Against the Grain

2012 in Photos

January: We tore out the ceiling and the terrible carpet of our basement on New Year's Eve and let the professionals do most of the rest. It was ready to paint by the end of the month. This is my new office, newly framed.

February: We did the painting ourselves (and by we, I mostly mean Dan), which took the better part of 2 months. 700 sq feet plus ceiling is A LOT.

March: Disney World with my parents!

April: The carpet gets installed and the boys start rolling.

May (well, I cheated, this was April 29th): Peter's first communion

June: Planting the garden

July: Hot days in the yard

August: Annual trip to the cabin and Lake Itasca

September: A visit from old friends 

October: Digging for fossils at the Lilydale Brickyards with fellow homeschoolers

November: Tim's love affair with puzzles begins

December: Holidazzle Parade: Peter and Leo as Pinocchios, with my sister and I ahead pushing the first banner

Thanks to Dwija for the inspiration and link-up.

The Puzzler

Out of nowhere Tim has become a puzzle-solving machine. He still doesn't understand concepts such as edge pieces always going along the edge, but he makes up for it with tenacity. We have a handful of wooden puzzles with cutouts and he got so fast at those that I had to dump three puzzles out together to confuse him long enough to get something done while he was working. Next I got a couple puzzles back that we'd lent to my SIL. One is a box of 16 pieces that turn into 4 groups of mother-baby animal pairs. The second is a 48 piece zoo counting puzzle that has 12 groups of four pieces that all connect into a seven-foot long puzzle. I'd give him one of the mother-baby 4 piece puzzles and once those were easy, I gave him all 16 pieces at the same time and he needed to sort them.  This week he has begged to do the zoo puzzle all day long. He's done it at least 3 or 4 times a day and would prefer more. What's worked best is if we put little piles of each set per number in order -- then he connects the four 1-elephant pieces, attaches the 2-giraffes, and so on. Then he can attach them independent from us.  If we spread all 48 pieces on the floor face up, he'll get quite a few of them but begs us for help that he only sort of needs. Today I got tired of tripping on the zoo puzzle and got out a 25 piece bunny puzzle. The first time, I sorted the pieces into 3 groups and guided him as he guessed at it. The second time I sorted them again and only had to help him once or twice. It is so fun at this age to see him catching on so quickly!  

He's also begun putting more words together. My favorite was when I asked him where Leo sat in the car and he said "Leo sit next me." Comprehension and 4 words! He's using his own name much more often -- he usually calls himself Bimmy/Mimmy. He recognizes the capital letter T as the start to his name. He understands the numbers 1 and 2 and also says the numbers 3, 8, 9, and 0 but doesn't associate them with their numerals or concepts. He hums "Twinkle Twinkle" and throws an end word in here and there but doesn't seem to know the Alphabet Song yet.

Homeschooling Report - Week 8

We’re on week 8 of school and it wasn’t until I read my last entry that I realized how much I’ve adjusted since we started.

 

Math: Last week I ditched Saxon 5/4 and began a combination of Beast Academy 3A and Singapore Primary Mathematics 3A for Peter. He was dreading math and it was depressing me because math is the last thing I find boring and the problem was that it was mind-numbingly dull for him and rarely challenging. Looking ahead, the problems were going to cover more new material but it never looked interesting. Last week he went through half of Beast Academy’s first chapter on polynomials while I waited for the Singapore materials to be shipped. Since BA won’t be released quickly enough for him to use that indefinitely, my plan is for Singapore to be his spine math program and we’ll do Beast off and on to break it up. So far this week, Peter’s finished the Singapore pages I assigned long before Leo finished his math, so Peter’s gone over to Beast and done a few pages there too both Monday and Tuesday. Today his Singapore problems took longer so he stopped with that. Saxon has made me feel that it’s important to really know math facts so I’ve been giving Peter three options daily – he can do the Singapore mental math sheet from the Home Instructor’s Guide (there aren’t enough to do this daily), he can do Xtramath online, or he can go over x3, x4, and x5 flashcards with me. So far, he’s chosen flashcards twice and the mental math once. Since the first two Singapore chapters cover most of the same stuff he’s been doing in Saxon so far, I’m having him just do the Intensive Practice book for those 2 chapters, all this week. Next week he’ll start chapter three, with multiplication and division up to x5 and we’ll slow down and use the textbook and workbook too. I was excited to realize that he’ll be doing long division before Thanksgiving. Cool! Leo will be sticking with Saxon 2 until it’s done in February. I’m letting him choose between his fact sheet and Xtramath. Although Xtramath takes much longer, he’s chosen that over his fact sheet. Screen time vs. writing, I suppose. He almost has all the addition facts memorized.

 

Science: Nature study wasn’t working for us. It’s depressing when your kids whine about going outside to look at bugs. I switched to using “Building Foundations of Scientific Understanding”, which is a very wordy book geared towards teaching K-2^nd grade but can be adjusted for older kids.  It covers biology, chemistry, physics, and earth & space science in a fundamental way without cheesy experiments. Lack of cheesiness was a requirement at our house. Thanks to Pinterest to help me find them, the wordy book has been summarized, fleshed out, and explained in various blogs. There’s a lot of flexibility in what “thread” of science to study, so long as they balance out eventually because they all build on each other to an extent. The intention is to cover the 41 topics over three years. We’ll probably do it in two since the kids are older, but I like knowing that however long the material takes, we can take. There’s a 3^rd-5^th grade volume that incorporates more writing but this one is mostly talking to the kids, getting them asking questions, and doing demonstrations. We end up covering science once or twice a week depending on whether we go to a nature center or other field trip instead some weeks. It works wonderfully to have science toward the end of the day when the boys are getting squirrely. I’m hoping to write out what exactly we’ve done so I have a good record of it when Tim’s old enough and I don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Today we were all whiny and tired so I introduced gravity by showing them a 20 minute “Magic School Bus” video and then having them drop balls of different weights off the couch. I don’t plan to do that often, but on a sleepy day, I was glad for the option.

