Our Week in Review

We are slowly settling into our new school rhythm.  I say "new" because each year is new and different than the one before.  Our weekly studies are a combination of work we do for mom and work we do for co-op classes, but history remains our "spine."  This week was kindof interesting because I combined three weeks of our Year 3 Tapestry of Grace curriculum into one discussion.  We wrapped up our reading of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, learned about the push for independence in South American countries, and studied President Monroe and his famous speech which became known as the "Monroe Doctrine."

Whew!

Three days this week we just sat in the family room and read history books together.  Much of our high schoolers' work is rigorous and intense, so it is nice to be able to just sit and read with each other sometimes, and spontaneously share what we are reading about.  I love that as a homeschool mom I have control over the curriculum, and not the other way around!

Before discussion today I prepared a lunch of some foods that Lewis and Clark would have eaten on their long journey west to the Pacific Ocean (beef jerky and sausage, which they would have made from buffalo intestines, but we just bought at Kroger!), as well as a traditional Chilean food called stuffed empanadas.  For the empanada recipe, go here.  We ate, we read, we talked.  Delightful!

It was hard keeping the dogs away from our food, haha!

Science and foreign language classes are all taken at our co-op now, but I am still the primary English teacher for all my boys, and I absolutely love doing IEW writing with Little Man!  He is working on a narrative story of King Arthur and doing a fabulous job.  He is quite a good writer already! 

He is also doing IEW's "Fix It" this year, where every day he fixes a sentence or two that has deliberate spelling, punctuation, and grammatical errors, and then rewrites the correct version in his best cursive handwriting.  By the end of the year he will have an entire story, perfectly edited and written out by hand!  Fix It spans five years (six now, but my old version only has five), so he has four more stories to do after this one.   Here is a sample of his corrected Fix It writing from this week.  He is working on "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer":

This weekend we are looking forward to two soccer games, painting a bedroom, and singing in a worship choir this Sunday.  What are you looking forward to this weekend?

IEW - Medieval History Based Writing Lessons

This year, because we are studying the Middle Ages for history, I decided to purchase the Medieval History Based lessons from IEW (Institute for Excellence in Writing) for sons C and A to use for writing.  I love when content areas such as history or science can be merged into writing practice.  I don't normally buy a new writing curriculum each year, as I am so familiar with IEW's methodology that I can make our own writing assignments based on any subject that we wish to write about. However, I wanted to be a bit more systematic this year, especially for Little Man, who has learned so much IEW from listening to me teach his older siblings that I forget he himself has had very little formal IEW instruction!

I LOVE this book!  So happy we went this direction.  It dovetails so nicely with our history studies, and builds writing practice step by step.  It has a track for older students that requires more work, so it is easy to use with both boys at their respective levels.

We did a lot of good writing this past week.  Here Little Man is making his key word outline based on a paragraph on the Byzantine Empire:

And here is son C doing the same thing.  He had two paragraphs to outline, rather than one.  The following day they wrote their own paragraphs based on the outlines they had made.  We talked about quality adjectives, and found places in their paragraphs to "dress up" with these great adjectives.  The day after that they typed up and printed their own paragraphs.

Little Man is gluing his paragraphs into a bound book of blank pages, and adding pictures on the facing pages, so that by the end of the year he will have his very own hand-made history book!

Our Week in Review

 In this post I told how we are doing a "math hour" and an "English hour" every morning.  I am loving this because it encourages the kids to "work ahead" (almost never does a day's scheduled math work take the full hour, except for the oldest two) and do subject-related games or activities for the rest of the allotted hour.  This means seldom used games are now being used!  Little Man and I play a math related game almost every day.  It's fun!

This year, thank the Lord!, I have been able to keep up with teaching writing to the younger two boys together three days a week.  At least so far!  I am spending roughly a month on each of the Teaching Writing: Structure and Style units.  In September we worked through units 1 and 2 (they go together) and are currently working through unit 3, which is story writing.  This week we made an outline together of the story, The Lion and the Shepherd, and each of the boys copied the outline onto notebook paper.  From this outline they later re-wrote the story in their own words.  Next week we will add "dress ups" and type the finished stories.

