Weekly Report 6/9/2011

Very little academics got done this week, which is just fine by me!  We did manage to read a few chapters of Anne of Green Gables out loud, though.  If anyone ever wants to know what we are reading aloud, you can check the bookshelf on the right in my blog. I keep it pretty updated.

I also downloaded the Funnix Math program which is available for free right now.  I downloaded the reading program back in January and Lydia seems to like it, although most of it goes over her head.  I expect the math one to be the same.  We have been working on counting quite a bit, though, and Lydia's getting close to being able to count to ten without forgetting "2" and "3".  Every time we go down the stairs to go to the basement we count the steps.  It's a great way to practice!  Mostly, though, we've just been hanging around or swimming in the pool on the back deck.


 

As for me, I've decided to postpone my Latin studies for the time being.  It was just getting to the point where my grammar was too lacking.  So I've decided to put it aside and work on grammar instead.  I'm specifically going to work on diagramming and KISS grammar, like I mentioned in my last post.  I managed to find a few free diagramming resources that should help me along.  I think that I'll probably need to invest in a diagramming program with more examples and an extensive answer key to make sure I'm doing it right, but I'll stick with the free ones at first.  I've started one and I think that I will continue, because I'm finding it very helpful.  I'm hoping that in the next few months I'll be able to get back to studying Latin.

It's been a hectic month, so I haven't had much time to do anything formal with the girls or myself, but I thought I'd check in anyways.  Tyler finished his first year of medical school!  It feels like an accomplishment for me as well, because I played a very significant supportive role to him, as well as his practice dummy.  Right now he is doing a preceptorship for a few weeks, so we are staying with my in-laws at the moment.

In the few weeks before we left, I was spending a lot of time working on Early Intervention evaluations for Lydia.  Those of you who know us well are familiar with the struggles she's had since she was tiny.  Between moving so much in the last year, and the lengthy process of getting set up for evaluation, this is the first chance we've had to get her checked out since she was a baby.  I was worried that I was making stuff up and that she was doing just fine and I was just one of THOSE first-time parents.  It appears I wasn't making it up at all, because she qualified for 2 hours each (the maximum) of developmental, speech, and occupational therapy per week.  That's 6 hours a week!  Before I started this process, I was thinking I should sign Lydia up for a class or something to get her a little out of her comfort zone and out of the house on a regular basis, but I think 6 hours a week of therapy should be plenty of activities.  I am totally new to the area of special needs and therapies, so this will definitely be an adventure.  I have a good feeling about the company that is doing her therapies, though, and she really seems to like it there so far.  I'm looking forward to getting back home and getting her started.

For Music Study, Lydia has zero interest in Chopin.  Every time I start Chopin, she says, "Listen Baldi!, Wan to listen Baldi!"  I can see why she would prefer Vivaldi.  It's more exciting music, as opposed to Chopin that is quiet piano music for the most part.  I haven't been great about turning on Queen, but that's an album that gets listened to at our house all the time anyways, so I'm not too worried about her getting exposure to it right this minute.

As for Unit Studies, she wasn't really getting much out of it so I'm not doing them anymore for the moment.  She already knows all her letters and their sounds, and is learning her numbers through daily activities, like counting the stairs and her cars.  She doesn't really care about crafts at all at this point, either.  She enjoys scribbling with crayons, but that's about it.  The one part that was very successful was getting her a few books with a theme and reading them over and over again.  She especially enjoyed the penguin books and the kitten books.  She still recites The Three Little Kittens and Kitten's First Full Moon to herself while she plays.  I think I'll continue to get several books about the same basic theme, because she enjoys it.

Grandma's house has two back decks, each with a porch swing.  Lydia LOVES the swings.  She is almost always happy to go sit on it and swing with you for a long period of time.  I've been using this time to do read alouds.  Right now we're working on Anne of Green Gables, one of my personal favorites.  Both Lydia and Ellie will sit with me on the swing for a few chapters.  I'm most impressed with Ellie, who will just go limp and listen until I'm done reading, up to 45 minutes or more.  That's a pretty good attention span for an eight month old.

Ellie is getting bigger every day and is starting to want to be involved in things.  She follows Lydia or myself around everywhere.  She can pull herself up to her knees and sit up by herself now, as well as crawl and get into things.  She's fun and I look forward to getting to know her better as she gets older.