 

Writing: It took one day of Leo writing out his key word outline retelling for me to realize IEW wasn’t going to work for him this year. He just flipped out over writing four sentences at once and it wasn’t worth the fight to force that multiple times a week. I’m sticking with it for Peter but with Leo, I’m doing two days of narration (I’ve been reading him about a chapter of “Mr. Popper’s Penguins” and stopping to have him tell it back to me every 2 or 3 pages) and two days of copywork. So far for copywork, I’ve given him a long sentence to write with things like capitalized names to make note of. Last week we talked about nouns and I started having him underline the nouns. I’m realizing now that the long sentences tend to be trickier to pick nouns out so I think I’ll switch over to a couple short, easy sentences. I’d like to work him up to about four sentences in a sitting by the end of the year. I won’t do a formal grammar program with him, but we’ll do some basic parts of speech within the copywork.

 

Music: Piano lessons have been more sporadic than we intended because the boys don’t want to play what Dan assigns to them, but they’ve been playing random other things. Not ideal, but we’ll have to figure out whether we want to force them to do it right or let them just mess around on their own. They’ve been learning about various composers and really getting interested in them. They ask me to turn on the classical station in the car and at bedtime. We went to a kids’ concert about Beethoven, so now they’ve been reading about him. I got a wonderful book called “How They Croaked” that explains in wonderfully-gory ways how a bunch of famous people died and we’ve all learned a ton from that one. Yay for soap and antibiotics. So my formal read-about-a-composer-each-month and listen to their music plan isn’t happening exactly, but whatever is happening is better.

 

Reading: I began assigning daily literature for them to read. They have to fill out the “did I like this?” form afterward, but otherwise they don’t narrate them or do any sort of report. Peter generally gets a chapter a day from a Newbery award winning novel. Leo I give mostly picture books of various levels of difficulty. I try to remind them about their books while I attempt to get Tim to nap and most of the time, they read their selections then. Peter tends to read more at a sitting but less often. Usually about halfway through his books, he speeds through the last half while in bed instead of waiting to read it over a second week.

 

The biggest hurdle so far has been getting through all the subjects I feel we should cover on days when we aren’t home the whole time. I didn’t sign them up for too much but I neglected to realize how many things come up and need to be worked around. I’m on the board of my MOMS Club, so I have to go to the monthly business meetings. Some months our board meetings can only be scheduled during the day, too. Peter started speech therapy at the neighborhood school, which is currently 25 minutes once a week, but it ends up eating an hour in the best part of the morning. Thankfully, his speech improved a lot over the summer (with no help from us) and he’ll be graduating out of therapy this fall. Some doctor/dentist/orthodontist appointments need to be during the day. It’s just tricky to avoid everything. One extracurricular that’s going much better than I expected is swimming. Swimming runs 10 Tuesdays from 4:35-5:05 and if we get there early, they can have free swim. There is only one other kid in Peter’s class and 2 others in Leo’s. They’re getting tons of attention and the locker rooms are nearly empty. It’s much less chaotic than going on Saturday and it’s late enough to finish school time and let Tim nap. Tim seems to be phasing out naps and then at least I’ll be able to schedule things at 2pm without worrying about messing up naptime. I signed them up for wrestling late November – early February. I know nothing about wrestling but it’s once a week, low key, at the same time for both boys,  cheap, local, and an appropriate time to climb all over people. Sounds perfect. We’ll probably return to swimming in the spring. We’ve gone to Homeschool Day at the indoor climbing wall both months and they LOVE it. They have a homeschool team for kids 8+ and a not-just-homeschool team for 6-7 year olds and if it didn’t cost a fortune, I’d probably sign them up. They can both get to the top of the 4 story walls no problem. 

What's Working and What Isn't

Our two-short-week warm-up to the school year will be done tomorrow and it feels
like we’re getting the hang of the new routine. Here are some highlights and lowlights.

Earlier this summer, I bought Motiventure’s
Summer Olympics program, then was too overwhelmed to implement it. I finally
got over that and made a list of all the chores I want the kids to do every day
plus another list of bonus point options. It’s basically a fun way to make them
do stuff – all carrots, no sticks. Instead of negotiating extra screen time or
allowance, they get points and competition. We’re only 3 days into it and I’m
worried that Leo’s going to quit trying if Peter beats him by a lot this week,
but they have been far more motivated than they ever have been before.
Everybody’s bringing dishes to the sink and carting laundry around the house.
They each brought garbage and recycling out to the alley enthusiastically
today. I’ll take it!

I’m speeding through ancient times to give
them backstory on how Rome got to where it was by 63BC when our history volume
begins. At first, I tried to get through a few pages, multiple times a day.
Both today and yesterday, they kept asking for more at once. I think I read 25
pages in one sitting today. I was going to wait until after a couple other
subjects, but they insisted we read first thing as we did in previous days. I’ve
been giving them blackline maps of the areas being discussed. Today they designed
their own Punic Wars on top of the map of the actual ones while I read about
them. So long as they can tell me what’s happening, I mostly let them do
things. I usually insist on sitting fairly still and they can’t read other
stuff. After all of today’s reading, we’re finished with ancient times and will
wait to start the new unit until Monday.

I think doing math with them is fun but I
doubt they agree. Peter gets through his math lesson but he treats it as
something to trudge through. Leo’s math has been wonky because I’ve had him
take an assessment every day (except when he forgot what even/odd was and I
spent a day going back over that) until we reach the point where things aren’t
obvious anymore. We hit the test for lesson 40 today and I’m going to stop my
accelerated approach now. I think he’d do fine at the next assessment (the one
that would cover lessons 35-40 and be taken with lesson 45) but starting with
lesson 41, the material looks like concepts he could benefit from that aren’t
as fluffy. The math facts are still ones he knows but he isn’t always able to
write all 25 in under a minute at this point. The book has 132 lessons, so we’ve
skipped almost the first third of the year and I think we’ll finish in
mid-February. My current plan is to switch him to Singapore and stick with that
through 2B. Then I might switch again to Beast Academy, which currently begins
with third grade. Hopefully the timing will work and the 4^th and 5^th
grade materials will be ready when he is. I will probably switch Peter to
Singapore next year, assuming using it for Leo is a good experience. Then
eventually, I’d move him to the Art of Problem Solving’s curriculum, which I
think starts with pre-algebra. Saxon (our current program) is just so bleh, I
can’t blame the kids for thinking math is dull. Both Saxon and Beast Academy
seem to make kids think more deeply about the concepts and avoid endless
drills. If they’re light on math facts, we could add in XtraMath or flashcards
or something.

