How We Do Memorization

As I've mentioned before, memorization is a very important subject in our home.  I grew up doing very little memorization and I still have a lot of difficulty memorizing anything.  I always regretted this and memorization was one of the first subjects I knew I wanted to do when I decided to homeschool.

In most classical education scopes and sequences, memorization is a very important subject, especially in the younger years.  Some authors/speakers suggest that poetry is the most important source for memorization material.  Others say scripture.  And still others say facts and lists are important, although even these people disagree as to whether the facts and lists should be taught in context with the subject or whether it is good just to memorize them as stand-alones.  I agree with all of these groups!  I think poetry is great because it helps our minds get filled with good language and sentence structure.  Scriptures are important because of the content that is in them, and I honestly believe that one of the ways the Spirit can speak to us is through those words we have memorized.  Facts and lists are important because they create a peg effect: the more familiar you are with a word or topic, the more you pay attention when it is brought up and therefore the more you learn about it.  Thus while memorizing you are creating a "peg" on which to hang information.  I also believe that while teaching memorized pieces in context is ideal, there is still much to be gained from memorizing for memorization's sake.

Children get confidence and self-esteem when they have memorized something that they saw as challenging.  It feels good and is a great accomplishment to memorize something challenging and know that it will never be apart from them again, that it is in their heads forever.  When I was in eighth grade, I decided on my own that I wanted to memorize the Gettysburg Address.  When I had learned it all, I was very proud of myself, and to this day I still remember the Gettysburg Address and perk up when I hear it mentioned.  I want my children to have this experience as much as possible.

That's the "why" of our memorization.  Our "how" is actually pretty simple and doesn't take too long every day.  The key is that we do it every day that we do school, and we constantly review in order to not forget anything.

As I've mentioned in previous posts, I mentally divide our memorization focus into three categories: Language, Religion, and Facts & Lists.  Language includes things like poetry, great speeches, Shakespeare, etc.  Religion is mostly scripture, but can include hymns or quotes.  Facts & Lists is the miscellaneous group.  So far this section has included things like the 8 planets, my phone number, the colors in a rainbow, etc.  I try to keep our memorization workload pretty evenly divided between these three categories, although language and scripture tend to dominate in this season of our lives.  I imagine and we do more science and history, though, facts and lists will catch up.  At some point we might include foreign language as a fourth category, but not yet.

What I do is take the three categories I listed and make up a list of things to memorize.  This is the fun part for me.  I use Google searches, Living Memory by Andrew Campbell, various church resources like the Seminary Mastery list, and just ideas that I have to compile what we want to do.  Here is the list I did for the 2012/13 school year (Lydia's PreK).

Lydia's memorization book

After I have the list compiled, I write each item on its own index card.

Cards that she reviews on even days.  On one side is the prompt and on the other is the actual material.

 As poems get longer I might have to rethink this, but for now, this has worked.  I keep all of our future memorization work handy for use as soon as Lydia has mastered old ones.  I also keep a memorization book.  It is actually just a small scrap book that someone gave to us and that I organized according to the Simply Charlotte Mason method.

At first, every day we reviewed our new memorization piece and all the previously memorized pieces.  Once that became too cumbersome, I divided all of Lydia's previously memorized work into equal parts and she reviewed each one every other day, and the new piece daily.  That's where we are right now.

Pretty soon, though, even that will become too cumbersome so we'll put some of the more recent work into the even/odd group, current work is always daily, and older work will be reviewed one day a week.  We'll keep going like this until we have material that we review daily, every other day, weekly, and monthly.  It sounds complicated, but once you get it set up, it is very simple.

Every day while I make lunch for Lydia, we do memorization.  While I make her sandwiches, she goes through her older memorization and then we work on her current piece.  It takes us about 10 minutes, max.  When we review the older pieces, I say the title or scripture reference.  From that, she repeats the title, says the name of the author, if relavent, and then says the selection.  So for "Who Has Seen the Wind," I say the title of the poem and then she says "Who Has Seen the Wind, by Christina Rosetti.  Who has seen the wind, neither I nor you..."  Sometimes she might need the first word to jog her memory, so I help her.