As for my studies, I'm still plugging along at Latin and Khan Academy.  I just finished Lesson 11 in Latin for Beginners this morning and have completed 49 exercises areas on Khan Academy for a total of 170,011 energy points!  In math, that puts me in simple geometry and pre-algebra.  It's all coming back to me and I'm finding it fun. I'm thinking that I should probably add in some formal grammar, specifically diagramming.  My grammar knowledge is all intuitive, and I would like to know it better formally.  I plan on having a heavy diagramming emphasis in grammar when I teach my daughters, so I think this would be a good place for me to start considering I did diagramming for all of 2 weeks in school.  I was thinking I might do KISS Grammar all the way through, but I've since found out that they don't do diagramming.  Maybe I'll just get a book on diagramming and do KISS?  KISS comes very highly recommended and it's free, so I'll probably at least try it.  Finally, I'm trying to get caught up in my history, so I've been reading History of the Ancient World, by Susan Wise Bauer.  I really enjoy Ms. Bauer and plan on using her other book, The Well-Trained Mind, as my guide through educating my children.  HOAW is the first of four books that she will eventually finish (only two are out yet) that will chronicle the history of the whole world.  It's very dense, but I enjoy her style and find her way of viewing history to be both entertaining and informative.  I'm learning so much just by reading it, and I can't wait to do history with my girls.

Weekly Report

This week was mostly uneventful.  We didn't have a theme for the week and mostly just read books, colored, and did "letters," which consists of Funnix and Starfall.  She is on lesson 11 in Funnix.  Lydia loves to do anything involved with letters or numbers, although her grasp on them is pretty weak so far (Mom: "Hey Lydia, can you count to 9?" Lydia: "1,4,5,6,7,8,9!") That's just fine, though.  She's only 2 and a half, and we have a lot of fun where she is.

This week she listened to all of Winnie the Pooh and The House on Pooh Corner at least on and a half times on audio book during her quiet/nap times.  They are her favorites and asks for them every day.  We also read the story of Macbeth in Edith Nesbit's Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare.  We read Chicka Chicka Boom Boom and Go Dog Go countless times as well as several other stories and a healthy dose of Sandra Boynton.  We also went to a few parks and the tubes this week, which is very good for Lydia as she has a very hard time with other children.  I'm going out of my way lately to try to get her to have social experiences to help her learn to deal with them, so that is also taking a lot of our time. 

Lately in family scripture study, which we do right before the girls go to bed, we've been noticing that Lydia is paying more attention.  Usually we do it in the girl's room and Lydia and I sit in the rocking chair while Tyler sits on the floor and reads out loud to us (Ellie is usually in her crib already).  We've been doing this since Lydia was a year old and it is what works for us.  Lately, though, she's started talking a lot while Tyler reads.  Only recently we realized that she was repeating the words he was saying.  She'll take a key word or maybe one he emphasizes and she'll say it too.  She'll say words like Nephites, Korihor, blessings, battle, etc.  It's been fun realizing that she isn't just sitting there daydreaming, but that she's actually listening to Tyler.  It definitely makes me more resolved to make sure we continue.

Oh, and Ellie made a breakthrough this week.  She learned to sit up!  I'm not sure she really likes it though, because every time I sit her down like that she doesn't seem to know what to do with herself and starts crying after a few minutes.  But she can do it!  She'll be joining in with us in no time.

This week I got to lesson 10 in Latin for Beginners.  I'm still enjoying it very much.  In fact, my hard copy of the book arrived this week.  The picture above is of my new textbook and my Latin notebook.  The textbook is an original and I'm pretty sure it was used at a military high school back in 1911 or so.

Here's an example of my Latin translations. I just started on the second declension this week and moving along nicely!  I'm also going to start Khan Academy math.  I've been wanting to review my math skills, and this looks like a fun and free way to do it.  I'm starting at the very beginning, with addition and then graduating as I go.  I'll post more on it later if it turns out that I'm going to stick with it.  I already have 34,955 energy points, and I think it's going to go nicely.