My detailed plan for having baskets of
literature available has mostly flopped. Peter began reading a couple of them.
Leo has mostly ignored them. Neither usually reads much fiction and it’s harder
to insist that daytime reading be from the baskets than I thought. I might have
to schedule in literature time one afternoon a week or something where that’s
the only thing to do.

Art and Music have gone over very well.
Music is pretty bare-bones – we read about a new composer once a month and
listen to his/her works for an hour once a week. But the book of composers is
written well and fun. Art is a combination of art appreciation using
Child-Sized Masterpieces and projects from two books that give ideas on
recreating styles from famous artists. The boys enjoyed making watercolor bath
paintings today and got into mixing colors and trying different techniques. We’ll
do this once a week.

Spelling isn’t a favorite although I really
like the programs they’re each using. Leo’s is way too easy for him at this
point, but we’re moving quickly through this part and should reach things more
at his level by spring at the latest. I’m not sure why he isn’t loving it – it’s
certainly not because it’s too hard. All About Spelling does a great job making
it multi-sensory so it’s not like he’s stuck there writing endlessly. Peter’s
program has him self-correct and he’s come upstairs every day saying he has the
words all right even when he doesn’t. Yesterday he actually had 13/15 and today
was 14/15. I’ll just keep double-checking his work and hope that eventually he
gets better at correcting. It does seem like this level might work for him
after all. He might reach the end before the end of the school year, but that
would be fine.

I decided to dump Pictures in Cursive and
get Handwriting without Tears books for both boys (grade 3 cursive for Peter
and the 1^st grade one for Leo). That cursive isn’t pretty, but it’s
taught in a sensible way and that will get the job done. Leo’s handwriting
could use work and I don’t want to constantly focus on it so his own handwriting
book will give a place for that.

I think I’ll sell the Life of Fred book I
bought because I’m not sure where it would fit in and the little I showed the
boys they weren’t impressed.

The Institute for Excellence in Writing’s
TWSS program has gone over well. Peter totally gets it and makes key word
outlines super-fast after 3 days. Leo thinks through it a bit more and then
comes up with probably better word choices. I’m doing the writing for Leo at
this point – when they start having to write out their version, I’ll have Leo
do the final draft as copywork. They haven’t complained about the writing and
that was a big hangup for each of them in the past, so yay!

Timing and transitions are getting smoother
but we still need to work on that. We’ve started fairly close to 9am (except
yesterday when we went to 8am Mass and ran a bunch of errands along our walk
home and started at 10:30) and we’re always done by 4. We end up taking
probably a 90 minute break in the middle when we make lunch, eat it, and I
nurse Tim to sleep. Any work still remaining in the afternoon gets done in fits
and starts. I want to consistently get the core things done before lunch. I’m
trying to figure out what the best order for subjects is to minimize crankiness
and whining. I do think that having a big protein-filled breakfast helps both
for their moods and the chance that they don’t beg for snacks all day. We’re
doing okay on that front – I plan for late afternoon teatime and try to keep
any other eating to fruits and veggies if they’re desperate.

I realized today that we haven’t had the
horrible outbursts from them that we typically have, especially at the
beginning of the school year. They don’t skip off happily to bedtime, but they
don’t scream about it either. Mornings are calm and that’s definitely new. It’s
really, really nice that evenings are for fun things and not homework. I loved
letting them run through the sprinkler until 8pm last night instead of worrying
that they’d be exhausted and miserable if I didn’t drag them in. They’re going
to bed a bit later than they used to and I have to wake them up at 8am (but Dan
used to get them up at 6:30).

I went to the Y with Tim at 6pm tonight
while Dan brought the older boys to the dentist and I think that’s going to
have to be more the standard than my former 10am classes. It’ll be harder to
hit my 12 visits per month, but if I go once each weekend, I think I’ll be able
to do it with some effort. I should be able to get away with bringing all the
boys once a week and maybe still bring Tim (who likes it there!) the other
times.

My work schedule has been almost
non-existent since we went on vacation at the end of July. Dan’s summer job
made that possible but I need to start back up again. Fall is always tricky
because it’s the peak of canning season. One of my two clients cut back a lot
so I haven’t had as much to do, but I haven’t done the project I do have.
Somehow it’ll work itself out.

This definitely wouldn’t be the case for
all children, but my kids have been happy as clams never leaving the
neighborhood. Leo’s going to appreciate the field trips, as the most extroverted
person in the house, but I think Peter could stay here indefinitely without
complaint. For that reason, it’s probably important that we do drag him away,
but staying home is not a struggle with either of them. Next week we start
field trips – I think we have a 2 hour nature center cidering class on Friday.
The following week I might bring them to the homeschool day at the indoor
climbing center and the co-op has a park playdate on Friday. I’m trying not to
go overboard with outside-the-house stuff until we get our feet under us at
home.

Now that I better understand how much math
we’ll get through, I went through the calendar and counted out holidays and
weeks and whatnot and realized that we’re going to have more school weeks than
chapters in a few subjects. We have 36 weeks (5 are 4 days and 2 are 3 days,
plus a 37^th week is 2 days and I’m counting this week and last week
as a single week) in the year. Our religion program is 30 chapters, music and
art are 32. Peter’s math will take the whole year if we do 9 lessons every 10
school days. History has 7 units and suggests about 4 weeks each, but it’s
flexible. Everything else is fuzzy and goes as long as I want. Knowing that, we
might stop a couple things during December and focus more on Advent and
Christmas stuff. In addition to the obvious religion options, maybe we could
look at customs throughout the world or something. It’s nice to know there’s
some leeway. I haven’t figured out how things will work on days where we’ll be
gone most of the morning. Science classes obviously take the place of some
science classes for the week. Fun days are a little trickier, but if they’re
with other homeschoolers I won’t feel guilty about counting them. Once a month
I have MOMS Club business meetings I’ll need to attend and other things like
that will come up. I can probably flip the day and do the core subjects while
Tim’s napping but I’ll need to decide whether to cover other subjects in the
evening or skip them.

