done. I sat back and marveled a this skill-building process!

So, what did she/we do?

* 4 chapters in Story of the World
* Completed Math U See Beta!! (Yes, she's done with 2nd grade math!)
* Completed 15 pages of an on-line math curriculum (more on that later).
* Read 2 early reader books from the library
* 2 Hooked on Phonics spelling lessons
* Followed the Iditarod (Mane kept a musher data sheet for Jessie Royer and DeeDee Jonrowe. She filled out times, dates, positions, and number of dogs herself. This included some learning about writing dates and "a.m." and "p.m." times.
* 2 Lego projects following instructions from a booklet
* 10 "real life" math problems
* 2 pages of free writing (corrected for grammar & spelling)

Aside from those things, we also went to the orchestra, visited grandparents, volunteered at the Go Fish concert, did a puzzle with grandma, went to visit friends in Cambridge, had friends come to visit us twice, went to Bible Study, and attended several soccer games (where Mane runs around & plays with friends).

I know it sounds like a lot, but Mane has also had plenty of time to go outside, work on art projects, watch Ponyo, and hang out with her dollies!

I'm feeling great knowing that we're still progressing through some goals. Mane is feeling great knowing what the goals are and having some control over them. Today we wrote up our second set of goals. (Yesterday, true to flexible homeschooling form, we spent the day with the grandparents and drove them to the airport, picked Mango up from school, went to the book store for some books I need for Bible study, and got me a new cell phone!)

Handwriting

Mane LOVES handwriting. This really ought to come as no surprise for me. Reading has been tough for her, but she's been writing ever since she could hold a writing utensil. She's been asking me how to spell things for her ever since she could understand that letters join together to form words. The house is full of samples of her writing. When we began the StartWrite handwriting program I was thinking it would be tedious for her, and I didn't know how well she would like it. I should have known, though. The idea of writing fancy makes her exceedingly pleased. She's learning italic cursive right now, but I have a feeling she may actually learn more than one type of handwriting over time. She entreats me to write things in "real" cursive for her now. I have been teaching her one letter at a time, but I finally printed out a page for her today with all the letters because she wanted to write a story and wanted to see how to do ALL the letters.