First Day of School

We completed our first day of school this fall. My four and three-year olds aren’t tired, but I am.

I noted early on that I was not completely prepared to teach history today, but since we do each twice per week, I had the option to do science instead. Our hands-on plan went well, especially since I assigned my oldest to look up “Simple Machines” in the Usborne Science Encyclopedia during her assigned reading time. She took notes and drew pictures on “levers.” Since that was what I planned on building on our first day with our Ein-O Discovery Tank, it fit in nicely. We built all three “classes” of levers and started our notebook pages on them. (I forgot to print out paper for this, so I had to run do this while they were building their models.)

We stopped by the library this evening to pick up a book on Mary Stuart and an additional “visual encyclopedia” on physics to use during the next few weeks of science.

I wasn’t ready for spelling today as I didn’t have my tape recorder handy and when I retrieved it, I had to change the batteries. I also couldn’t find my extra red spelling notebook for SWR, so I ended up going online tonight and ordering another (with plenty of “not-needed” extras).

We had some “attitude” today, but it went pretty well, all-in-all. My oldest’s piano book arrived via UPS this evening, so we’re in good shape for the rest of the week . . . I hope!

Keeping the preschooler, toddler, and baby busy was just as fun as I knew it would be. Thank goodness for good weather and baby naps!

Spell to Write And Read (SWR)

Our spelling curriculum is Spell to Write & Read – otherwise known as SWR. Don’t confuse it with another product named similarly but which starts with “Sing to …” Totally different things.

I was drawn to this program when several of the books I read before starting on this homeschooling journey noted it or the program it loosely ‘grew’ from, “The Writing Road to Reading.”

Things I like about it:
- It is very structured. I am very structured.
- It lays out roughly what should be done each day for each level.
- It covers spelling with a heavy emphasis on phonics.
- It is very rule-based. There are very few “exceptions” that one needs to teach. We don’t teach “sight words.”
- I can use it with a variety of age levels with one cash outlay (the “core kit” is less than $100) at the beginning and very little on-going costs. (Each child needs a new “Learning Log” each year. I usually buy several at once and don’t have to buy more for another couple of years.)
- There is built-in review (“spiral learning”) and each year, they go through the same words they were introduced to the year before. This helps cement their spelling.

Things that I struggle with:
- It takes between 30-45 minutes per child per day to really cover the material with my kids.
- I can’t combine my kids very much because they are at such different levels.
- My kids are not “natural spellers,” so it takes at least a year (or three) for them to “get” spelling.
- It takes some energy from me to make spelling “fun.” I can modify the program to make it more interesting, but I don’t usually because I don’t get as much taught on the days when we do “fun” activities vs. just doing the spelling dictation.

This is our third year of doing SWR. According to SWR, my oldest should be doing the older (black) learning log this year because of her age. However, I made the decision to keep her in the primary (red) learning log another year because she doesn’t like to write very much and the primary learning log is pre-formatted. The older child formats and writes much of what is in the black learning log. I will be doing my own black learning log this summer in anticipation of helping her with setting up her own in the fall.

The first year a child starts SWR in our family is really a struggle. One learns 70 “basic” phonograms (or letter group sounds), a myriad of rules, and gets many (10-20) words per week to memorize. My kids are also not “natural” readers. Thus, when we start SWR in first grade, they are often not able to read – especially fluently. So, we use SWR to practice reading words. But this also means that they are spelling and writing words they cannot yet read (without sounding them out).

If one were to give a grade for spelling that first year, it would be an “F.” My six-year-old rarely gets even half of the spelling words for that week correct. She spells very phonetically and does not yet apply the rules correctly. She will either forget a rule or apply one where it is not needed. I saw this with my older child when she was in this same stage. It improved with the review spelling lists the following year, although the new spelling words the second year were spelled mostly incorrectly again.

Once the first handful of steps (in the red SWR book) were complete, we started with our daily schedule. I follow a different routine with my two children. I’ll start with what I do for my younger (first year doing SWR) child and then I’ll tell you what I do for my older child.

We are supposed to go over phonograms or spelling rules daily. I don’t anymore. It just takes too long. So, I usually review all the phonograms every other day. This takes up to 20 minutes. Once a week, we play a game with them. This could be phonogram bingo where she gets to keep the pennies on the phonograms she identifies/says correctly at the end of the game. I also do where she jumps toward me while I flash the cards & she gets a hug/kiss when she gets to me. Sometimes, I pick 16-20 phonograms and place them where she can see all of them. I will say the sounds for one of them and she has to pick up the correct phonogram card. I time it sometimes (all the cards you can pick in a certain # of minutes). Sometimes I have her compete against her older sister (with a huge advantage for the younger one on the outset) where she gets five seconds to pick up the right card. If she doesn’t in that time, her sister can pick it up. Whomever ends with the most cards wins (something).