Next week, we're going to do a unit study again.  This time on "Kittens."  I think that will be my pattern: one week I'll do a unit study, the next I'll take it more easy, then unit study and so on.  It works for us right now.  I even found a preschooler-appropriate lapbook to go with our topic next week, so that should be interesting.  I've never done a lapbook before!  I will, of course, post pictures when we do it.

Next week is Tyler's Spring Break, so I may have to see about getting Dad involved!  That would be interesting for sure.

Learning Latin

I'm doing it!  I'm learning Latin.  And I have to say, it is a total blast.  I'm really excited about it.  I dreamed about it last night, in fact.

Because I plan on following the Classical Education method when homeschooling our girls, I've run into the idea of teaching Latin many times.  At first I thought it seemed pointless.  Why teach a dead language?  Why bother with it when you could teach a useful language.  The more I studied about the benefits of Latin, though, the more convinced I became.  The very fact that it is a dead language means that it is an ideal one to teach in a home environment where the parent is not fluent.  Latin is read and written, but rarely spoken.  It does great things for test scores and it helps children in grammar, vocabulary, and in logic.

Then there is the history associated with it.  Latin was taught in almost every western school for the last several hundred years.  So much of our sciences and histories are in Latin and a knowledge of Latin will open my children's doors to original writings.  One of the biggest things I aim to do in homeschooling is to teach my children in an unfiltered way.  This means no textbooks for content subjects.  We will go straight to living books and original sources for history.  Having a Latin background will help enable them in this endeaver.

I'm sure I have more reasons than what I've listed, but I can't really think of them right now.  Needless to say, I became convinced to teach Latin.  I researched Latin curriculum.  I attended a few lectures at the homeschooling convention on the subject, and I talked to one of the developers of my favorite children's Latin curriculum for 10 minutes or so at his vendor booth.  Latin was on my mind.

But then there was the problem with me.  I have zero Latin experience.  Even my foreign language experience is pretty dismal.  I had two years of French and one year of Japanese in High School, followed by two semesters of German in college.  I remember almost none of it and I didn't feel like I was talented in the foreign language department.  I figured I'd just learn Latin along with my kids.  Maybe I'd even stay a month or so ahead of them so I could help them.

Then the other day I was playing around on the Old Fashioned Education website, which lists tons of free educational resources.  On a whim I clicked on their Latin section.  That's where I first saw it.  My new favorite book: Latin for Beginners by Benjamin D'ooge.  Latin for Beginners was written over a hundred years ago.  My previous experience with old texts was that there was very little hand-holding and a lot of information thrown at you very fast.  But as I started skimming this one, I realized that it was very modern in style.  And most importantly, it explained the grammar as if I had no previous knowledge about grammar terms.  It explains what the cases are, the parts of speach, etc. while teaching about their Latin counterparts.

This is exactly what I needed.  I got all A's in school in English, but I couldn't use a lick of it to save my life (as may be noticed from my poor writing).  After researching, I found that I'm not the only person who loves this text.  There is a whole forum about it, as well as several free resources including virtual vocab flashcards, audio lectures, and a downloadable answer key.  From what I can tell, it is supposed to be comparable to Henle Latin and will prepare the student to read Caesar by the end.

I have completed the first 5 lessons out of 76 and am having a blast.  I can't wait until the girls' bed time so that I can do some more.  It is perfect for me, and I just had to share.  Every time I sit down to work on a lesson, time flies by very fast.  It's like I'm working on a really interesting puzzle.

After working on the first few lessons, I realized that while possible, it would be onconvenient to do the whole book in PDF format on my computer.  I simply need to go back and forth to look things up too much.  So I bought on original copy off Abe Books for $5.  I'm thinking this will be one of the best $5 I've ever spent.

If you are interested, here are some links to the resources I've mentioned:

Latin for Beginners, Benjamin D'Ooge
Latin for Beginners Answer Key
Latin for Beginners Flash Cards (search for DB/LFB/001, changing the last number to represent the lesson you are looking for, so DB/LFB/002 for lesson 2)
Latin for Beginners Forum
Latin for Beginners Audio

(Although I gave up on this a few months ago, I just discovered that there is also an original teacher's manual available for it as well.  It thought that I would link to it with the rest of the resources.)

Latin for Beginners Teacher's Manual

I'm excited to see where this takes me!