Our four high schoolers get most of their daily writing homework from their English class at our co-op (which I teach!).   We have been studying poetry, and have a test coming up next week.  Here daughter G is making flashcards of all the poetic device definitions that will be on the test (surrounded by piles of clean folded laundry!).

We spent four weeks learning about Ancient Egypt, the land Moses grew up in.  This week we went back to the beginning and read about creation through Noah's flood from the book of Genesis, which Moses is believed to have authored.  We are only half done with this creation poster, but each of us gets to illustrate one square.

And at the end of the day, story time with dad.  He is currently reading the first Harry Potter book out loud to the whole family.  He does all the different voices and is a delight to listen to.  Truly!  (again, surrounded by piles of clean folded laundry!  While you listen, you fold...)

There were hard moments during this week, even hard whole days, but I am choosing to be grateful for all that was accomplished in our minds and souls in spite of the hard times.  God is faithful!

Our Week In Review

 This would be for last week. :-)


We did all the usual work, but focused on our writing assignments which we'd been working on for the past two weeks.  To wrap up our three week study of South America in the early 1800's, each of the children chose a South American country to write about.  The specifics of the assignment were as follows:

I specifically added the "one picture must stick out from your poster" part to give each of the children a chance to be artistic and creative.  I was curious how each child would choose to do this. 

Little Man chose to study and write about the country of Bolivia.  For one of the four pictures on his finished poster, he chose to put a map showing where Bolivia is located.  Here he is coloring in the country of Bolivia on a map of South America.

Sons G and L chose the countries of Peru and Ecuador, respectively.  Son G became fascinated with Machu Picchu, while son L was enthralled with the Nate Saint missionary/martyr story (he chose to write about missionary work in Ecuador for his fourth paragraph).  Son C, not pictured, chose to write about Venezuela.

Daughter G chose the country of Brazil.  She had such FUN with this assignment ~ spending hours and hours researching this particular country, finding pictures that would adequately represent the incredible flora and fauna of the Amazon region, and choosing the subject for her "famous person" paragraph (retired soccer star, Pele).  Her poster is the only one completely finished.  Unit celebration is fast approaching this weekend, so everyone else is finishing up with their poster assembly this week!

I love writing assignments.  They can encompass so much learning from many different disciplines.  We did quite a bit of internet research, so I had the opportunity to help direct the children in how to do this.  We did use some info from wikipedia, but talked about how usually that source is just overwhelming because there is almost too much info.  Certainly for the scope of their paragraphs, I discouraged wiki.  We found books at the library, we read, we outlined, we wrote, we edited, we typed, we printed pictures, we drew pictures, we worked a bit on graphic design ~ the laying out of all the pieces on posterboard.  Such great learning!  And the children really know about their country of choice, so much more than they would have known otherwise.

I can't wait to display these posters at our unit celebration!

William Wilberforce

We have been quite awed this past week as we have learned more about William Wilberforce's campaign to end slavery in England in the late 18th century.  If you are not familiar with his story, get thee to a library (or just go on amazon!) as soon as possible and get a book about him.  You may have heard of, or seen, the movie Amazing Grace, about his life.  It is a wonderful movie that gets many details right.  But a well researched biography has more of the details right, and gives you a lot more info than a 2 hour movie can.

Our two middle schoolers read parts of a book about Wilberforce, while our high school daughter read an entire (short) biography of him written by John Piper.

Of all the interesting, amazing, noteworthy (insert other superlatives here) aspects of Wilberforce's life, the one that stands out to me the most is his tenacity and perseverance.  He became a member of the British Parliament at the tender age of 21, and took up the cause of abolishing slavery about 7 years later.  From that point on, for 46 years, he worked tirelessly to outlaw slavery.  FORTY SIX YEARS!  That was a LOT of "no" votes, a lot of friendships lost, a lot of ridicule endured, a lot of rejection.  But he never gave up.  He never quit.  He never said, "I think I've done enough."  He persevered until slavery was finally abolished just a few months before his death in 1833.

