1 - Working: Being all planned out. I will do everything in my power to not ever start another school year without being as planned out as possible. This has been the best, lowest stress school year we have had, and I chalk it all up to having all of my plans in place before we started. About half of our curriculum is "do the next thing" and every copy I need is in a folder at my fingertips. For the rest of it, I love knowing what we are doing and having it all prepped and ready to go. I like planning, and I likely will start the process earlier this coming year (around March maybe) to give me more time to spread out the tasks, but I will definitely be doing this.
2 - Not working: Those cute notebooks and modified work box binders. The little pictures aren't working because the kids just don't care. Honestly, they do school until I tell them we are done, and they are getting used to the order of things. They did enjoy peeling the pictures off and rearranging them and peeling off the velcro dots. Yeah, I've let them go -- filed in a box for possible future use. As for the folders inside, since we tend to work against the clock (15 minutes of spelling today then stop, for example) I never really know how far we are going to get in any assignment so I can put the worksheets in the right days. Instead I just keep my file box close by to pull out the new papers when we need them. We are using the notebooks to store completed work and continuing projects. I need to redo the tabs to reflect that.
3 - Working: Our curriculum choices. From Singapore math to PAL Reading and Writing to Linguistic Development Through Poetry Memorization, I love every single thing that we are using this year. There is not a dud in the bunch.
4 - Not working: Handwriting. We started the year doing cursive and that was going great. Then we got to the portion of All About Spelling where Olivia had to write out the spelling words, and I realized that she couldn't do it in cursive because we had not yet learned all the letters. She also couldn't do it in print, because she had trouble remembering how to form the letters. (She could get the letters down on paper, but she was not doing it the right way. Some of it was quite creative.) So we have scrapped cursive for now and have gone back and reviewed the correct way to form all of the letters. She has quickly come up to speed and her handwriting is looking better than it ever has. The only issue is by the time we get back to cursive (and I am not yet sure when that will be -- I want this to solidify first) she will have forgotten most of it!
5 - Not working: Audio books during quiet time. This went out the window quickly, because it was such a struggle. I don't think the books were as much of a problem as the "quiet time." I do really want to bring those audio books back, because reading aloud is pretty tough for me too with Thomas bouncing off the walls or demanding we read the train book ad nauseum. I am thinking about how we can do this -- I think having them work on art projects, drawing, or maybe puzzles, blocks or play dough instead of requiring that it be "quiet time" might help this work. Of course Thomas's naps are hit or miss these days too. It's a season.
6 - Working: Morning circle time. We struggle with sitting down to read after lunch, but we never struggle with starting our day with circle time. We sing, work on our Circle Time Virtues, do our memory work, read something for our faith studies, and it all works very well. Sometimes they draw or paint while we do this. I might add in an extra bit of reading here I think. I could if I would start our day a bit earlier consistently.
7 - Working: Writing your own program. Yes, it was a lot of work to pull together the list of all the things I wanted to use and what to do with them this summer for geography and science, but I love that the program is tailor made for us. There are not tons of activities we don't want to do (though we have skipped some of the cooking ones -- finding I am not big on those) or things we don't want to read. And the light schedule I planned for science is just perfect. Adding that to nature study events, Classical Conversations science experiments, and field trips is making a perfect science curriculum for a K and second grader without being in a science text every day.
For the most part this is what is going well with us and not working this year. Fortunately I think the things going well out-weigh the other. How are things in your home school?
This is awesome. I was just thinking of doing a homeschool wins/fails update myself. It sounds like yours are pretty much all wins!
