It's a Wonderful Thing...

...to be three years old when your curriculum box arrives in the mail!

As I've pondered each child the past few weeks and begun to design programs of studies tailored especially to each of them, Katie has been my easiest to plan.  This child just plain exudes joy.  Everything is happy!

In so many ways, she reminds me of her "biggest brother."  I have a picture of Michael when he was her age posted just above my computer monitor. He is covered in fingerpaint, with his arms spread wide and his smile spread wider.

It serves two purposes:  to remind me to back away from the computer and to remind me of a time when I wholeheartedly encouraged giant messes of creativity. This is my blond-haired, blue-eyed golden boy's last year at home.  We've begun the process of finding a college and I think I can safely claim to have some perspective on home education. That perspective certainly colors plans for everyone else.

I don't want to push the stages of development, nor do I want to fold one stage into another without stopping to really notice and savor it. One thing I find is that the younger children in a large family tend to get folded into the school-aged crowd. The veterans tout all the benefits of "trickle down" and advise that we teach to the oldest when we take the whole family as a group.  If we are not careful, they miss all those wonderful early childhood treasures that we cultivated so happily for our first children.  I am determined not to let that happen, if for no other reason than I LOVE early childhood and all the good things it holds.

Mounted with the picture, just above my computer monitor, is this poem, taken from the Five in a Row website years ago.

If I had my child to raise all over again,

I’d finger-paint more, and point the finger less.

I would do less correcting and more connecting.

I’d take my eyes off my watch, and watch with my eyes.

I would care to know less, and know to care more.

I’d take more hikes and fly more kites.

I’d stop playing serious, and seriously play.

I would run through more fields and gaze at more stars.

I’d do more hugging and less tugging.

I’d build self-esteem first, and the new house later.

I would be firm less often, and affirm much more.

I’d teach less about the love of power, and more about the power of love.

For the most part, I lived that philosophy with Michael and I have few regrets. So, with the poem and the picture as my inspiration, finger paint became the focus of Katie’s “official pre-school,” at least metaphorically.  And how silly is this notion of "preschool" when you know there is no school at all planned after a “preschool” that isn’t even school itself?? Ah, but  I digress.

Finger paint really is a glorious medium! We’ll unpack the rest of the box tomorrow.

Carnival of Homeschooling

Grab a cup of tea and put your feet up.  The 29th Carnival of Homsechooling is being hosted by the Nerd Family!

The Plan for Christian

I want to thank Typepad from the bottom of my laundry basket.  After I spent hours very early yesterday morning and carefully saved a draft of this post, Typepad published it for me, complete with all kinds of technical glitches, and then it was utterly inaccessible all day.  The house is much cleaner and I had a heaping, helping dose of humility as you all got to see a very raw post.  I'm trying again and hoping that the formatting and the links work this time.

This summer, I'm looking carefully at each child and planning specifically for them in detail.  While we will certainly study lots of things together, I'm beginning with individual plans this year.  The exercise has been good for me.  I really enjoy considering each individual and marveling in his or her uniqueness. Because he has been so much on my mind, I started with Christian, who is fourteen and technically an eight grader.

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Math

Turbo Twist handheld --nothing like a nifty gadget for boring car trips!

Christian will work his way through the Touchmath upper grades program.  This is a program that is used extensively with children who have visual processing disabilities.  Though it’s been primarily limited to schools heretofore, the learning disabilities experts at Touchmath were extremely helpful in working with me to create a wholly appropriate program for Christian. I promise much more on this in later blogs.  I just watched the training video yesterday and I'm pretty excited about the concept and thinking I might use it for my little ones as well...

We will also provide a talking desktop calculator. Auditory cues will help reinforce keystroke accuracy and correct mistakes.

Processing support/improvement

BrainBuilder is a "neurobic", computer-based training program that is designed to assess and build auditory and visual sequential processing abilities. In an intensive series of adaptive, interactive exercises, BrainBuilder trains the brain to expand its ability to sequentially process auditory and visual information.

When working independently, Christian will listen to “Music for Concentration.” (He's not thrilled about this but he does want something to screen the outside noise and the research on Baroque music and concentration is really compelling. This CD uses streamlined baroque masterpieces to sharpen focus and enhance mental endurance.

