Weekly Report: Days 1-5

I don't have many pictures for this week because most of them were taken on the first day.  It was a very productive first week, though.  It is weird, I feel like I am taking this year much more seriously than last year, or the year before.  Probably because this is the first year that Lydia would be going to school if we weren't homeschooling, so it is getting real!

We got family pictures back this week.  I loved this one of the girls

Lydia

Math:
Saxon is going quite well so far. I am enjoying teaching it and Lydia seems to be responding well to the spiral format.  It does help that she already understands the content that we've been doing so far, but I'm hoping it will continue to be a good fit.
Reading:
We did OPGTR every day and Lydia also read a book to me every day.
Language Arts:
Writing With Ease went well.  It definitely helped that the first selections were from Little House in the Big Woods, which she loves.  She did well with her narrations and copywork.
FLL also went well.  We're going to be skipping some of the lessons because we are doing poetry memorization somewhere else, so we'll probably speed through it.  I might supplement with Language Lessons Through Literature, but we'll see.

Eleanor

Math:
Essential Math is turning out to be a bit boring for her, so we did it a few days and then played with c-rods. We basically did living math.  I think I might change our focus from Essential Math to Miquon as our main curriculum.
Reading:
We're working on her figuring out blending. She does ok, but gets frustrated very easily.  For the next little while, we'll probably be using the Hooked on Phonics app because she seems to respond better to the game format.
Handwriting:
We started Handwriting Without Tears and she's enjoying it so far.

Together

Read Aloud:
We read about half of Raggedy Ann Stories, and the girls are enjoying it well enough.  It isn't my favorite, but we'll power through.
Science:
We didn't do science this week, but we'll start up next week.


So that was our first week, uneventful, but enjoyable and a good start!

Other Plans 2014/2015

Most of these will be done together, some more regularly than others, but they are still important parts of our homeschool and I thought they deserved to be listed, if only for my own records.

Religion:
We are very religious, and while I don't really consider us "religious homeschoolers," it is still an important part of our lives.  In the morning, immediately after breakfast, the girls and I will read one story out of the Illustrated Scripture Stories books put out by the Church.

We will probably be focusing on the bible this year, as we focus on the Book of Mormon in the evening as a family.  Every night we read one page together out of the BoM and talk about it as we go.  Lydia reads a verse or two as well.  While we read, the girls look at The Illustrated Stories from the Book of Mormon set that we happen to own (thanks Mom and Dad!).  It is a 16 volume set that is out of print, but really detailed and awesome.  We recently finished the Book of Mormon for the second time as a family, so we are starting fresh right now and are only a few chapters in.

Memorization:
Since we stopped memorization for a while and are adding Eleanor in, I'll be focusing on reviewing ones Lydia has already learned for a while and teaching them to Eleanor.  So all of our previous memorization lists still apply.  If we finish that (and Lydia likely will, if not Eleanor) then I will just continue with last year's plan and the timeline.


Science:
Science is not a formal priority for us this year.  I do plan on doing some formal science though, specifically Building Foundations in Scientific Understanding.  The first volume is for K-2, so we will be doing 12 lessons out of it this year.  They are fairly meaty, though.  I also plan on doing some interest-led science this year, including a lot of time on the human body, which Lydia is especially interested in right now, and probably space.

We will be doing My Body which is a project where you build a life-size body diagram organ by organ.  We will also likely make a few lapbooks.  Lydia has been enjoying Human Body by Tinybop and My Incredible Body apps, both of which are excellent and she has learned a lot.

I am also getting chickens in a few weeks as day-old baby chicks, so we will probably do some informal science as they help me with them too.


History:
We will do nothing formal for history this year.  The girls listen to Story of the World volumes 1&2 all the way through every few weeks at bedtime which covers from pre-history to the beginning of the renaissance.  We are still working on memorizing the Classical Conversations Timeline too.

And the girls watch Liberty's Kids all the way through every few months, which is a great program about the founding of the United States.  Besides those and reading library books, I plan on no history focus this year.  Actually, now that I list it out like that, this is a fairly decent history plan for a first grader and pre-schooler.