And throughout this 46 year struggle, he lived his life with an incredible sense of joy.

Truly, his was a life filled with God's amazing grace.

Our three older children are all writing short essays about Wilberforce this week.  Here is our daughter's opening paragraph:

"William Wilberforce is best known for working tirelessly for the abolition of slavery.  Surprisingly Wilberforce did not always live his life with purpose.  In his youth he was a spoiled, selfish libertine, who was completely uninterested in God.  He had inherited a large fortune from his father, and used it, unfortunately, on gambling and dining at fancy London clubs.  Having some interest in politics, in 1780 when he was only twenty one, he got a spot in Parliament, starting his political career.  Later Wilberforce commented, "The first years I was in Parliament I did nothing - nothing to any purpose.  My own distinction was my darling object."  Then, at age 25, he was converted to Christ by Isaac Milner, who was his old schoolmaster.  Wilberforce felt God so powerfully that he went in secret to talk to John Newton because he felt confused about his calling.  He wasn't sure if he should continue his political career or serve God by becoming a minister.  Wilberforce had known Newton since he was thirteen, as Newton was his childhood pastor.  Newton encouraged Wilberforce and hinted that he could, indeed, serve God by serving in politics.  Introduced to the horrors of slavery, William Wilberforce launched himself into the campaign for its abolition in 1787."

Doesn't this make you want to read the rest?!?

Last week we read about this incredible man and saw the movie Amazing Grace.  This week we are writing about him.  I am thankful for the opportunity to dig a little deeper into the life of such an obedient and faithful Christian!

(and as an aside to this: for the first time in several years we are not using a packaged IEW product for our writing, but I am creating all our writing assignments myself based on IEW methods.  I am LOVING this opportunity to more closely tie our writing with our history!  Finally following the wise adage of Marcia Somerville (author of Tapestry of Grace) to "read, think/discuss, write." Whoo-hoo!)

Central Command

I have been getting an astonishing amount of school prep done for this fall.  Astonishing compared to last summer, when I got virtually nothing done ahead of time (extenuating circumstances).  So thankful for the time this summer to get ready!  It makes such a difference in my outlook and anticipation of the year.  This is my "central command" for school prepping.  I have been focusing on our history/geography studies, as that provides the backbone for everything else we do.

On the chair you can see a tall stack of books with green dots on the spines.  Those are our new books for this go round through Year 3 of Tapestry of Grace (19th century).  Last time we went through Year 3 we did not have a high schooler, so this time we needed the high school level books.  I was able to purchase a good portion of them used.  Woot!  The green dots signify that these are Year 3 books, and on the dot is written what learning level the book is for, and which unit during the year it is used.  The large green binder is my Tapestry Unit 1 teacher book, and as I "dotted" all the new books, I went through the binder and marked the books that we own (many!) and the books that I will have to get from the library.

Under my reading glasses is a weekly planning book that I made myself.  It is not a planner in the sense that we could use it to write in all our assignments for every subject, it is simply a tool to help me plan out each Tapestry week.  What books will each of my children be reading for literature that week?  The ones Tapestry recommends, or a substitution?  What will each child's writing assignment be?  What hands on activities will we do, or movies will we watch that coincide with our history studies?  Is there a president to add to our Presidents Books that week?  New states added to the union?  Are there any "extra" things that we already own that would be fun to fit in that week?  I printed off 36 copies of this single sheet planner and took them to FedEx/Kinko's to be spiral bound.  I have been happily filling in things for all 36 weeks, but focusing on the first 9 weeks of the year (unit 1).