For new pieces, I always read the entire piece to her completely a few times before having her say it back to me.  Then we start with the title and the author.  Here's an example of our dialogue:

Me (after having read through the whole poem a few times): "Sweet and Low," by Alfred Lord Tennyson.  Say that please."
Lydia: "Sweet and Low, by..."
Me: "Alfred Lord Tennyson"
Lydia: "by Alfred Lord Tennyson"
Me: "Now say the whole thing, Sweet and Low, by Alfred Lord Tennyson"
Lydia: "Sweet and Low by Alfred Lord Tennyson"
Me: "Great. Sweet and low, sweet and low, wind of the western sea."
Lydia: "Sweet and low, wind of the sea."
Me: "Close, but you say Sweet and Low twice and wind of the western sea.  So you say, Sweet and low, sweet and low, wind of the western sea."
Lydia: "Sweet and low, sweet and low, wind of the western sea."
Me: "Good, now let's say the whole thing.  Sweet and Low, by Alfred Lord Tennyson.  Sweet and low, sweet and low, wind of the western sea."
Me: Great!  Go ahead and eat your lunch, you did a good job today."

The following day I might read the poem all the way through one and then see if she remembers what we did.  I help her along if she gets stuck.  Usually we try to do about two lines a day, but sometimes it just takes longer.  Often she'll ask or I'll volunteer definitions of words or the meaning of a line.  After we did "At the Seaside," she started calling her little plastic shovel a "wooden spade," after I explained that a spade is just like a shovel.  Sometimes I'll make a motion or say a line in an over exaggerated way to help her remember.  So in "Sweet and Low," it says, "Low, low, breathe and blow."  For "breathe" we take a big breathe and lean way back and for "blow" we lean way forward and breathe out as we say the word.  Or for D&C 82:10, part of it says, "when you do not what I say, ye have no promise."  We always put a big emphasis on the word "not."  There's no trick to it, I just always try to make it easier to remember if possible.  I also always try to stay in tune with what she seems like she wants to do and don't push it too much on any one day.  I want memorization to be enjoyable.  

Doing it this way has made it quite painless, and since we always do Lydia's schoolwork immediately after lunch, it is the first subject of the day and never gets forgotten.

We love memorization and I don't see it going to the back burner any time soon!

Weekly Report: Week 34

I haven't written up a weekly report in the last little bit because we took an unscheduled break off of school.  I just wasn't feeling like doing it for a little over a week, and since we are ahead in our schedule, we didn't!  In that time, we did do about a week's worth of school days, though, so I'm going to say we finished week 34, even though it was spread over a few weeks.

Eleanor at the lake.

We went to Lake Wedington and had a picnic and played in the sand.  The girls recently watched an episode of Daniel Tiger where he played in a sandbox and they wanted to play in a sandbox too.  There are sand-filled volleyball courts at the lake, so they played there for over an hour and then we hiked a bit.

Adelaide missed out on the sandbox but had fun on the blanket with me.

Lazy mom + picnic = Lunchables

We also got to go to Little Sprouts one time.  The other week got rained out.  But the Wednesday we went was fun because they had a farmer plow a pumpkin patch that the kids are going to plant in a few weeks and we got to watch.  Here's a picture of it from Little Sprouts' Facebook page.  I'm borrowing their picture because it is pretty difficult to wrestle my three and take pictures at the same time. :)

Adelaide reached a major milestone in the last week or two.  She is officially walking!  It's about time as she is over a year old.  Right now she walks about 50% of the time and crawls the other 50%, but that percentage is going up every day.  Give her another month and she'll be a pro.

As for actual schooling subjects...

Reading:
Lydia continues to progress and is completely understanding the concept of silent "e" with long vowels.  Right now we're just going through and practicing the sentences.  She is still a very slow reader and has difficulty focusing, so it usually takes us 2 days or more to get through a lesson.

Math:
For the last several math lessons, we've been doing lessons of my own creation.  It is pretty much the same every day.  We started out spending a lot of time building "stairs" with the rods all the way to twenty.

This is a picture from earlier in the year, but we're doing the same thing.

 My hope was that by doing this over and over again, she would start to internalize 10 & 2 make 12 and 10 & 10 make twenty.  And it is working!  She has gotten much, much faster at creating the 1-20 stairs with the rods and she doesn't even need to see the number anymore.  When she is done, we "climb" the stairs and then go "down" the stairs, which helps her practice counting forwards and backwards.  Then we climb the stairs 2 at a time, which practices counting by twos.  Next week we'll climb the stairs starting in the middle, which should help her with "counting on."

I also made a playlist on YouTube of several math songs that count in different ways and we listen/ watch them regularly on our Roku.  These seem to be helping, especially with the skip counting. 

Today I took out the abacus for the first time in a while and when I explained that each row was 10, she was able to quickly tell me what the teen numbers were, and then helped me count by 2s to 20 and 10s to 100.  I'm glad we've been taking this break and think we'll keep it up for a while until she solidly understands all the concepts I'm hoping to help her with.

