Fall Semester in Retrospect

I have a minute this morning so I decided to drop in here and let you all know how the first semester has gone here at Blueberry House. As in any other year there have been false starts and finding out that a book or program is just not going to work the way Id like it too. But that is just par for the course. If you are a new homeschooler and that is happening to you, take heart.  Even us seasoned homeschoolers and teachers get it wrong sometimes.
Peter has evolved through the last three months to where he now is doing everything but Math in Christian Light Education. He has a huge three ring binder that has file tabs in the right cover. Each one is labeled with a subject from CLE. His Lightunits (same thing as the old Paces) fit perfectly in the pockets. I broke down and bought the actual goal charts from CLE when I could just have easily designed my own but why reinvent the wheel? Right? I hole punch his goal chart and put it into the binder and off he goes. He can work almost independently. I have him read to me every day; one day he reads his Reading story and the next he reads his Social Studies to me. He reads all vocabulary words aloud to me and then he is on his own!

Tink is struggling. I am not so happy with how things are going with her. I need to just figure out what is most important this year and let the rest go. Her three most time consuming things are her orchestra classes, her volley ball and a writing class that she is participating in at the Charter School. I really wanted to focus on reading vocabulary this year and so far I have but she is really struggling with it. I have to figure out a better way to introduce it - a better way to fit it into her schedule.

She is now complaining about Teaching Textbooks. She claims its too hard. Did I make a mistake when I let her skip TT Grade 6 and go straight from Grade 5 into Grade 7? She tested at Grade 7 with there online tests but maybe with her processing problems I shouldn't have let her skip. I plan on taking the Christmas break to figure out what to do with her Math.

The Grammar Keys arent working for her like I'd hoped either. I have a little cricket on my shoulder that continues to chirp even though I try to kill it. What is it saying? Well listen. Here is what it says, "Tink has reached her limit. She cant learn any further. Nothing is working because she cant process more. She is academically DONE!"

I refuse to listen but I have niggling doubts that maybe she is reaching her limit with English Grammar. She wrote a novel for NaNoWriMo this month. She ended with 7,612 words and ten chapters. It was required for her writing class. She got an A+ for this semester but mama definitely had to take over the editing to keep the story on track. Now that the deadline has been met my goal is to take paragraphs for her own unedited writing of that story and use if for Writing Mechanics. There's nothing like fixing your own mistakes to speed up that learning curve.

So life goes on. I have 13 students now. I plan 60 lessons a week. I have 2 students in first grade, 2 in second grade, none in third, 3 in fourth, 1 in fifth, 3 in seventh, 1 in eighth and 1 in ninth. There is never a dull moment!

Tink has an all day volleyball tournament Monday and Tuesday. I am looking forward to taking Tuesday off to go watch her play.

So how does your first semester look in retrospect. Have you found something that is working great? Is there anything that hasn't worked? Share it with us.

The First Month of School Review

September is over and we are now well into October. I love this time of year! I get excited about all the possibilities. The kids curriculum and classes are working out really well. September always is the month of change and tweaking for me. After all the years of teaching I know what I want for the backbone of our curriculum but there's always a few things to fine tune by the time October rolls around.

One of those is Peters Spelling. I had pulled him out of Sequential Spelling for a number of reasons. Now I am putting him back in the program. The Christian Light curriculum is working very well for him. I'm moving him at a fast rate through the Language Arts program. I actually placed him at a 2nd grade level to catch the little nuances in the program and the vocabulary that the curriculum uses that may be different than other curriculum's. As a result of being placed so low and because we started in August he is now half way through the LA 2nd grade year. It was good for me to place him that low. It firmed up some missing areas, mainly the one of punctuation and capitalization. His third grade books are ordered and on the way. I will move him through those quickly too with the goal to be in the fourth grade books by February. Then we can slow down to a normal pace.

His history is working beautifully. He loves the map study. I ordered the loose leaf maps that match the fourth grade history lightunits. He is filling those out to have his own atlas at the end of the year. He is also making a salt clay map of the continent of North America. Unfortunately, I didn't stick to just salt clay. I added the oil in like I do for play dough so the map has been in the drying process for a week now. The middle of the US is still doughy! I'm going to have him paint it Monday regardless of the swamp conditions in the Midwest!

