Rutabaga Dreams

While I’m on the subject of homeschooling, here’s our homeschooling plan for the 2008-2009 school year when Emma will be (by age, at least) in first grade. She’s above grade level in several subjects, (after all, she’s reading at a 3rd to 4th grade level at this point!) and thankfully I can take that into account and still challenge her.

I’m still seriously considering doing the charter for next year, largely to get the money for Emma to take some sort of weekly lesson. I suppose I should at least give them a call to see what I would need to do to get signed up and what they would want from me in return for the moolah.

But anyways, without further ado, here’s our subjects and materials for next year:

Math: Math-U-See Beta
Frequency: Daily
Cost: $55 for workbook, DVD, and teacher’s manual

Reading: Continue reading out loud from various books.  (For example, right now she’s reading Little House in the Prairie to me)  I’m also wondering if she should also have some assigned personal reading (or at least reading time) as well, or if I should just keep a stack of good books from the library for her to pick from to read at night - perhaps a combination of the two?
Frequency: Daily
Cost: None, materials will come from the library

Copywork: Continue copying verses and quotes using the current system. We should move to a smaller size paper at some point.
Frequency: Daily
Cost: $3-4 for a new notebook

Memorywork: Continue to do what we’re doing with the index cards, check Harp and Laurel Wreath (which we already own) for selections.
Frequency: Daily
Cost: None

Latin: Continue with Prima Latina.
Frequency: Daily
Cost: None, already have the materials.

Christian Studies: Faith and Life Series, book 1 - Our Heavenly Father, also continue to do a short daily Gospel devotional with prayers (but perhaps move to after breakfast?)
Frequency: Weekly for Faith and Life?
Cost: $10 for the workbook, $7 for the textbook

Bible: Children’s Bible History
Frequency: Weekly?
Cost: $7.00 (at Kolbe)

History: Story of the World, Vol. 1
Frequency: Twice a week?
Cost: $12 for the book, $23 for the activity guide

Art: Child Sized Masterpieces (finally!) and perhaps Drawing with Children or Draw Write Now
Frequency: Once a week, alternating? Once a week for each?
Cost: None, already own materials

Science: Noeo Science
Frequency: It should be done 2 or 4 times a week and would probably take about 20 minutes if done 4x a week.
Cost: ~140.00

Physical Education: She obviously needs to get out and run around every day. Also considering some sort of lessons - ballet? gymnastics?
Frequency: Daily for running around, weekly for lessons
Cost: Uncertain, none if we sign up for a charter school

Read Aloud: Continue to read various children’s classics outloud before bed
Frequency: Daily
Cost: None, materials will come from the library

So, we need to cough up about $275 for the year (including shipping), which I suppose isn’t too bad. I’d also like to get some supplemental materials throughout the year, but we’ll see what finances will allow.

Around the beginning of the year I grew quite dissatisfied with how I was handling our memory work, so I decided to figure out a new system.  Previously we were going over most, if not all, of our Latin and memory work every day, and we were both finding this too time consuming and far too tedious.  I remembered reading about a Scripture memory system on the Simply Charlotte Mason site and I decided to adapt it for my purposes.

I decided not to do the monthly tabs at this point, because I didn’t think Emma would be able to retain anything that long without reviewing it more often than monthly.  We have  Daily, Odd, Even, and Monday - Friday sections.  Memory work and Latin are combined, and this system makes it really easy to figure out what we need to review on a given day.  Today, for example, we reviewed the following in each section:  Daily - Glory Be (in Latin and English), Prima Latina lesson 9 vocab, Where Go the Boats by Robert Louis Stevenson, Odd - Lesson 8 & 5 vocab, Thursday - the Sanctus (in Latin and English), Lesson 3 vocab and the alphabet.  The vocab for each Latin lesson is generally 5-7 words and we generally do Latin to English first, then English to Latin.  It seems like a lot when I type it out, but it only takes us about 15 minutes to go through.

Our copywork also goes in this box, with a tab for copywork to do, and finished copywork.  It is rather like Penny Gardner’s copywork jar (she used to have a description on her site, but I can’t find it anymore), but in a box instead.  Emma likes being able to pick what she copies each day, and I like not having to come up with something decent each morning.  I’m much happier with what she’s copying now, and I’m doing a better job at giving her good sentences that are the right length for her writing level.