Handwriting:
She is zooming through HWT Kindergarten.  All the practice on the iPad with LetterSchool has really helped her take off with it.  We usually do 4 or 5 pages at a time when we practice and she does well with them and is retaining them.  We'll probably finish up the book pretty early in Kindergarten.

Spelling:
I am loving All About Spelling.  It is working brilliantly for my daughter and I am enjoying teaching it.  We are almost done with Step 5.

Memorization:
Lydia is a little more than halfway done with "Sweet and Low," which is the longest poem we've worked on (16 lines!).  She likes this one because I've sort of acted it out as we practice, so she does too.  I'll have to try to incorporate more of that into our memorization.  We also continue to review all her previous memorization on a regular basis, and she has retained everything so far.

Our Favorite Educational Apps

I talk a lot about apps that we use on our iPad.  We use our iPad a lot around here for all sorts of purposes, although it was bought to be an educational tool.  There are so many really cool apps out there and I have downloaded and tried tons of them, both free and paid.  Lydia is autistic, and the iPad has been wonderful and has helped her quickly learn concepts or vocabulary that she might not have learned as well without it.

Since she is still only 4 (almost 5!), these are mostly at a preschool or young elementary level.  There are several things I look for in an app.  The first being that it isn't cluttered.  By cluttered, I mean that there is too much on the first page, or all sorts of ads and banners that can accidentally be clicked by young children.  I love an app that is intuitive in its navigation.  I also don't want an app to be loud and flashy.  Finally, my daughter doesn't really respond that well to stories, especially verbal ones, so most of our app choices have very little talking in them (although not all).

I will probably add to this app list as time goes on and my other children get older and we discover new things out there, but for now, here are our winners.  Oh, and I'm not getting paid for any of this, these are my honest opinions about these apps.

LetterSchool
This is probably Lydia's most favorite app right now.  It is a very simple handwriting app that is so simple it is almost deceiving.  Before this app, we tried several handwriting and tracing apps, but all of them were flops.  This one has the child do the letter three times in different ways that focuses on strokes without being frustrating.  And it lets you pick which handwriting font you want it to teach!  It is programed with Handwriting Without Tears, D'Nealian, and Zaner-Bloser fonts.  Lydia's handwriting has drastically improved in the month or so that we've been using this app.

Tally Tots
I simple game that teaches the numbers 1-20.  Each number has a mini-game to play that reinforces its number value.  It is uncluttered and the games are fun and cute.

Alpha Tots
This app is by the same people as the Tally Tots app.  It is the same premise, except it teaches all the letters and their sounds.

Logic of English Phonograms App
When I decided to teach spelling with a phonograms-based method, I was a little worried because I never learned them myself.  I bought this app, hoping that it would help reinforce sounds to my daughters so that I wouldn't have to spend tons of time drilling them.  And it works.  It isn't flashy or incredibly fun, but both Lydia and Eleanor have learned a lot and enjoy playing it for short periods of time.

Pepi Tree
This app was a surprise winner.  It was free when I got it, and has some repetitive music in it that I have deliberately chosen to believe is cute rather than go out of my mind, but the girls love it and it has sparked several life science conversations with them.  They learned where butterflies come from, what owls eat, and how spiders catch their food.  The other morning, on the way to therapy, Lydia was listing off all the food that owls eat to me.  So it is a winner in my book.

Dr. Panda's Veggie Garden
This game is like Harvest Moon for little kids.  It walks them through how to grow and take care of lots of different kinds of plants.  I find it a bit redundant, but they play it over and over again.  It is cute and uncluttered and the child doesn't need to know how to read or even understand language to play it.

Barefoot World Atlas
I probably love this app more than my girls, but I can't help it.  It is so beautiful.  It is also the largest app I own as far as memory it takes up.  It is an illustrated globe you can explore that has factual tidbits you can click on and read or have read to you.  It is an awesome app and I hope my girls will enjoy it more as they get older.  As it is, Lydia still plays with it fairly regularly, although she mostly looks for the train, airplane, and car related facts.

Map Puzzles for Kids
OK, I'm a little reluctant to post this one.  It is obviously fairly low budget and tends to freeze a little, but it is the best app I've found that is simply a puzzle of countries and continents of the world.  My daughters love puzzle apps, so I got this one in hopes that they could put that to good use.  It says the name of the country when you place it, and really, how much more complicated does it need to be?  Lydia has learned where tons of countries are located by playing this app alone, so it is definitely a keeper for us.