Language Arts

Handwriting:  Christian will continue to use the Handwriting Without Tears series and the AVKO keyboarding program (a program for dyslexics that reinforces word attack skills and spelling patterns while teaching keyboarding skills). 

Spelling:  Because spelling is traditionally presented in a visual manner, Christian will not use a traditional spelling program to strengthen his spelling skills.  Instead, we will draw upon his strength in word attack and phonics skills to teach spelling from an auditory perspective, using The Phonetic Zoo, a phonetically based auditory spelling program.  When Christian looks at a word, he sees it as a whole. But spelling is sequential, and the correct sequence can be missed when seen as a whole, particularly because he cannot rely on visual memory to retrieve the word. Spelling the word out loud, letter by letter, will convert the input to auditory input and aid in accurate storage of the correct sequence in the brain.

We’ll continue using AVKO spelling as well.

Literature:  Christian will study literature and grammar typical for the eighth and ninth grades using videos to help comprehension. 

To Kill a Mockingbird and 24 More Videos is a program that will enable him to watch video productions of great books and still get the literary nuances. Videos are democratic in their range and depth. Most, if not all, students can understand the focus, the message of a video even when they might not pick up on the rhythm and nuance of the written language. That doesn’t mean the written language is not important - but a well-made movie based on a classic work of literature can make that literary work accessible to children for whom reading is a struggle.

The extension activities will include short answer questions, vocabulary activities, true and false, comparisons, essays, paragraphs, fill in the blanks, songs, writing fables or short stories, basic grammar concepts (homonyms/antonyms etc, adverb phrases, verb tenses)  symbolism, inferences, character analysis. Most of that I expect to do with him orally.

He will read high quality picture books aloud daily to his younger siblings for no less than a half hour, broken into fifteen minute increments, to increase his oral reading fluency and build his confidence. He really likes to spend time with the little boys in particular and they idolize him. I'm noticing that Stephen (7) is really struggling to read, despite being a very hard worker.  I want him to have lots of read-aloud time.  Christian can get practice in oral expression and he can help me to provide more story time. This will be good for everyone.

Composition: Writing is very important to Christian.  He has spent hours writing a novel on his own. He chooses to write for pleasure, as long as no one has assigned it and no one is watching. While the conventions of punctuation and spelling are missing, the story is amazingly complex and beautifully written. We spend time together daily proofing and editing.  He is publishing it in installments on his blog.   He has a regular audience of enthusiastic readers which is really increasing his confidence and helping to hone some of those interpersonal skills.

Science:  Christian will study Life Science this year using Lyrical Life Science .This multi-sensory program, which has a core audio-component, will allow him to memorize typical eighth grade science facts more easily. Mostly, though, he will do nature rabbit rails with the rest of us. He will also continue his extensive gardening projects and the maintenance of a family nature journal on the computer (using the camera and writing to record his observations ). His goal this year is to build several different wildlife habitats and to have our yard certified as a Backyard Habitat by the National Wildlife Federation. He is registered with the NWF and has set up a planner specific for our yard on their website .

Religion:  Christian will listen to saints’ stories on CD and narrate them orally to me to record and save the summaries in a notebook.  He will continue to memorize the catechism and to participate in all our family-centered Catholic Mosaic projects.

History: Christian will continue to pursue his love of history, reading historical fiction and listening to it in audiobook format, as well as watching the History Channel. He has chosen the subject matter for this year because he considers it “research” for his novel. Together, we will work through a complete ancient history course to include the audio version History of the World, the classic D’Aulaire’s Greek myths on audiotape, and Odds Bodkin’s stunning rendition of The Odyssey on audio.

He will read the following books and narrate the chapters orally.  Because Christian brings a great deal of background knowledge and an intense interest to this subject matter, I have little doubt that he can handle the reading material. These are all in our personal collection and he has heard many of them read aloud. This familiarity will aid the silent reading.

D'Aulaire's Book of Norse Myths

Beorn the Proud (Polland)

Sword Song (Sutcliff)

Nordic Gods and Heroes (Colum)

Brendan the Navigator (Fritz)

Archimedes and the Door of Science (Bendick)

Between the Forest and the Hills (Lawrence) 

Black Ships BeforeTroy(Sutcliff)

Ides of April (Ray)

Fingal’s Quest (Polland)

Foreign Language: While the requirement for a foreign language has been waived, Christian will continue to build his repertoire of American Sign Language vocabulary with the rest of his family, using the Signing Time DVDS, a multi-sensory approach to sign language.