Computer Science:

I consider computer science an important subject in our homeschool, so we will be doing Code.org's new K-1st cs program when it comes out (promised to be this summer).  Looking at it, that is about 20 lessons total.  We will also be doing some pre-coding activities, mostly in the form of apps like Kodable.  I don't think Lydia will be ready for Scratch by the end of this year, but that is our goal in the next few years.

Language Arts Plans for 2014/2015

First Grade 

Reading:  Finish up The Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading.  At this point it is almost just a formality but we will finish it, dang it!  Lydia is already reading as well as I could hope and it is mostly just practice and maturity at this point for her.

We will also be reading books together daily with the hopes of eventually moving her to free-reading time on her own.

We will be doing family read alouds daily.... I hope.  I haven't been great at this in the past, but here's hoping this is the year!

Writing: We will be using Writing With Ease Level 1.  This is almost exclusively narration and dictation, both of which will be good for her.

Grammar: First Language Lessons Level 1.

Spelling: All About Spelling Level 1 & 2.  We're mostly done with level 1, so when she finishes it, we'll move right on to level 2.


Pre-K

Reading: We're starting OPGTR!  One girl finishing it up, one starting!  I'm pretty sure I will be using this book for like 6 years straight, but here goes year 3.

She will be joining us for our family read aloud.

Handwriting: Handwriting Without Tears PreK.  Eleanor will be learning all of her capital letters.

Math Plans for 2014/2015

First Grade Math

I've tried everything I can think of for math with Lydia, but it just hasn't been sinking in.  All my dreams of creative and alternative math methods have been thrown out the window with her.  I don't think it is a maturity thing either, I think it is just the way she is.  She just hasn't been getting it.  So for this year, I decided to go with the best, most thorough and incrimental traditional math program I could find: Saxon math.

When I first started looking into homeschooling, Saxon was one of the first math programs I heard about and I immediately dismissed it.  I consider myself fairly mathy and some of the other math programs appealed to me much more (Singapore, Hungarian, Miquon, Living Math).  I was sure I could make those work for my children.  But they just aren't, at least for Lydia.  Algorithms are what Lydia needs.  A deep understanding of number relationships is not.  Repitition and memorization are what she needs.  Spiral (constantly reviewing past concepts) and infuriatingly incremental are what she needs, so we're going with Saxon.

Honestly, it is a very respected, proven program that thousands of children have used with great success, but I am a little disappointed to go there.  Also, it is crazy involved!  I have a HUGE teacher's manual (like several inches thick) that is scripted (which I actually like).  I have two workbooks, a "meeting" book, and several masters.  Not to mention the tons of manipulatives that they require (which I mostly had on hand already).  Math is probably going to take us an hour or more a day.  But I am committed.  I am hopeful.  I really think this might work for her, and if it does, we are in it for the long haul, at least with Lydia.

I will not be supplementing Saxon at all this year, at least in the foreseeable future.  It is already so involved that I don't think I'll be up to it!

PreK

For Eleanor this year we will be finishing Essential Math.  She is already on about page 100 in Essential Math A and will probably finish it up in the month.  Essential Math B, from what I learned with Lydia, is much more challenging and I'm sure she'll need to slow down.  I also plan on trying all my beautiful math dreams out on her.  We'll be doing a lot of work with our cuisenaire rods and probably working through Miquon and possibly even starting Math Mammoth if she gets there.  Eleanor is very bright, but she is still very young (almost 4 years old), so we'll take our time and see what happens.

She will also be sitting in a lot on the verbal stuff I do with Lydia, like skip counting and counting backwards, as well as calendar and patterns, so I expect Saxon to benefit her too, somewhat.

First Day of Homeschool 2014

Today was our first day of school.  Lydia started 1st grade and Eleanor started PreK.  I was going to wait a bit but they were bored and I think we were all ready.  I wanted to make the first day special because back when I first decided to homeschool, the first day of school was the part that made me saddest to give up.  I always loved the first day of school and I want my kids to think it is special too.

We started with a breakfast of ice cream and brownies, which is very special at our house.  We almost never have ice cream, much less for breakfast, and the girls enjoyed it.  I also let them pick everything about what they wore today, including their hair.  Then we took pictures.  We are at that fun stage where the kids are so squirmy the pictures are a bit blurry, and their "smiles" look more like grimaces.

Lydia- 1st Grade

Eleanor- PreK (yes, she and Lydia are the exact same height)

Adelaide- Just wanted a picture too.