Make a Scene
These probably won't be considered educational by most of you, but they are for us, so I'm posting it.  There are several apps that Make A Scene creates that are themed: farm, arctic, jungle, etc.  We have all of them and buy new ones as soon as they come out.  Lydia has spent so much time with them, and while they are not obviously educational, they have been very good for her.  She has learned so much vocabulary and she has used her imagination in many of her scenes.  It is a simple sticker book app that is very well thought out and well done for small children.  While not an original concept, the execution is the best I've seen for our purposes.  Oh, and the voice that names each "sticker" is British, so Lydia has developed a little bit of a British accent with several words she learned on it.  Particularly with the dinosaurs, which is adorable.


We have lots of other apps that we enjoy, but these are our highlights and the ones I consider most educational.

Weekly Report: Week 33

We had a busy week last week.  We played and enjoyed ourselves quite a bit.  On Monday, we went up to Grandma and Grandpa's house for a little while after having fun playing at the splash park.  I was too busy making sure the girls were safe to take any pictures, but they had a lot of fun and we will be going up quite often this summer, I think.

 On Wednesday, we did Little Sprouts. This week's class focused on rabbits and even had several rabbits there for the kids to pet and look at.  Some of them were huge and they even had some baby rabbits.  Eleanor, especially, enjoyed herself and we were one of the last families to leave.  This picture was taken by their director and put on their Facebook page.  Ellie was too cute, they just had to share.

On Friday, we had a play date at the park in the morning and then Saturday we went up to Grandma and Grandpa's house again.  Overall it was a very fun week.

I had fun too.  On Tuesday night I had a book club meeting with some of my friends where we discussed Out of Solitude.  It was an interesting read for me and I enjoyed it quite a bit, even though we aren't Catholic.  Then, on Thursday night, I had a craft night with some of my other friends where we exchanged quiet book pages and made a few more.  In the picture, I made all of the top row.  The bottom three were made by some of the other women.  I'm not usually very crafty, but I was pretty proud of my little pie, in particular.

I don't think I'm going to really go into detail for what we did for school this week.  It was really just more of the same and I'll probably go into more detail next week.  Reading is still working on long vowels.  Math is working on place value.  Spelling is working on alphabetical order and vowels/consonants.  Handwriting started finished the PreK book and started the Kindergarten book.  And Memorization started a new poem.

Weekly Report: Week 32

Just another regular week here.  The girls and I have been enjoying the sunny weather so much.  Today I even set up a clothesline outside for my laundry for fun.  It is sunny with a slight breeze, the perfect laundry day weather.

We did a full week's worth of school and even made it to the Botanical Garden with some friends, although we missed Little Sprouts because of time confusion.  Oh well, the girls still had fun and enjoyed being outside playing with pretty flowers everywhere.  We also made it to the library, which is always a daunting task for me because the girls all want to go in different directions and there is just one of me and three of them.  Somehow we made it out in one piece and even got some books!

We're technically only 4 weeks away from the end of our "school year," but I think we'll just keep going at a regular pace.  I don't feel like I can just set aside any of these subjects without Lydia forgetting a significant portion.  We also have a good routine going.  We do have some vacations coming up and we'll take time off school for them, but I think we'll probably hit more around 40 weeks than my original goal of 36 before Kindergarten starts the second week of August.  At this point, though, Kindergarten won't look that much different than what we're already doing.

Reading:
Lydia got through lesson 68 in OPGTR.  She mostly worked on a_e words but also learned about words like he, she, me, etc.  She is picking it all up so well, I'm very impressed.  Our biggest problem with reading is inattention.  She has to be redirected back to the page every word.  I've worked out some games and systems to try to keep her as focused as possible, so hopefully that attention will just come in time and maturity.

Lydia is listening to Black Beauty during her naptime now and seems to be enjoying it.  The girls are also really enjoying the My First Little House books a lot and I got several of them from the library.  They love hearing about Laura, Mary, Carrie, and their dog Jack.  I've been doing some informal narration questions with Lydia after she listens to books or stories and she's making me really hopeful for when we start writing, which will be fairly narration-heavy.  We were listening to Story of the World in the car a few days ago and after we got home, I asked her what happened in our story.  She told me that Caesar cried.  Which he did, according to the story.  So she's picking up on things, despite my fears that auditory things will be a huge challenge for her.

Math:
I wrote more in depth about my math plans here.  This is what we're going to focus on for the next while.  We started out by just playing some math related games yesterday.  Lydia, Ellie, and I played Candyland, Chutes and Ladders, and Hi Ho Cherry-o yesterday and each won a game.  The girls love playing them, but I really don't.  Those games are definitely more a labor of love than enjoyment.  But sometimes that's a mother's job. :)

Spelling:
I am absolutely loving All About Spelling.  It is a brilliant program and perfect for Lydia.  If a week and a half can say anything, I will definitely continue to use it.  Lydia is now on step 3 in the program and has learned almost all the phonograms for Level 1, how to alphabetize, how to segment words so you can tell what sounds they are made up of, and what the vowels are.