Much to his relief, Latin study will be limited to the memorization of roots.

Keep your eyes on your own work!

There is so much curriculum conversation going on at the 4real message boards, at The Lilting House, at Karen Edmisten's blog spot, on Theresa's farm...It's happening every waking hour!

And it's great to share ideas.  But it's also a slippery slope.  We can peer into each other's homes, see all the good things happening there and start to feel very insecure--and covetous.  The truth is, we all have different gifts and abilities.  We all have different shortcomings.  We all have different temperamental nuances. We have different budgets.  And, most importantly, we all have different husbands and children.  The beauty of home education is that it's not one-size-fits-all.

What works in Leonie's home of seven boys (where some are grown and gone) might look silly in Alice's cottage of six girls and one boy, where the oldest is twelve and the youngest was born just a couple of weeks ago. In either home, if they tried to duplicate the other, a golden opportunity for a unique and beautiful education would be lost.  I can't imagine Leonie without her down-to-earth unschooling approach which is tailored so well to each and every boy, where she spends so much time talking with them and planning with them.  And I can't imagine Alice without the faith and grace and beauty and excellence that is the life and breath of the cottage and everyone in it. And I sheepishly admit to wanting to have been one or the other of them at various times over the last seven or so years.

And really, neither approach--taken in its entirety--would work very well here.  We all have the same number of children, but we are not all the same.

This is the crux of the whole thing.  Our selves and our families are God's design.  It's one of the few things we can know for certain. God made us and He knows intimately the way we are.  Furthermore, knowing the way we are, He has put people in our lives (primarily our husbands and children) to help us get to be the way He wants us to be. He gave us these children (whether by birth or adoption).  It's His plan that we educate them. And so, we can only be doing His will if we work with that whole complex of self and family together. We can glean ideas, but we can't outright copy the work of our friends. This is our own personal journey to sanctity.

That's why this time of year is so tricky:  even the veterans start comparing and looking at each other's work and they can be sorely tempted by the devil.  We have to sift all the good advice and information in light of our own family circumstances, our own kids.  If we don't discern prayerfully, the tricky Evil One quickly has a foothold on leading us astray. He will take something good, like the fine examples of our friends' home "schools," and twist it in our brains late at night and make us forget that we are not created in the image of those good ladies.  We are uniquely created in the image of God.  And so are our children. Together, we journey to heaven, choosing the tools for shaping minds and souls very carefully, because the mission is to answer God's unique call for us, and us alone.

It's Signing Time with Nicky and Katie!

Every once in awhile, one of my children sets us off on a rabbit trail that becomes part of the family culture.  About eighteen months ago, Nicholas (then four), was fascinated with a wooden sign language puzzle I had on the alphabet shelf.  When he lifted the knobbed pieces he could see which sign stood for which letter.  He was completely focused on learning those signs.  And then, he began his campaign for more.  "Teach me how to talk with my hands!"

I found some beautiful and very effective books, The Handmade Alphabet and The Handmade Counting Book.  Quickly, he mastered those alphabet signs and the number signs and still, he was unrelenting in his begging for more.  Lissa wholeheartedly suggested the Signing Time DVDs.  I ordered the six that were available at the time.  A family addiction was born.  We all learned the songs; we all learned the signs.  I got to know Rachel Coleman, the woman behind the amazing videos, and was so inspired by her story.  We've been singing and signing ever since.  There are more volumes in our collection now and we've moved on to other resources like American Sign Language the Easy Way and The American Sign Language Phrase Book.  Talking with our hands is something we just do. 

We had always dabbled  a little with signing simple things for our babies.  Now, we're all looking forward to Signing Time board books and Baby Signing Time videos and a brand new baby to learn all those signs!

Yesterday, all alone in the kitchen, I started singing one of my favorite Signing Time songs, Shine.I went to the website to find the lyrics and learned I must not be the only mom who loves the songs for herself. Now there is a CD of all the songs that resonate with parents.  I thought about how much Signing Time and sign language have become a part of who we are as a family.  And I was so glad my four-year-old took me by the hand and led me down this lovely trail.