Leo has always been a child of extremes.
When he was four, he studied maps. For hours, he laid on the floor, tracing
roads and adding features. He kept that up the entire fall that Tim was a baby.
It was really handy with a newborn. He can still tell people how to get places
all over the Twin Cities. This past winter into summer, it’s been electronics
and rockets. He has done everything with his snap circuits set and now reads
Dan’s college electronics book for fun. Dan ordered parts and the three of them
plan to build an altimeter they can put in one of their model rockets. A month
ago, he began composing music. Sometimes he copies notes from other pieces.
Usually he looks at other music to see what it looks like and learn about
crescendos and key signatures and everything else. It took a few weeks before
he knew about measures and how many beats they should have and now it’s
considerably easier for Dan to play the pieces the boys write. Peter has gotten
into the same things this year, but with Leo it’s more of a constant obsession.
If we were unschooling, we would be doing music theory and electronics all day.
The music writing has led to piano playing – Dan is now giving them lessons because
they finally see the value in being able to create the sounds they have in
their heads. Making them practice the beginner pieces and not random other
things is the challenge. It feels really weird telling them to stop composing
music so we can have our spelling lessons, but really, Leo at least would sit
at the table surrounded by sheet music all day. This definitely falls into the
category of weird but not too bad hobby. It’s cheaper than building rockets.

So far, I haven’t felt twitchy to get out
of the house either. Running errands is harder – so far it’s been easier to
wait for Dan to come home than to try to work it into the day when no one wants
to join me at the grocery store anyway. But the days are busy enough that I don’t
feel stuck here. With the boys helping more on chores, I’m doing better at
keeping up with what’s left. We usually finish around the time I need to figure
out dinner, so that hasn’t become any more of a problem than it used to be. I
like not interrupting Tim’s nap to pick the boys up from school 2+ times a
week. It looks like Peter’s speech therapy is going to be switched over to our
neighborhood elementary school without too many hiccups. I have spent less time
online during the day than I used to. Tim seems fine with everything. He plays,
he gets into our materials sometimes. He helps me cook. He has taken over the
fireplace mini-broom and steals the dustpan so he can sweep on his own. We
sometimes put him in underwear to leave the house and haven’t had a horrible
disaster of that (yet) but I still put diapers on him if I can’t hover over him
out of the house.

So my day 5 opinion is that this is going
to be the right move for our family. I’m enjoying it more than not and I like
the extra time I have with my big boys. No one has asked to go back to school.
So far so good!

A Doozy of a Week

In hindsight, I should have waited until after Labor Day to start
school. This week has been a choppy bunch of craziness and our school days were
the only part of that I had much control over. But when I decided to start
August 29^th, I didn’t know that my mom’s surgery would be on the 27^th.
I didn’t know when our friends would come to town. I didn’t know when all the
peaches and pears would be ready to can. Then I didn’t want to start waffling
and make the kids think they could talk me into shifting things around. I had
thought I’d be going to the cabin next weekend and wanted to make sure we got
some school days in before that. But after all that’s happened this week, I can’t
imagine getting the kids packed up, fitting in a partial school day on
Thursday, driving 200 miles, sleeping somewhere unusual without Dan for bedtime
backup, then driving 200 miles home three days later. It’s just not in any of
our best interests. So we’ll go back to school for a four day week on Tuesday
and should be calm enough to catch up on the things we dropped when our friends
were able to come a few hours earlier than expected.

 

This afternoon after they left, all the stress of everything that’s
happened whacked me and I felt like I could have slept the rest of the day.
Instead, I ran a bunch of errands without any children and at least crossed a
bunch of stuff off my mental to-do list. I got free cocoa for my birthday too!

 

I haven’t talked much about my mom’s hospital stay. In early
August, she went to the doctor to have a lump checked out. Shortly thereafter,
she had a biopsy and found out it was definitely breast cancer. She waited
until after a visit from out-of-state cousins and had a double mastectomy on
Monday. I was frustrated that I couldn’t find a way to be at the hospital with
her during that day, but my dad, sister, BIL, and uncles were all there and she
didn’t get out of surgery until evening when I was able to visit anyway. Tuesday
my MIL and SIL could watch the boys so I was able to stay most of the day. My
dad has had some health issues over the years but my mom has always been really
healthy. It’s become very clear that she’s the one who holds the family
together since my dad isn’t nearly as good at keeping us informed as to what’s
going on. The ups and downs over the past couple weeks have been pretty scary
as first there was loads of bad news, then more reports would come and negate
the previous thoughts. I’ve been grateful to have my sister to freak out with
and it’s been wonderful to see how many people came to visit and let all of us
know they are praying and thinking of her.

We're getting a hefty dose of socialization

Rather than be concerned that I'm skipping what would have been our third day of school (along with today's afternoon) because we have friends in town, I'll just say that my 8 and 6 year old boys will be playing constantly with other 8 and 6 year old boys for the next 3 days. At 14 hours/day, that should be equivalent to at least a week or two worth of socialization that they would have had in a school classroom, right?

We attended a homeschool annual picnic on Sunday with 300 others from about 50 families (why yes, this is a Catholic group, how did you guess?) and found 2 other families with lower school kids from our kids' former school. One of them even has a third grader that Peter knew and the mom worked with both boys in the after school program last year (and Dan still teaches her older kids). It was great to see familiar faces and I'll probably ask if the third grader can come over and play some afternoon once we're all settled.  

For my boys, who haven't typically made close friends in their classes, I think homeschooling will help them develop better friendships than they had while in school. We'll see the same kids every couple weeks at co-op get-togethers and we'll finally have TIME to invite kids over if they want.