Memorization:
She has now finished our list.  I think I'll go ahead and add some new poems and scriptures to her list.  I already picked out some selections that I wanted for Kindergarten, so we'll just start with them.  She is really blowing me away with her ability to memorize and really enjoys doing it.  I am hoping to get a video of her reciting all of this year's memorization, but I'm not sure I can keep her interested that long.  I'm going to try, though.

Art Study:
I put up 7 new art pieces in our dining room.  I'm using Ambleside Online's art study choices for Degas and Manet.  They are from a previous term.  I wasn't super interested in this term's selections, so I chose these because they have dancers, horses, and trains in them.  Those are things that interest the girls a lot.

Math Plans for 3-year old PreK

Ellie will be three years old this next school year and she is already insisting on being included in school plans.  So far I've been able to appease her by printing off pre-writing sheets and having her do "reading" apps on the iPad and call it reading.  I have a feeling she's going to wise up pretty soon and want something more legitimate.  This post is focused on her math.

My plan with Eleanor is to do the Mathematics Enhancement Programme Reception level, also known as MEP Reception.  I attempted to do this program with Lydia, but it was just too verbal for her.  Eleanor shouldn't have any problem with the verbal aspect of the program and it should be right up her alley. 

MEP is a British program based on a Hungarian series.  It focuses a lot on problem solving skills and games.  While meant for a classroom, it does transition to homeschool quite well and is available completely online for free.  The Reception level is only 60 lessons long, so that should give us plenty of time for pausing and working on specific concepts.

We'll also start some C-rod activities.  For now, we will mostly focus on familiarity with them and might start some simple Education Unboxed games or Miquon Orange lab pages.  I did go ahead and buy her the Essential Math A&B workbooks, but I doubt we'll start them this year.  If we do, it will be more towards the end of the year.

School this year is still 100% optional for Eleanor, so all of these plans mostly for fun for her.

Math plans for Kindergarten 2013/2014

Edited: I think we'll begin with this now.  As we get to the end of Essential Math B, I'm finding that I'm dragging her along and that she is just getting frustrated and not really absorbing all that much.  So I think I'll start with this plan as of tomorrow.

I've been putting a lot of thought into what we should do for Kindergarten math next year.  Lydia will be done, or almost done with the Singapore Essential Math program by then, and originally my plan was to move on into Math Mammoth 1a, which is technically a first grade program.  However, I'm finding that she is only absorbing about 50% of the concepts that I'm teaching her and I feel like there would be some great value in stepping back and solidifying her number sense before moving on.  Because she's only be barely 5, I think that now is a great time to pause and really get these concepts down solid.

How to approach this, however, is a little more complicated.  I've thought that maybe we should stick with doing Miquon Orange/Red as our primary math program.  I've also thought about just using a list of concepts and teaching them myself in whatever way makes sense.  I do feel very comfortable teaching at this level, and the latter is a tempting solution.

So after thinking about it, I think we'll do a combination of things.  I plan on using Kitchen Table Math as a sort of guide or check list to make sure she is honestly grasping what I'm talking about.  Rather than worksheets or lesson plans, the book lists the incremintal steps that a child should learn about numbers.  For each little step, it gives some suggestions or ideas on how to teach it.  Up until now, I've mostly been using it as a backup for more ideas if Lydia got stuck somewhere, but I think it will be a great program to follow on its own.

Along with Kitchen Table Math, I plan on using some of the ideas from Education Unboxed.  EU is similar to KTM in that it doesn't have worksheets or lesson plans, but is concept focused.  It is a website with videos of how to use Cuisenaire Rods to teach various math concepts.  We love c-rods at our house, so this is a great resource.

I do plan on continuing with Miquon Orange/Red as I feel like.  Knowing me, it is going to be difficult to not try to finish the program, but as of right now, it is definitely secondary.

Some of the concepts that I am going to focus on with Lydia for Kindergarten are:

• counting to 100
• skip counting by 2s, 5s, 10s
• place value to 10s, maybe 100s
• counting "on" (I say 5, she says 6, 7, 8...)
• counting "back" (I say 5, she says 4, 3, 2...)
• greater than/less than, more/less, bigger/smaller
• ordering things by size
• patterns

That list isn't exhaustive, but if she can get there, we'll move on to more formal math, like Math Mammoth and Miquon.  I'm just not sure she's ready yet.