So other than adding in some extra PE classes, a digital story telling class and Sequential Spelling things have remained almost the same with Peter. I'm also working on getting him into a geometry class during the time that Tink is in her two hour history class. Peter would love a more advanced approach to geometry than what his dear mother is giving him! Psst, I'm not good at geometry but don't tell anybody!

Tinks classes and curriculum haven't changed at all! I am proud of that! I worked so hard on ironing out the creases and rough spots in her Middle School curriculum that there really was no need of change. I did add in a history class but that was so she could fellowship with 11 other middle and high school kids who are all Christian. Most of the kids she knew years ago and we had just lost touch. So this is wonderful for her. The history is World History and the exact same years we studied last year but I'm keeping her in the class anyway for the friendships and the potential friendships that may develop from that.

                                              

(This is Peter playing cards while on a break at the charter school)

I have put pics of Peter in here but none of Tink because I havent managed to get around to Tinks classes yet and get her pics. I will be sure to include her next time!

So this now finds us neatly tucked into the month of October! I couldn't be happier with September's results! So how are your plans panning out? Any glitches? Any changes? What are your thoughts as we move into this second month of fall schooling?

Peters 4th grade schedule

This school year promises to be a challenging one again. The children's school schedules are full at home and at the charter school.

Peter is carrying a full load but he just cant sit and study for long. As a result I have interspersed his studies with lots of I have enrolled him in three different PE classes and community basketball in the evenings. He is a kid that needs to release large amounts of energy. I'm hoping this will be enough to keep him moving and focused during the rainy season.

Peter is taking math in Bob Jones again this year and is excelling. He is going into the fourth grade but is placing at the 6th grade level in math. He loves Math.

I wish he was so in love with Language Arts! I am taking him through two years in one this year in grammar. It's pretty intense but Peter has the wherewithal to do it. He just needs to focus his little self and set his mind to doing the work.

In Social Studies, Grammar, Reading, and Science he is using the self paced program of Christian Light Education,

He is also taking a Science class at the charter school. I am not a lover of Science. I pretty much cant stand it really. I just hate the experiments and all the "stuff". Okay, I know you Science lovers are cringing right now but knowing I hate it is the first step towards the realization that my kids wont get much Science if it were left to me. So Peter is taking Animal Antics Air and Water at the charter school. There he can do labs and experiment to his hearts content.

Because of this lack of feeling for science on my part I have also put Tink into a Life Science curriculum that is taught through musical lyrics. All of the word definitions are sung to popular camp songs so the kids can learn them easier. It's going to be a life saver for Tink who struggles with vocabulary and word definitions.

I have taken a completely different approach with Peter in Spelling this year. Spelling is built into the CLE program but I want him to have a bit more so I found a spelling book that I think will work for him. It's neither Bob Jones or Christian Light and right now I cant even think of the publisher.

I am so tired today. I couldn't sleep during the night. My mind was going in a million directions over a talk I am suppose to give to some teachers the end of this week. I was thinking of everything I wanted to be sure to include in this session on teaching the slow learner. Because of my restless night and because I ate sugar yesterday against my better knowledge, I am now dragging.

I am sitting in a guitar class with a tutoring student. I have another student in a hand bells class. Peter is in PE and Tink is in Writing for middle school. I'm starting to drag. In one hour I have my first public school student arriving at my house for tutoring. I have tons to do in that hour, not the least which is to get home and quickly brew myself a cup of coffee before the evening students arrive.

If only this headache would leave!

Fall Semester Lesson plans 7th grade

All summer we have dabbled around in our books, doing bits here and there but not really buckling down and doing book work on a scheduled basis. Today ends all that because the charter school is opened today for classes.

I really struggled with the children's curriculum this year. I just couldn't quite find the right fit! Tink tested low in vocabulary and she has every year. It was time to see if this could be corrected. I searched all summer for curriculum that would incorporate vocabulary in a huge way! I'm finally happy with my final choice.

Tink has studied English inside and out. She can label and diagram sentences with ease. The problem though stems from her short term memory. I dont want her to lose what she already knows but neither do I want to put a huge emphasis on diagramming this year. The solution was found in Grammar Keys.

Grammar Keys is a software program that covers all the basics in language, and grammar and sentence mechanics. The student does the course online and also in a work book. The workbook comes on a DVD and needs to be printed on paper. It took me a bit to figure out how it all worked but when I did I was very pleased with the program. By using Grammar Keys Tink will not lose any of the knowledge she already has while we delve deeper into reading vocabulary.