As for today, we made it through our morning basket time (prayers and history reading today), math, spelling, handwriting, music, and piano practice (Leo) before our college friends arrived. That was a couple more things done before noon than we accomplished yesterday. I wasn't going to get around to music and the boys kept asking about it. Okey-dokey! We're an art project, a Leo religion lesson, and a few history readings behind where I'd planned, but we're looking at a 4 day weekend and I'll let them know we need to fit those in here or there.

I'm excited to spend time with friends who somehow share our science backgrounds, most of our politics, my opinions on birth and breastfeeding, and know what it's like to have 3 small boys. Ahhh! I love the way that with good friends, it doesn't matter how long you go between visits, they always feel familiar.

Our First Day

            I vaguely recall Dan leaving the
house at 6:35 this morning and being grateful that he could leave without the
hassle of waking, feeding, and coaxing the boys into the car before the sun
came up. I didn’t wake up until the alarm went off at 8 and I had to wake the
boys up even then. I made everybody smoothies and eventually the big boys got
dressed and we took our first day photos outside.

            All of my pre-first day teaching has
been during Tim’s naps, so I wasn’t sure how much more difficult he would make
things. We prayed the first decade of the rosary (which Peter declared he’d
done every day after lunch last year – news to me). Leo wasn’t an active
participant, shall we say, and Tim thought the beads were an excellent
accessory. They were excited about the rainbow paper I got for them to scratch
off while I read the ancient history text. I’d stop mid-sentence and they
generally knew what I was going to say and were listening.

            Peter said he didn’t want to do math
downstairs. I had both boys do their timed fact sheets at the table then I told
Peter he could go in his room instead and he was fine with that. Leo’s odd/evens
lesson used pattern blocks and Tim had a ball with them. Of course he thought
they were all his and we had to coax blocks from him. The number he knows best
is 2 and we’d request 2 blocks at a time and he’d oblige.

            For both math and spelling, Peter
finished considerably faster than Leo and I suspect that will be the case
indefinitely. Leo’s spelling lessons are supposed to be no more than 15-20
minutes, but today he went ballistic when I did not agree that he had mastered
all the sounds of the Y phonogram and I didn’t want to count tantrum time as
part of the lesson. I’d like to think that phonogram freakouts won’t be a daily
occurrence, but I’ll have to figure out whether that timing will be absolute or
actual lesson time. I don’t want him to think that he can putz the whole time
and never get anywhere.

            Peter got all his spelling words right
on the first try and if that continues for a few lessons, I’ll look into
selling his current level and replacing it with the next one (he’s doing
Phonetic Zoo B). He tested between the two levels and I didn’t want to
frustrate him and make it too hard.

            It was 12:15 by the time the
spelling brouhaha was over and we all had leftover taco soup and chips for
lunch. I think part of Leo’s problem was that he was hungry, but I don’t want
to let him snack constantly as he’d prefer to do. He often eats only a small
part of his breakfast and if he does that, I’ll probably leave it out and
insist he eat that if he’s starving before lunch. I’d prefer to skip a morning
snack but have an afternoon teatime to cut down on the pre-dinner crazies.

            I managed to stay off the computer
and the phone until lunch.

            It was 1:15 by the time we got going
again and I knew Leo would be picked up at 1:30. We got through the next
history section before he left with my SIL who’d promised him a trip to the
electricity museum. I then got Tim to sleep (I would have earlier but didn’t
want to be interrupted when my SIL came) and Peter built Legos.

            Once Tim was down, Peter and I sat
down with his religion text and took turns reading from that. It’s set up to
either be done once a week or daily and I’m planning to split the difference
and use it twice weekly with each boy, alternating days, then quiz them on the
catechism questions on Fridays. Part of the first chapter included the end of
the Creation story and Peter managed to bring up evolution vs. creationism. And
I thought I’d have easy topics to tackle on day 1! We talked about how the 7
days in the Bible don’t have to each be one day because the original Hebrew can
be translated in different ways. Peter’s take on the whole thing is that God
can make DNA change and cause the evolution. I think I handled it alright. He’s
not planning to give up his belief in either God or science yet at least.

            The only thing left that was
Peter-specific was handwriting. He had flown through the vowels when he went
through the book for fun over the weekend so I thought that would be a painless
way to end the day. But B’s got the best of him and he flipped out when they
weren’t working and declared himself done. I convinced him to go on to easy C’s
and he put up with those, barely. Fine, whatever, I printed a new B sheet to do
another day.

            I intended to read another section
of history and read about Vivaldi and listen to part of the Four Seasons, but
that will have to wait for another day. I asked Peter how much usually got done
on the first day of school and he said, “Not much.” So I’ll call this a
success. Dan did give Peter his first piano lesson in the evening, too.

            By the time Dan got home at 5:30,
supper was almost done. I had to wait until after supper to go pick our
community garden veggies (15 lbs of tomatoes and 2.5 lbs of beans!) and I sent Dan to the store for canning lids at 9pm
because there hadn’t been a chance to get them during the day. I have a dozen
library books waiting to be picked up. Eventually we’ll have to figure out how
errands will happen. Tim was up until 11:30 and if that’s a sign that he’s
preparing to give up naps, it would simplify our days in terms of when we can
leave the house.

            I was going to bring the kids to 8am
Mass tomorrow but with Tim up late and our friends possibly arriving now in
late morning, I might wait on Mass until next week when the parish school has
their first Mass on Wednesday. All the transition times are going to have to
become more efficient, but we’ll get there. I hope.

 

Tomorrow it begins

I think we’re ready. I hope we are. Dan has been at school full days for a week and a
half and seen kids for orientations for the past two days. Leo got through 3
spelling lessons and 3 math lessons last week while Peter was at camp.
Yesterday I told the boys that we could do math and/or spelling then and do
math/spelling games on Thursday in exchange. Initially they said they’d do
both, but everyone felt done after math and I didn’t push it. Since I had to
introduce Peter to all the forms and his text and whatnot, I kept both of them
up at the dining room table and it showed me that my initial plan to only get
Peter started and then send him downstairs to do the bulk of the problems would
be better. I cleared off Dan’s desk that’s been covered in stuff since we
remodeled so he can have a place to work that isn’t covered in Legos like his
worktable in the playroom. I’ll tell him that he can lie on the floor or sit on
my big ball if he wants, he just needs to get the problems done. Leo got up to
the 5^th test in his math book and mixed up weekends/weekdays and
seemed to forget the difference between odd and even numbers. The
weekend/weekday thing doesn’t seem like a big deal – we’ll just bring that up
at the math meeting until he gets it. I think the odds/evens is because I
usually ask him to go through odds or evens in a row and this was a random list
and his brain fizzled. Either way, tomorrow I’m going to return to the lesson
where they really talk lots about odds and evens and see whether it sinks in. I’ll
probably move along to the next test but add some odd/even questions to our
lesson time for a few days.