We belong to a Tapestry virtual co-op,  and as it happens this year our very-end-of-summer vacation will cause us to miss the first three weeks of class.  I had to think through how to handle that ~ whether or not to require reading/schoolwork while on vacation (no), how to get the children up to speed on the flow of history up to the point where we will jump in (Story of the World audio cd's while driving), and how to handle our first week of school, which will be week 5 of unit 1.  By God's grace I have a plan in place that I think is doable for us, given the fact that we'll be getting home and jumping right in at full speed with tired, travel-weary bodies and minds.

Long time readers will know that we love, love, love Institute for Excellence in Writing (IEW) and have used it for our writing curriculum for many years.  For the first time this year we are not using a new IEW product as the spine to our writing, but I am creating my own writing assignments for each child the IEW "way", using topics from our history studies as the content for each assignment.  We will be writing on topics that we read about and discussed the week before, allowing us to follow the read-discuss-write sequence that Tapestry so strongly recommends.  I am so excited about this!!  It has been really fun for me to go through each child's books and ponder the best writing assignment at their level that will bring everything together in their minds (Lord willing!), and help develop the way they think about key ideas. 

I LOVE HOME SCHOOLING!!!!!

At least at this moment. ;-)

I love making plans, and I love even more seeing them bear fruit in my children's minds and hearts.  To disciple one's children, and see first hand the character development as it is happening, is such an incredible privilege.

Learning to Read with Primary Arts of Language

I am thankful for our Little Man for many reasons, but one of them is that because of him, we still had one child young enough to use Primary Arts of Language, published by IEW just last spring! I have not yet met an IEW product that was not excellently written, and this is no exception. It is a fun, gentle, well laid out way to introduce reading, writing, spelling, and literature to young children (not necessarily all at the same time), and I have loved using it with Little Man!

First, a warning. This is a long post with lots of pictures. If you want the full explanation, continue reading. Click on pictures to enlarge them and see more detail. If you simply want the bottom line, scroll to the bottom!

The whole program consists of three Teacher Books (one for reading, one for writing, and one for the games that you make as you go), student workpages in the form of e-books to download and print, and a "phonetic farm" folder with stickers that the student puts on one at a time as they are learned.




Here is Little Man with his phonetic farm folder last spring! We started this program very slowly toward the end of his kindergarten year, and are still working through it a year later because that's just the pace that fits our lifestyle at the moment. :0)

Each day there is a "work page" as part of the lesson. This is the part the child is to do independently. At the beginning the work pages are super easy, such as filling in color names like this:



And then they get progressively harder. Here is one from Lesson 20:



PAL also utilizes the use of games to reinforce the concepts taught each day, which can be made very simply out of manila file folders. The game "boards" and game pieces are pre-printed and provided. I have heard that some moms make all the games ahead of time, but I have been making them as we come to them. I put the game pieces in a letter sized envelope, and tape this envelope to the back of the file folder. Everything is kept together this way, all ready to play the game the next time! This was a game we played that reinforced a specific spelling rule.



Here is a game that teaches prepositions. We use an emptied out box (muffins in our case!) to put the pieces under, or on, or in.

"..the ant is under the box..."

Sometimes we play the game with a chair instead of the box, and Little Man gets on the chair, or crawls under the chair, or runs around the chair, or jumps over the chair.. He loves it when we play the game this way!

As part of each lesson, new words are written on index cards and taught to the student. Before very many lessons have passed, you have enough cards to begin stringing together simple sentences. Our Little Man felt such success when he could begin to read "real" sentences!


So, here's the bottom line:

If you have used another program in the past with great success, and you are comfortable with it, stick with it. Why fix it if it ain't broken? For anyone used to a simpler program (such as myself, who used How to Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons for my other children), PAL does have a lot of moving parts. However, the author, Jill Pike, has done an admirable job of making it as open-and-go as possible (or, as she would say, "fall out of bed easy"!) and it can't be beat in its comprehensive approach to all the arts of language. Also, this uses the sight-sound method of reading instruction, which means that it blends together the benefits of learning phonics with the benefits of learning sight words, so that the student is able to read real sentences very quickly. In my mind, this is a superior method to teaching phonics only (or, heaven forbid, sight words only!).