I've stated before on my other blog how Tink placed at the 11th grade for Reading comprehension. Based on the test scores I also did away with the Reading book/workbook scenario. Her comprehension was at the 11th grade but her reading vocabulary was at 6th grade! This year she will be reading entire books and doing vocabulary and limited comprehension questions on each book. She will fill out a reading journal as she goes along and will write up a book report at the end.

I have chosen the book Jacob Have I Loved for the first book of the year. I printed out complete lesson plans for the book from Ed Helper. I'm not sure how much you can see on that link without a paid subscription but I'm guessing you can view the page. You would not be able to download the plans but it would still give you an idea of what it looks like.

For Science we are doing Teach with Movies. I chose this particular way of doing Science because the lesson plans were only $11.95 online and each movie has a list of vocabulary terms the children must know. Teach with Movies has movies and lesson plans for History, Science, Literature and character building.

Tink is doing United States History again this year. She didn't get it finished last year, mainly because we started it so late in the year. She is using North America Is the Lords from Christian Light Education.

Here is what the website says about this book; "North America Is the Lord’s is a comprehensive history and geography of Anglo-America from a God-centered perspective. This study credits God, the Creator, as the sovereign Lord. It describes opposing forces in history: the kingdom of God and the kingdom of darkness. Social values belonging to God’s kingdom are upheld. This book counters the humanistic idea that we control our destinies, and that our land thrives because of our own ingenuity".
I love this book and decided it was well worth Tinks time to finish it!

Tink is doing Math from Teaching Textbooksagain. It's a good fit for her so I'm not going to reinvent the wheel.

Those are her main courses. At the charter school she is taking Orchestra classes including symphonic orchestra, a writing class for middle school and volleyball.

Once again her schedule is full but she seems to thrive on it.

Fall 2008 Schedule

Go to Haven at Hometo enter the contest for this tea themed giveaway.

This weeks assignment at Homeschool Blog Awards is to write about our plans for this coming school year. If this would have been last weeks assignment I wouldn't have been able to tell you much because I hadn't yet fine tuned our schedule or curriculum. But this week I put my nose to the grindstone and really concentrated on this.

I have posted our curriculum on my left sidebar with links to all the subjects if you are interested. Last year I used mostly Abeka. This year I'm switching to BJU. I've always been partial to Bob Jones but I've never used it as fully as I am this year. One of the reasons I am going with it is because of their intense Reading program. Even though my daughter is going into 5Th grade she cannot read at that level efficiently. The public school would have her in the 6th grade. The state has her registered as 5th grade and I have her in basically 4th grade stuff. Im hoping that if I take one more year to reinforce this Reading that she will be on her way and we can get rid of the Phonics part of our curriculum once and for all. For those of you who are new readers, Tink has a Sensory Processing Disorder so school is very hard for her. I still have not figured out what Im doing for Math.

My son will be in second grade and he will be attending a charter school once again. Bearing that in mind, this is how our day will look this fall semester.

6:00 am Everyone up, Breakfast and Bible Memory
8:00 am Leave for bus

Monday
8:30- 10:00 Clay Creations
1:30 Afternoon co-op consisting of:
English Composition( how to write short stories, book reports, essays, etc. This class is taught by me)
Art
Educational Game Time
Book Club


Tuesday -Thursday
8:30 Back home where Tink and I will begin our day with our morning walk.
9:00 School subjects in this order with no particular times
Reading
Math (still to be determined)
Language Arts
Spelling
Geography (book still to be determined)
Band
Violin
Choir
PE

Friday
Life Skills (this will focus on everything needed to run a home efficiently)
Band

We will do History winter term and Science Spring term.

Our extra curricular classes are all in the afternoon save one. Clay Creations (Pottery) is Monday morning from 8:30 to 10:00 at an Art Studio two blocks from my sons bus stop. He catches the bus at 8:15 so that will work perfectly into our schedule.

The other electives this term are Band, Choir, PE and Violin. The first three are offered in the afternoons at our church school two miles south of me. For violin Tink takes private lessons at a little studio set among wild flowers and woodlands, in back of an adorable little cottage. Tink loves it. That is about five miles from our house. You can see we don't drive far for any of the classes.