I pretty much laid out which subjects we’ll be covering on which days this week and next
week. With our friends coming Friday, Labor Day Monday, and likely heading to
the cabin Thursday afternoon, I’m going to treat these two weeks together as a
single week, doing art and music once each. I won’t start the writing program
until next week. I’ll skip nature study because we’ll be going on a hike with
our friends over the weekend and then we’ll do a bunch at the cabin too. It
will take 2 weeks to do my speed-through-ancient-history plan. That consists of
reading the 100 initial pages in our history spine out loud together and
checking out maps of the civilizations but skipping any other activities until
we reach 63BC when our actual history study begins. So it will be Monday Sept
10^th before we have a full, normal school day. I think that will be
okay. The week after that, we start having field trips every week or two.

I haven’t quite figured out how the non-academics will fit in. At some point there will
be recess. Another time, I’ll have them do chores that involve moving stuff
around, probably laundry related. But until I know how long things will take
and how squirrely they’ll be, I’m not sure where to put those. I do know I want
to institute a No Constant Snacking rule. And a No Playing With Legos or
Circuits Until School Stuff is Done rule. I haven’t told them that I bought the
scratch-off rainbow paper Leo’s been begging for—I’ll let them use that during
read-alouds. 

I read them the first two chapters of “Where the Red Fern Grows” while Tim was napping
yesterday and will be continuing that. I showed Peter his cursive workbook on
Sunday and he nicely did the A, E, I, O, U, and Y pages before I made him go to
bed. I made sheets for Leo from a Zaner-Bloser website, too. My plan is to
require each of them to do the letter/words well six times instead of a
page-full poorly.

I found the Core Knowledge Curriculum’s list of suggested poetry per grade and I’m
going to incorporate those somehow. Not this week.

Tomorrow we’ll be taking our annual first day photos, but this time, we won’t have
uniforms. Here we go….

A Soft Start

Peter is at
sleep-away YMCA camp this week (for the first time! Sob!) and when Leo was a
big whine-ball this weekend it occurred to me that I might be able to start
some of his school subjects during Tim’s naps and ease us into the school year
a bit. A lot of homeschoolers go year round and others take a wide variety of
approaches to starting and ending the grade levels but after 4 (or 2) years of
going to school with Daddy, I figured the boys would react best to a definitive
start date. All of August I’ve been telling them that when Daddy’s students
start on August 29^th, we would start too. But yesterday was his
first day back without students, so it sort of felt like the first day.
Regardless, I told Leo that while Tim was napping we could play a game or do
something else fun of his choosing, and then we’d have our first spelling
lesson. His spelling program, All About Spelling, highly recommends giving
15-20 minute lessons regardless of how much material is covered during that
time and starting with that allowed me to promise that it definitely wouldn’t
take longer. His math lesson, the other subject he’ll be doing completely
separately from Peter, had the potential to take longer. I also wanted to keep
doing Xtramath with him. He’s been very close to mastering the addition facts
for a week now but seems to get just enough slow or wrong to hold him back and
be frustrating.

 

So, he wasn’t
exactly happy about it, but after putting together 2 puzzles together, we sat
down in the living room and I began going through the scripted phonogram
lesson, seeing which letters he could name all the sounds to. He sat on the
glider, rocking back and forth while I was on the couch across the room. On
some, such as X, he immediately knew the /ks/ sound and giving the clipped
sound was a no-brainer for him. I’ve never gone over phonograms with him but it
was clearly something he’d done in school. He easily got all the letters but A,
O, S, U, and Y. I told him we were done for the day, checked my watch, and saw
that a whole 7 minutes had gone by.  Not
your standard first day of school.

 

Today I told
him we’d be doing spelling again but he could choose between Xtramath online
(which is never more than 10 minutes) and starting his school math early. He
went with the devil he didn’t know and chose school math.

 

One of the
few curriculum choices I’ve been steady with has been my early decision to
continue both of them in Saxon math. I’m somewhat familiar with it since the
boys have used it at school and I’ve never thought, “Wow, this is such an
awesome math program,” but it’s one of most common math curricula out there and
I figured I could tailor it to them if necessary. Now that both boys have spent
the summer going over math facts, Leo’s program in particular seems like it’s
going to incorporate a LOT of review. After talking it over with Dan and asking
other homeschoolers how they dealt with it, I decided to start the year with
Leo taking each of the weekly tests until he hits concepts he needs to work on.
If he makes clumsy mistakes, it gets a little murkier. Maybe I’ll give him a
similar problem and see if he does it again. Most tests seem to cover about 5
topics. If there’s one topic (such as drawing the hands to indicate 5:00 on an
analog clock, which I’d thought he might do wrong on the first test) he can’t
do, I’ll spend a day going back to the lesson where that’s introduced and then
give a similar test the next day. Once he’s having trouble with multiple topics
(Saxon says students should get 80% on tests but I’d expect more than that if
we’re skipping the lessons), we’ll jump back 10 lessons to the point where
those topics begin. There are 130 lessons in the book and by about the halfway
point, all the addition facts have been introduced. I suspect that he’ll get
somewhere between the lesson 30 and lesson 60 assessments before the math facts
begin to challenge him and he can’t easily breeze through the tests. So on his
8^th day of math, he’ll be at the lesson 45 test if that’s his limit,
we’d go back to lesson 36 for day 9. Ignoring field trip days and other reasons
that math might not happen, it’ll take about 100 school days to get through the
book. I remember the big deal made at the 100^th day of kindergarten
and last year that happened in early February. That leaves about 3 more months
of schooling in need of a math curriculum.