ReplyDeletePam,
ReplyDeleteI love your blog:)
Anyway, I love this post. I have lots of questions for you but I'll try not to seem to eager;) First, re: no. 2, THANK YOU so much for mentioning the workboxes and how they're going. I have kind of-sort of put that into our school organization but never got around to doing the little picture cards. I know my kids would get tired of them as well. And it would take me quite some time to laminate and just put them all together. I may, however, still do a few for my 4 year old because she'll think they're fun. And as for no. 3, which part of PAL did you start with? What do you love about it? I have lots of questions about it but think a quick email to Jill Pike might answer lots of them. Are you using Reading and Writing, both part 1? Do you use the games/phonetic farm/do the daily journal, etc... or do you use bits and pieces of it? Part of me misses the ease of just pulling out 100 easy lessons but then I remind myself that this is a tried and true program and why don't I just give it more of a chance. anyway, if you could elaborate on that particular piece of your curriculum, I would LOVE to hear your thoughts. No. 5- I can so relate here with your experience of read aloud time with your little one. My little one is only 14 mos. but he is proving to be quite the seeker/destroyer when it comes to pretty much anything. Especially when I sit down to read to the big kids:) So we really depend on audio books in the car because my little guy also likes to destroy the cd player when my kids use it. Anyway, we live about 20 minutes from anywhere so we get a lot of audio book time in the car. I look forward to hearing what others have to say about this topic! And no. 7, I totally agree about writing your own program. I have never been this organized and when we had a family emergency this week and had to take a few days off, I was not anxious at all because I knew exactly where we were in our year. That felt really good. But yes, a ton of time planning that. I'm glad I have a while before I need to do that again!
Thanks again for your summary here. Loved reading how things are going for you.
Elizabeth - Thank you! I am doing multiple parts of PAL. For my K guy I am using PAL Reading exactly as written except we do not do the agenda work. I make sure he gets plenty of review through the games, but he doesn't care for the cutting, pasting, and coloring of the worksheets. We take it slow -- sometimes only a lesson a week, and review, review, review. He is a lefty and not so strong in the fine motor department, so we are modifying the writing side of PAL. So far he has learned to form all of the lowercase letters on the white board, and we just finished that section. Before I move forward I am going to go back and see if he can work on doing them on paper in the boxes now. Once he gets that down we will move forward to the capital letters and lines.
DeleteWith my second grader I have realized that she needs more practice with those phonics letter pairs. So we are going through the poems and highlighting the helpers. I put them on cards for her to feed to the monster, and we are playing the knock knock game with the farm to review them. She is reading a Magic Tree House book aloud to me right now (her choice) and as we read and sound out words I point out the helpers to her. As for the writing, we quickly went through part one to review the letter formations but started on the lines instead of the boxes. Simultaneously we are working in Part 2 and she is already working on her Who/Which project and strong verbs. I have no doubt we will be well into Part 3 in a few months.
She is starting with AAS 1 and is about halfway through it. I will start John in it when she finishes it, even if he has to write the words on the white board. We do the family journal and the story summary as part of our morning circle time with both of them.
I love that it is such a versatile program -- look at how many uses it is serving for our family. I also love that it teaches the phonics through sight words too. We are on lesson 10, my K guy has learned so much about words and sounds and reading, and he still hasn't had to blend. I model it for him, but he doesn't have to be able to do it (which I think is a developmental thing) to be successful at the program at this point. I think it is a great way to ease into reading instruction. I love that the writing basically covers K-2nd grade. I love that other than making copies and the games, it is open and go. I love that we can work partially on a lesson for a certain number of minutes, put a sticky note in the book, and then finish the lesson the next day.
OK, I think this is my longest comment ever! Look for me to expand it a bit and turn it into a blog post next week! Let me know if you have any more questions I can help answer about it.
Pam-
DeleteThanks so much for your response! I think I'm learning so much as I go with this program. Just today, I sat and read through a bunch of far-in-the-future lessons (which I honestly have not had a chance to do yet) and I'm really excited at seeing where this is going! I, too, find that it's so easy to get that story summary in with our other subjects and my daughter (K level) is usually pretty eager to get to the games first thing in the morning. We have a hard time getting to the agenda as well. Lots and lots of cutting and pasting, yes. But it's good to hear that you like it and it's working for you. You sound like you are taking exactly the approach that is intended. That's awesome.
I am going at a pretty slow pace as I like to use the timer for the various aspects of the program. Otherwise I tend to want to cram a bunch in if, say, my toddler is being cooperative and playing nicely somewhere with an older sibling. it's gentle enough to start the year off with but is also introducing a lot of new techniques and material that we've never used. I'm looking forward to your post expanding your thoughts (though these are many already!:) ) and I'm sure I'll have questions then. This all makes sense in terms of where we are so that makes me happy:)
Thanks again!