School itself went pretty well.  We will need to work through some discipline issues, but for the most part, things went fairly well.  And Eleanor is now reading two-letter words (am, at, etc.)!  I'm excited for her to start learning how to read.

After school, we went to McDonald's for lunch (their favorite) and then the we went to the Children's museum.

This is a hand-crocheted climbing structure that was really fun.  Even Tyler and I climbed up in it.

Eleanor at the top

The whole family at the top.

Adelaide and Daddy inside of it.

Adelaide got a bit worn out.

So we had a good day, I think.  I hope the rest of our week goes just as well!

Sorry and an Update

Sorry I haven't posted in a while.  Life got really hectic and we didn't really do much school in the last few weeks anyways.  Therapy is over, which means I get to have my girls all to myself again.  Tyler graduated medical school and we moved to a new state.  We are almost settled in our new house.  Daily naptime for all three girls has been re-instituted.  Life is starting to get into a new regular flow and I couldn't be more happy about it.

School...well, I pretty much gave up on school weeks ago.  Besides reading with Lydia, everything else just felt like too much for Lydia's therapy-filled schedule.  She was having a really hard time with all that was expected of her and I made the decision to back off for a while.  We finished 116 days of school total and I feel good calling it a year and starting over in a few weeks.  I still haven't decided if we will call this upcoming year another Kindergarten year or 1st grade for Lydia, but either way, my plans are the same (and will be detailed in an upcoming post).  Eleanor will be starting PreK which she is very excited about.   I'm excited to get a fresh start and school in earnest.

In the meantime, we have been having a lot of fun adventures.  Here are pictures from some of them:

Weekly Report: Days 100-104

The last week has seen a change in Lydia's therapy here at home.  She has a new therapist that is alternating times with her old therapist and her program has changed to be a bit more rigorous.  She is struggling a bit with the expectations of her, but she is equal to the task and has been able to keep up with her basic school lessons.  The last day for therapy is in the beginning of May, so she only has a few weeks left and we want to make the most of her time.

I'm also giving a lot of thought to how I will do school after we move.  It is very likely Lydia won't be in any therapy at all after we move.  Tyler will also be a 1st year resident and will be gone almost all the time.  I will have my kids 100% to myself and I would like to up our schedule and formalize a little more of our learning time.  I just need to figure out how to do it.  We'll re-institute memorization time which we are currently ignoring because of Lydia's tough schedule.  The rest of it is up in the air.  I'm sure I'll be talking more about that as time goes on.

Lydia

Reading:
OPGTR is going well.  She is on lesson 169 and moving along nicely.  She also reads an easy reader book from the library almost every day with her therapist and is now reading two verses every night at family scripture study.  Her reading is starting to show a little more fluency and she has started adding emotion to her reading and sounds a lot less like a robot.

Math:
I have some big changes in store for Lydia for math.  As you might have noticed, we are sort of floundering with math right now.  Lydia seems to have hit a wall with my current methods and I don't think what we have been doing is particularly effective for her.  Lately she has been working on Xtramath as a sort of minimal math and placeholder while she's been doing therapy, but I think I have come up with a solution for our math woes with her for after we move.  I'm going to take a very new approach that I'll talk about in another post.

Spelling:
Spelling is going well, although it is fairly low on the totem pole right now for us.  She just finished lesson 17 in AAS1.

Handwriting:
I realized that I never had her finish the HWT book a little while back, so she's been working on the last few pages.


Eleanor

Reading:
While Eleanor isn't going to officially start school until this fall, it seems like we are unofficially going ahead with it.  Most days, Eleanor will practice her letter phonograms with the LOE phonogram app.  She has them down pretty well by now.  I usually quiz her on first sounds of words at random times throughout the day as well ("Can you tell me the first letter of the word 'TABLE'?").  Now I am starting her on blending.  I'm using an app for this, but it is almost as easy on my own.  Basically I just say the three letter sounds of a simple word separately and help her figure out what word it is.  Once she gets that, we'll start OPGTR.

Math:
Almost daily Eleanor asks to do math. I went ahead and started her in Essential Math A and she is flying through it.  She loves doing her own math and I usually have to cut her off.  Right now she is on page 36.