 

I’m debating
a few options at that point. I could go on to Saxon 3 (he’s doing Saxon 2 now) and
use the same test-skip-ahead approach to deal with the same early-in-the-book
review. Maybe we’d get halfway through Saxon 3 by the end of the year. Option 2
would be to use a combination of narrative math books like Life of Fred and the
textbook part of Beast Academy and play a bunch of games, planning to start
Saxon 3 in the fall. Those things could also be done throughout the year
instead of doing Saxon every day.  Option
3 would be to quit Saxon and switch to a completely different curriculum like
Singapore. A lot of my homeschooling college friends use Singapore and when I
looked at it, I couldn’t figure out when kids were supposed to really learn
math facts. I don’t want my kids to be in 4^th grade doing fractions
and have to think hard to figure out 6x9 or 15-7. There’s no fear of that with
Saxon, which is the epitome of drill-and-kill. But I don’t want math to be a
monotonous endless list of black and white timed tests and Saxon looks like
that.

 

So I guess I’m
giving Saxon its chance for this semester+ with Leo and for the year with
Peter. If we’re all dying of boredom, we’ll stick with our current textbooks
until they’re done, but I don’t see them as set in stone forever.

 

I got
ridiculously excited a few weeks ago when I found out that two of the
then-postdocs that ran my high school math camp have developed a curriculum.
They’ve had a middle and upper school curriculum for most of the decade but
they’re developing a lower school curriculum now too called Beast Academy. In
2012, the 3^rd grade year is being released. It’ll take a little more
than a year apiece to release the 4^th and 5^th grade years
and then they’ll go back to 2^nd grade. It has a text and a workbook
and the text is in graphic novel format. A lot of the problems are intended to
challenge the kids and really get them thinking in new ways. Their middle and
upper school books are designed to prepare kids for math competitions. My math
team loving self thought this was the best news in weeks. It seems that the
release dates will be too late for Peter to use them as his primary math
curriculum, although I think he’d enjoy the text without the problems. Leo
though, might be able to switch over to it without having a gap waiting for a
new release.

 

Back to this
week.  Leo and I did lesson 10’s math
meeting and I had him go orally over the fact sheets that are introduced in the
first 10 lessons. Normally they’re supposed to be written with a  1 minute limit. Writing is a big hang up for
Leo so I figured I’d save the writing for the test. He zoomed through the 2
fact sheets (doubles and plus 1) and then did the written assessment. The words
“that’s it? This is easy!” escaped him more than once. I told him to look it
over for goofy mistakes and then we checked that he had gotten everything
right, including the clock.

 

I feel like
there’s a careful balance to be made between challenging him and giving him
confidence via quick, straight-forward work. I don’t think high self-esteem is
something I really want to strive for while teaching them, but I don’t want to
start our homeschooling days by giving him a bunch of stuff so hard he that he
gives up before he starts. That doesn’t mean I want to spend 2 months going
over math problems he can do without thinking. But I think this first week or
two of pretty obvious concepts will help us settle into a routine. Spelling is
similar – I’m pretty sure he can spell all the words in the level 1 book
already, but after awhile, phonogram rules are introduced that aren’t obvious
and although he can spell the short words intuitively, the rules will help down
the road.

 

It’s nice to
be able to work out some kinks with how his math and spelling programs run so I
can focus on the other subjects once Peter comes home and we get going with
full days. As it turns out, next week is going to be pretty crazy and we won’t
even have the 3 days I’d planned. My mom is having a mastectomy on Monday (I’ll
talk more about the whirlwind that has been another time) and I’m hoping to
spend most of Monday and Tuesday with her. Wednesday and Thursday we’ll have
school. Thursday late afternoon, my college friends are coming to town until
Sunday morning and probably camping in our backyard. We haven’t seen each other
since any of our kids were born but we have matching 8 and 6 year old boys and they
have a 3 year old boy and a baby daughter. We can all hope that the boys all
get along. So really, it’ll be the day after Labor Day before we have most of a
full school week.

 

I’m hoping
that I can have exact lesson plans written out for the first few days so I don’t
hit a point where I have to decide spur of the moment whether to do art or
history. I don’t really know how the pacing is going to work for a lot of
things. Nature study will be twice a week, but the day we choose will be
affected by the weather. I’ve also signed up for a variety of field trips and a
lot are science-based and would replace nature study for one day that week. I
requested 30 books from the library that I’ll split into baskets for each boy
and those will fill in gaps if one boy is waiting for the other to finish. So
although I feel strongly about having a plan initially, I don’t feel like I’ll
know whether we’ll get through all 7 of the history program’s units until I see
how the first one goes. And it doesn’t particularly matter if we reach the
Vikings or wait until next year.

 

I’ve
definitely been struck lately that there is no perfect homeschooling approach
that will work for everyone. Not even close. I read a couple blogs today
encouraging new homeschoolers not to buy anything and the thought of it made me
wince. But my jumbled approach might be nuts to someone who buys their plans
all together and follows the script. And maybe I’ll do something completely
different next year since I haven’t actually tried this with real children yet.
It’s handy when I find a blogger that seems to take the same general approach
so I can gather ideas without questioning the whole approach I’ve been
accumulating.

Cabin vacation 2012

I keep better record of our cabin trips than anything else because the lack of internet frees up so much time. You’d think I’d learn from this and go offline at home sometimes, but no. At least the annual look shows me how the kids are changing since the cabin itself has been the same for the 15+ years I’ve come here.

Like last year, the five of us are here alone again. After more than a decade of coming with cousins and siblings (my favorite was the time we had 4 pairs of siblings – my sister and I, Dan and one of his sisters, 2 of Dan’s cousins (including my brother-in-law), and Peter and Leo), life is getting too complicated and families are getting too big for the extended families to come together. We might come again with Dan’s sister, BIL, and our niece in September, though.