On Monday afternoons I have started up a co-op with four other families. We rotate houses so as not to overload any moms. This has taken a huge amount of my time to get off the ground but Im excited about the possibilities and friendships that can come from it. The children in this co-op range from ages 5 to 12 so we have the classes divided into K-1 and 2-5.

It is very important to me that Tink takes a wide range of classes and that these classes be taught by people other then myself. This helps her in processing information from teachers who are not directly working with her from the sensory standpoint. In the real world Tink will have to be able to process instructions and information without compensation for her disability. This is part of what I do to prepare her for adulthood.

It also helps with her social inadequacies due to her disorder. It helps her learn what is acceptable behavior and what isnt. An interesting discovery was made about how children learn when a scientist, whose name alludes me right now, brought up his baby with a baby monkey to see what would happen. The gist of it was that the child's speech did not develop because he learned to bark and squeak like his sibling, the monkey. The scientist immediately stopped the experiment when he saw what was happening but this is the precise reason Peter attends a charter school for now. He needs to learn normal behaviors and not copy his sister who not only has sensory issues but has also been diagnosed with Oppositional Defiance Disorder. This is also why Tink takes classes with other children and why it is high on my list of life skills for Tink. I will write more about this nature and nurture study another day. It is fascinating to say the least!

So that my friends is our schedule in a nutshell. If you all want to read more about home school schedules and how people are organizing their school day just click on the link in the first paragraph. There's some interesting stuff going on in homes all over this country.

Charlotte Mason for third grade

Now I know I posted our fall schedule already but now things are more fine tuned. Of course, they have to be...school starts tomorrow! Tink has told her Daddy many times today that tomorrow is school. If only her enthusiasm remains. I've switched to Charlotte Mason in hopes that school will be more fun for her.


Here is Tinks Level 3 school schedule loosely assembled with the help of ambleside.

9:00-Devotions (Bible reading,Pilgrims Progress,singing)

9:30-Explode The Code *

9:45-Reading (Bob Jones University;)*

10:15-History/Poetry
History:
Monday-An Island Story
Wed-Childs History of the World
Thurs-Trials and Triumph

Poetry:
Tues,Fri-Robert Louis Stevenson

10:30-Break

10:45-math(Making Math Meaningful)*

11:05-Grammar(using worksheets and copywork)*
W-Art at Academy of Fine Arts

11:15-Lit
M-American Tall Tales
T-Parables From Nature
W-Art at Academy of Fine Arts
Th.-Heroes by Kingsley
F-The Princess and the Goblin

11:30-Copywork
W- Art at Academy Of Fine Arts

11:45-Lunch

12:30-Science/Geography/Bio's/Drama
M-Science/Nature Study (using my huge resource of Click and Your Backyard magazines*
T-Geography-Minn of the Mississippi
W-Drama at Academy of Fine Arts*
Th-Minn of Mississippi
Fr-Bio of DeVinci

12:45-Labs
M-Science Lab
T-Cooking/housekeeping Lab
W-violin lesson at Academy of Fine Arts
Th-Story of Inventions
Fr-Nature Lab (Work on nature journals)

1:15-Supplemental Reading(Hiedi)

1:30-Center Time(the kids will work with manipulatives, art, sand, wood, etc. There is no ending time on this. They will play in the center until they tire of it. This will not be closely supervised by me. I will set up and supply a couple different learning centers but they will play on their own).

*Books are not Charlotte Mason

To keep the house running smoothly the children will begin using their chore chart again. The last two months of summer we haven't been very faithful with it! During the school year I put chore cards in their To Do pockets. These chores must be finished before school starts in the morning. They are small things like getting dressed, making beds, brushing teeth, setting and clearing the table etc. Tinks home therapy is done before breakfast each day too. She also has her skin brushed in the morning,at lunch, at dinner and again at bedtime.

I am also returning to my cleaning schedule that I have used for years. It becomes a very loose schedule in the summer but I adhere to it strictly in the school year.
Here are the rooms I clean on each day of the week:
M-kitchen
T-3 downstairs bedrooms
W-3 bathrooms
Th-2 living rooms
F-2 upstairs bedrooms and schoolroom
S-porches and hallways and over all pickup
Sun- CHURCH

Every day is Laundry Day!