Another thing we’re enjoying is our (rather grandly titled) Modern and Pratical Studies.  Each day we do some sort of different activity according to a theme.  Mondays are mapwork (think basic geography with wall maps - CA, US, and World), Tuesdays are dictionary work (I have her look up three words in her children’s dictionary and we discuss how to find them and the definitions), Wednesdays are money (we’re mainly working with coins right now - names, equilvancies, different ways to make the same amount), Thursdays are map skills (for example, looking at a zoo map or a fake town map and discussing how to find things, how to get places), and Friday is time (reading clocks, telling time).  Fairly basic stuff for the most part, but it is fun and it helps to do it in a systematic way like this.  We were doing most of these things here and there, but I was finding her retention was not particularly good when we weren’t making it a point to do it regularly and this helps me to remember to keep getting back to this stuff.

So there’s a partial picture at least of our homeschool work.  It is hard to believe this school year is soon going to be drawing to a close (and will we finish Math-U-See Alpha by then?  Right now it is a toss-up)  My goal is to be done by May 23rd - since I’m due the following week and all - but
maybe we’ll go just a bit longer.  Or who knows, the baby may come early and we’ll finish Alpha in August when we start up again!  Right now I’m thinking about starting on August 11th, but it looks like we’ll be moving at some point this summer (and no, not into our house *sigh*) so this date is definitely not set in stone.

We completed lesson 4 today in Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons, and all is still going well. (a shorter title for the book would have been nice though) She’s getting better at watching the page and my finger rather than looking at me, which is making things easier. I tried having her point to the page and the letters, but it seemed like too much for her to think about at this point! For some reason though when we do the say it fast exercises, she likes to say the word fast in this breathy, whispery sort of voice that makes me think of Marilyn Monroe or something. It’s pretty funny, but I’m definitely trying not to laugh so as not to encourage her. I just have her do it over again, after asking her “use your normal voice please”.

We also have started working on the writing too, which is going fairly well. I realized that she didn’t know how to hold her pencil correctly, so we’ve been working on that. In the course of doing this, I’ve realized that I don’t hold my pencil correctly either. *sigh* At this point I’m teaching her how to hold the pencil the way I do it because I can’t seem to demonstrate how to hold a pencil correctly and I certainly can’t write that way at all. What’s that again about old dogs and new tricks?? She’s a lefty like me anyways, and I think we’re doomed to write a little differently no matter what - between having to push across the page, dealing with the dreaded hook and all that sort of thing that drives elementary school teachers nuts.

I remember being in the first grade and being mortified because I was singled out to receive a special pencil with a big rubber grip on it because I still was not holding my pencil correctly. I wasn’t doing the full preschooler fist anymore, but I would somehow hold the pencil between my thumb and my ring finger. Awkward, now that I try it again, but at the time it was so hard to go to anything else! I remember saying exactly what Emma said to me earlier this week - “but this way works for me, why do I have to do something else?” Definitely an interesting reversal of roles, and not the first or last time such a thing has or will happen!

Because of Mrs. Darwin’s discussions of Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons I decided to borrow a copy from my library and take a look at it. In the fall, I bought another book about teaching your child to read but I haven’t done much with it because they want the child to know all their letters and most of the letter sounds before you start it. Also, they don’t give all that much aid to the parent/instructor, so I felt a little lost with it. I didn’t get 100 Easy Lessons at the time because the reviews were somewhat mixed for it - some calling it too repetitive and too scripted. Well, it turns out that I think that’s exactly what we need so I think that this book is going to be the right one for us.

I read through the introduction and the first couple lessons last night, and we did the first lesson this morning. I am reasonably pleased with how it went, and I think Emma has the general idea of how it is supposed to work. I think the main complication is that when she is doing the letter sounds, she starts off looking at the page, then looks up at my face (for approval, I suppose) and doesn’t see when she is supposed to stop making the sound. Telling her to watch the page made her want to put her face right up to the page, so I think that is going to take a little work. She also had some trouble repeating the word slowly to me, drawing out the sounds of the letters. She just wanted to say the word quickly - am rather than aaammm, for example.

All in all, it went well for a first lesson I think. I’ll do some review this afternoon and try doing the writing portion then. The hardest part of the morning was when she asked if she could do more learning games with me, so I suggested a number game that we have and that she usually enjoys. It started out ok, but then she starting having trouble doing things that she was doing earlier, and trouble remembering a number from one moment to the next. I don’t know if we had just reached saturation point or if she was getting bored or what, but it was extremely difficult to play the game with her when she all of sudden could no longer count to 8 and when she did manage to do so, could not remember that she had just counted to 8 about 2 seconds later. I was trying to end the game on a positive note, but things just were deteriorating so fast that finally I had to just call it quits before I tore my hair out. I’m not sure how to recover from this sort of situation - I’ll have to give it some thought.

OK, time to make lunch for a hungry little girl (and mommy!)