Peter and Leo each have a queen bed up on the loft, Tim has the small front bedroom, and Dan and I have the larger back bedroom. It’s the first time since 2003 that at least one of the kids hasn’t shared the room with us. Last year Tim was crawling and climbing. I guess it’s slightly safer this year with him upright. There’s a chance that if we tell him to stay in the yard and not go down the stairs to the lake that he’ll listen. However, he can also get food out of the refrigerator, climb up on the counters, get games out of the closet, and almost anything else he sets his mind on doing. At least he still naps fairly consistently.

Peter and Leo are working their way through the better chunk of a ream of paper. They have designed hydraulic waterslides, nuclear-powered jets, crossword puzzles, their own musical scores, electric organs, and many other things. Leo spent 2 straight days reading to us from a Peanuts book in a voice too low and fast for us to hear clearly except when he reached the punchline and laughed uproariously.

Neither boy has asked for a lifejacket in the lake, which is a nice change from previous years. We have a leaky inner tube that gets anchored as far out as Dan can throw from the dock and they fight over who gets to use it. Peter likes swimming underwater 10 feet or so and popping up in the tube. I have resumed my quest to rid the swimming area of rocks and keep throwing them into the jetty. I figure it’s a lifelong goal. Leo prefers to float in the tube but isn’t scared to swim around when it isn’t his turn. Tim asks to have his swimsuit put on when the older boys get theirs, but prefers to throw pinecones into the water from the dock. I convinced him to collect rocks with me once. The sun doesn’t reach the shore until late afternoon so the swimming area is chilly until after lunch. The sunsets are always gorgeous facing west across the lake though.

We planned to go on our annual trek to Lake Itasca today but woke up to thunderstorms. It’s storming again tonight and tomorrow’s our last day here so I hope it clears up overnight. We brought the boys’ bikes with us in the minivan in hopes of renting bikes and a trailer for the rest of us at Itasca and it’ll be frustrating if that was a waste of space.

Dan replaced the decking on part of the dock and installed smoke detectors in our attempt to leave the cabin a safer place. I didn’t bring work with me this year partially because I needed the break and partially because all my projects are internet-based now and it would have been a big hassle. We’re attempting to go the full week without using the laundromat. Tim’s using the potty often enough that I didn’t even bring all our diapers. We have used all the fitteds over our 5 days here but there are still some prefolds and underwear to use.

Our drive here wasn’t too bad but it wasn’t the speedy trip up that we had last year. The year before was terrible – I was 34 weeks pregnant and it was Friday afternoon of the 4th of July weekend when the entire metro area heads north. That year took us 6 hours and it was the only time in my pregnancy that my ankles swelled. We didn’t realize I’d be giving birth in 3 weeks. Last year only took 3.5 hours. This time the 200 miles took 5 hours including a stop for lunch at Subway, a stop for cones at Dairy Queen, and a bathroom stop. Traffic was fine; it was the people in the backseat who slowed things down. Despite driving during naptime, Tim only slept half an hour the whole way. He wasn’t a screaming mess like we’ve had other toddler years, at least.

I’ve been getting a variety of things done. I took Dan’s grandma’s clothes out of the closets and packed a box of mementos that really should be back in town with her. I read through the boys’ history spine text, including the ancient years that we’ll read quickly to prepare for the years we’ll really cover, 63 BC to 1066 AD. I figured out lessons plans and timing for history activities for the first month of the year. I read “Honey for the Child’s Heart”, a book about reading to kids, and made a six page list of books that I can pick from to get from the library. Then I made a list of about 15 for each of the boys (mostly picture books for Leo, mostly chapter books for Peter) that I’ll have available for them to read in the afternoons after other lessons are done in September. I figured out which days I’ll cover which subjects and determined that at most, they’ll have 4 hours of formal school every day even though it seems like a lot of subjects on paper. I read bits and pieces of a Charlotte Mason book. I did a bunch of crosswords and logic puzzles. I read “From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler” which I somehow never read as a child. I’m starting to watch the DVD series that will teach me how to teach writing. I swam with the boys.

Yesterday Peter, Tim and I were up before the others and we walked along the dirt road for 45 minutes with Tim mostly in the Ergo because he stops to pick up pebbles every 30 seconds. The road gets muggy and unpleasant in the afternoon but was quite nice at 8am. We ran into a large group and I thought it was an extended family from a nearby cabin until they introduced themselves and I realized they were all neighbors out walking together. Many of the cabins are year-round lake homes for retirees and I wonder whether their morning walk is a daily or weekly event or if we all just noticed the nice day. Today I saw three neighbors, probably each in their 70’s canoeing together and they didn’t return for 3+ hours. I hope my senior years are spent so well.

In the afternoon, Peter, Leo, and I took a hike on the path around the lake. We’ve never made it more than 6 homes or so before turning onto the road and heading home. We walked for 45 minutes this year before the path petered out and I convinced the boys to turn around. I tried to go home along the road but Leo wasn’t wearing a shirt or shoes and the sunny dirt road was too painful for him, so we went back to the path. It’s sort of awkward because it goes through everyone’s properties, but most people keep their part of the path maintained and expect neighbors to hike through.

---------------------------------

The rain stopped in time for us to go to Itasca State Park on Saturday. We tried to switch things up but the boys insisted on going to the headwaters first. Tim threw pebbles (a theme for the year) while the big boys floated and waded as far as Dan would let them go down the still-tiny river.

We had a picnic lunch near the beach, then rented two adult bikes and a trailer for Tim. Looking back, it would have been better if we’d had the trail-a-bike for Leo, but in order to use it, we would have needed my bike. Seems like it’s time we bought a bike holder for the van. We biked 3.5 miles to the visitor’s center and Leo was not happy to start on the return trip an hour later. Once we got him going, we all realized it was largely downhill going home and that helped a lot. It sprinkled on us a bit but the huge trees kept us mostly dry. It was slightly too bumpy for Tim to sleep so he got cranky.

We didn’t quite have enough diapers to last us until we got home (it would have been fine if we had stuck around the cabin Saturday and Sunday) so I took a handful of wet prefolds and wipes out of the wetbag and washed them in the bathtub Saturday morning. Apparently I shouldn’t have left much of my stash at home. I did avoid a trip to town for the laundromat.

On Sunday, we left after lunch and managed to get a bit more naptime out of Tim.