This year I'm doing something I've never done before. I'm planning my meals for the week ahead! I think I pretty much need to do this. I haven't gotten this weeks meals planned yet or I would post them.

Another very important thing that is missing is Peters Kindergarten schedule. Tinks schedule is carefully designed to have her engaged in things she can do by herself while I work with Peter. Peters schedule isn't all put together yet. I'll be burning some midnight oil on that. Tinks schedule took all summer to figure out. Peters will only take about half an hour because the skeleton is already there because of Tink.

This, my friends completes a day in the life of a Charlotte Mason homeschooler. Any part of this may be reproduced without permission by time harried moms around the world.

Charlotte Mason
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Charlotte Mason for Children with Special Needs

I have had to quit using many of the recommended books for the Charlotte Mason approach to homeschooling. I know Charlotte Mason diehards say that even children with special learning needs can read the recommended books or have them read to them but I am here to say that it's not so in every case.

My daughter is nine and would be in the 4th grade at the public school. She has a sensory integration disorder that prevents her from processing information like other children her age. I started her in Level 3 at Ambleside, an online resource for homeschoolers wanting suggestions for scheduling a CM year. After two weeks of Level 3 I now have to drop her to Level 1 on some things and on other things we are switching books altogether.

Here is why:

My daughter cannot comprehend stories with more than two or three characters. Imagine now the trouble she has when all the characters have funny names and the sentence structure is so different she cant recognize the story at all. This means she cannot narrate or understand a word that is being read. I knew I had to come up with something different when we began reading Heroes by Kingsly. You have to read this sentence outloud to hear how it might sound to a child with an auditory processing disorder. Here's a line from that book; "Their names were Acrisius and Proetus and they lived in the pleasant vale of Argos, far away in Hellas." Do you hear all the strange s's? And there's still another problem. By the time Tink gets to to the word Hellas she has no idea of its a person, place or a thing because in that one sentence there are too many proper nouns.

Now look at this line from Secrets of The Woods. "Several times, however, when casting from the shore at the inlet for small fish, I had seen swirls in a great eddy near the farthest shore, which told me plainly of big fish beneath; and one day when a huge trout rolled half his length out of water behind my fly, small fry lost all their interest and I promised myself the joy of feeling my rod bend and tingle beneath the rush of that big trout if it took all summer." Yes that's all one sentence and by the time I was done Tink had no idea what the sentence was all about.

And here's a sentence from The Discovery of New Worlds by M.B. Synge. "And the crews worked with fresh vigor when they saw such pluck and perseverance, until after some days they again made land, the seas grew calmer, the winds hushed ,and they all knew that the Cape had been doubled at last". This book is used in Level 2 with Charlotte Mason and Tink is in 4th grade but that sentence made no sense to her at all.

Intervention was in order and it had to be made quickly before Tink rebelled at any reading. She crys at the sight of books anyway. So in keeping with Charlotte Masons theme I supplemented her books for easier ones. Here is what I am now doing for Tink. Bear in mind we are still using CM we just switched to books written in modern day English and books that were all around easier to understand.

I write this in hopes that anybody who has a child with a learning difference will find this helpful. Hopefully I will have saved you hours of research on your own.

Science: Instead of Story of Inventions, which I cant find a picture of, I have supplemented:

Natural History

Instead of the recommendations for Level 3, Secrets of the Woods, I use Level 1, The Burgess Animal Book:

World History:

Instead of:

I use these two books:


Instead of the History Tales and Legends in this book:
I use this:


Geography:
Instead of this recommended book:


I have now switched to this: For Literature we are still reading The Princess and the Goblin and the kids love it. It's a Charlotte Mason recommendation that we're keeping. We're also still doing dictation and copywork.

For Math we use Making Math Meaningful.

For Grammar I use worksheets.

Phonics is this book:


For Reading I use Bob Jones University Level 2b.

For Supplemental Reading we are reading Hiedi.
Our artist we are studying is Mary Cassett. We study her paintings for 6 weeks and read an autobiography of her life.

We are not studying a composer this term.

Poetry is by Robert Louis Stevenson.

Pilgrims Progress is read in the morning
along with Precious Moments Bedtime Stories.


And of course we are making our Science and Nature notebooks as well.

I know this looks like a lot of books but remember not every subject is done every day.

Disclaimer: These books have not been endorsed by Charlotte Mason. They are only my substitions.