If you have only one child you are schooling and wish to do a complete lesson, with all its parts, in one day, go for it! But it is very flexible, and can be adapted to your needs and the amount of time you have each day. We now do the reading and writing lesson on one day (about 30 minutes), and the story/literature lesson another day (another 30 minutes). I love that the games, once learned, can be played with an older sibling, and the daily reading sheets can become future reading practice. On extra busy days, that's all the "reading" we do. Review is built in, and all the pieces of reading, writing, spelling, literature, and thinking skills are woven together beautifully.

If you are looking for that type of program, you will be very happy with Primary Arts of Language!

Meanwhile, in the writer's class.....

I have shared what the younger children are learning each week in co-op, but have not yet shared about the writing class. We are working through another IEW product, SICC-B, which stands for Student Intensive Continuation Course, level B (which, for you IEW fans, is designed to follow SWI-B - Student Writing Intensive, level B. This was a natural progression for us since we did SWI-B last year.)

For any new readers reading this, the co-op we are in is a small, 3 family group. We have 5 students 3rd grade and younger who are in a Five In a Row class, and 6 students 5th grade and above who are in the writing class. We take turns meeting in our homes. If you can't find an IEW co-op near you, but you want to be in one, form your own like we did! Just find one or two like-minded families and plan it out. We did agree on some ground rules (which I think is very important), and it is working beautifully. It also makes IEW products more affordable for us, as we split the cost three ways and co-own them!

Each week we listen to Andrew Pudewa teach us about writing on the instructional dvd, and then we either work on our outlines for the new assignment, do a bit of grammar instruction, or both. I love how IEW has so much grammar instruction built right in ~ it sticks so well when you learn about it in the context of writing! And often, we teachers will choose something we've noticed in the students' writing that is consistently incorrect or awkward, and teach to that.

Last Friday we learned about clauses and phrases. In class we throw around phrases like "who/which clause" and "because clause" pretty frequently, but many of the students were still unsure what a clause actually was. It's important to know about clauses for several reasons, among them, knowing why and how to use punctuation correctly. So to make this a bit more interactive and hopefully, fun (!) for the students, I had them wear signs describing them as either a dependent clause, an independent clause, or a phrase. Then the "clauses" and "phrases" held sentence strips in the proper order. I started with the oldest students (8th graders) being the clauses first. This allowed the younger students to hear and see the sentences being manipulated correctly before attempting it themselves.

Here we have, "If it snows tonight, we can go sledding." Both dependent and independent clauses have subjects and verbs, but an independent clause can stand alone as a complete (simple) sentence, while a dependent clause cannot. After several sentences like this, everyone could "hear" the pause after the dependent clause, as if something else was begging to be said.

Then we moved the strips around. Could we say, "We can go sledding if it snows tonight."?

Or how about this one: "Because we are out of milk, I'm going to the store." Does it mean the same thing if we say, "I'm going to the store because we are out of milk."?


If we take off the word "because", the remainder of the sentence now becomes an independent clause that can stand alone. I took some scissors and literally cut the word "because" off. Then we called more people up and had students holding individual words and mixing them all up in different ways! We talked about the value of the who/which clause and the because clause ~ that they help us combine two shorter sentences into a longer, more interesting one. We talked about how the punctuation would change if we rearranged the clauses, and took the scissors to the strips once again.


We made lots and lots of sentences and talked about what made them correct or incorrect. We identified all the subjects and verbs and sentence openers. We had fun goofing around a bit too. :-)


Here is son G's finished work from last week. It was from lessons 8-9 of SICC-B, a report on Clara Barton taken from multiple sources. The underlined and bolded words are the prescribed way of marking required elements in the report.

How One Small Thing Can Impact Your Life
by G, age 11

The youngest of seven children, Clara was small and shy. As a child, Clara gained interest in her father’s war stories. Interestingly, she nursed her brother David when he suffered a painful accident when she was eleven. Clara, who was a tomboy, proudly owned a pet turkey. Unlike most other kids her age, Clara Barton was homeschooled. One day Clara was skating when she wasn’t supposed to. She fell and injured herself and pain bolted through her like electricity. Now she knew what it was like to be hurt. When she was fifteen, she became a teacher. Isn’t that weird? Despite all this, Clara Barton was extremely shy and small.

When Clara Barton got older, she was appointed clerk of the patent office in Washington, D.C. She was deeply touched by all the wounded soldiers she noticed and wanted badly to help in some way. She became a nurse, serving often on the front lines, which was dangerous work. After learning that much of the fatal suffering was because of the scarcity of supplies on the front lines, she single handedly organized supply depots. Incredibly, Clara was appointed superintendent of nurses in 1864. All this happened because she worked in the patent office and discovered the horrible conditions of war.

One day, when the war was over, Clara Barton received a vehement letter, which was from her hometown, that read: “Miss Barton, I haven’t heard from my son in weeks. The government believes he’s missing.” Immediately Clara began to vigorously hunt for missing soldiers. After everyone else went home, Clara didn’t lose confidence. She kept searching. She found men. She succeeded. Clara Barton’s nursing and searching eventually led to the Red Cross, but that’s another story. See how one letter can impact your entire life?

Our Week in Review, and a new twist on Kindergarten

Last week we had a whirlwind tour through the remainder of Genesis as we read about the Patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph). Lots of interesting stories and situations in Genesis!! I had to constantly read ahead and did phrase a few things differently for our 8 and 5 year olds. Our older two children are also doing the same reading silently on their own, so they got the whole scoop, including sex, homosexuality, and circumcision just in this week alone!

Our history studies this year have us on a very aggressive Bible reading schedule, but I am determined to do all the Old Testament reading outloud so all our children can hear it. It is an amazing review for me too, and I am learning TONS every day.

Here a few pictures of the children's Bible journals from the last two weeks. This is daughter G's drawing of Noah and the animals coming out of the ark:



The same picture by son C:


And son L:


This is son G's Tower of Babel:


And here is Little Man's! His tower comes complete with cranes. ;-) But notice the talking bubbles coming from the two people at the bottom of the picture. He drew different symbols in each bubble to show that they couldn't understand one another!!


Though I could have spent several whole days on our history/Bible studies, we did do other subjects too. Here is son G working in his Fix It notebook. Have I mentioned how much I love Fix It? On the left you can see the 4 passages he fixes each week. He marks corrections right on the paper using the proper editing symbols, goes over corrections with me, and then re-writes the corrected sentences on the right hand side using his best cursive. This is all we are doing for grammar this year, and though I sometimes worry that I'm not hitting grammar hard enough, if we can accomplish the same learning with less pain, I'm all for it!



Daughter G is a pretty good typist already, but sons G and L are just learning keyboarding this year. Here is L doing his daily typing practice (which he LOVES):


In an ongoing effort to fit quality kindergarten time in with Little Man, I stumbled upon a routine that seems to be working really well for he and I, and that is to do a week's worth of math workbook pages in one day, a week's worth of handwriting workbook pages in one day, and a week's worth of phonics pages in one day. In some ways this goes against my own educational principles of frequent review in small chunks. BUT, he does get math practice, handwriting practice, and phonics practice in other ways on the other days. It's just the workbook pages that we are hitting only once per week.

The reason for this is the workbook pages require me to be right there, teaching and guiding, while he can be more independent doing math or writing related activities on his own. Here we are on "math day" doing all of lesson 5 in his workbook. We are still working on one to one correspondence, number recognition, and learning to write numerals.


And here he is on another day, sorting and counting little plastic fish.



This is a language arts activity he can do on his own that teaches opposites. Each set of two pieces is self correcting because they only fit with each other and not with any other piece.




I'm thankful for all we are learning, and for all the ways God helps me each and every day!