On the days we do phonogram work, I have her spell the words for that week that we’ve already dictated. This takes the rest of spelling time (another 20-25 minutes). She is a very tactile/visual learner, and she has to write them – usually on the whiteboard.

On days that we don’t do phonogram work, I try to dictate between 8 and 12 words. Then, we review the words, having her re-write them (in a mini-quiz) on half-size notecards or on the whiteboard. She will also read the words through to me. This means we get around 20 words per week done. I have chosen not to do any of the reinforcement activities for the last several months because 1) I found they don’t add value this year for this child and 2) one activity eats up an entire day of our week, causing me to cut out either half the list of words or a day of phonogram work. We do try to make up a sentence using spelling words at least once per list, but we do not often write it down. We are doing list I-3 right now and I hope to get into and mostly through section J by the end of the school year.

For my older child who has consistently gotten 70 phonograms correct on her phonogram quizzes, we review phonograms only once per week. It only takes about five minutes to go through the stack with her. We spend the rest of the time dictating words, having oral spelling quizzes, and doing reinforcement activities (once per week). We average 30 new words per week (plus 20-40 review words since we are in sections M/N right now). I would like to achieve 40 words per week the several weeks of the school year. My goal is to get through section O this year with the older child. She started in section K-1, reaching new material in M-3.

I spent much of the first half of the year also teaching rules/reference pages several times per week with both children. I am pretty much done with that with the older child, but still sometimes spend a day (or three partial days) teaching the younger child a rule and building the reference page in her learning log.

My older child (8-yrs-old) is now getting 90% or better on her spelling tests each week. Her most recent spelling diagnostic tests (included in the red SWR book) have been above grade level (3.7, 4.3, 4.7 – meaning third grade, seventh month; fourth grade, third month; and fourth grade, seventh month). My younger child’s spelling diagnostic results have been at or above grade level even though she does poorly on her weekly tests (2.0, 2.1, 1.9).

SWR is not for everyone. If you are a mom who does not like structure and repetition, don’t pick it up as you probably won’t use it consistently. If you don’t like heavily rule-based learning, this isn’t for you. If you don’t have time in your schedule to consistently devote 45 minutes per day to spelling, don’t pick up this program (unless you have “natural spellers” who aren’t afraid of writing a lot – then you might be ok). If you don’t have time before you start using this program to devote to reading the red SWR book, building your own learning log, re-reading the red SWR book, and learning some of the phonogram sounds (I still don’t have them all memorized as well as my older child – I struggle with a few consistently), I wouldn’t pick this program up. If you want your children to be able to know all the Dolch sight words at the same time as their friends in public/private schools, this may not be the program for you (unless you add that in on the side).

I am convinced it lays a great foundation for spelling and reading for life-long learning. I was never a great speller and I spell better now than I did before starting to teach this program. But, in my opinion, the best spelling program for your family is one that you are going to be able to teach consistently and well. That may not be this one.

Summer Session: Day 3

We took a two week break after the official “end” of our school year. We started back up on Monday for a light summer session of schoolwork.

I start out with Child #1 & Child #2 working together on Writing With Ease Level 2. It is primarily for Child #1 who just finished second grade of our homeschool. I determined that she needs to have steady practice in copywork, narration, and dictation. Knowing myself, I won’t give her daily practice in such things unless I have a curriculum that has it all laid out for me. So, I purchased the workbook for WWE2 to do this school year.

Child #2 just finished Kindergarten but she loves to write and does a pretty good job writing in cursive. (I started teaching cursive to them both last summer with sidewalk chalk and continued this last school year with Cursive First.) She needs help in cutting her “narrations” down from a retelling into just a couple-sentence summary. The copywork is a bonus and I don’t expect her to keep up with the dictation as she can’t read or spell well at all yet.

The WWE2 workbook is laid out so that Day 1 is narration. Day 2 is copywork. Day 3 is dictation. Day 4 is narration and then dictation. Days 1 and 2 went pretty well. Day 3 was horrid. I didn’t think Child #2 would be able to do dictation, but she did pretty well – with lots of prompting of how to spell the next word (which she pretty much remembered). Child #1 remembered much of the sentence but showed a lot of frustration when I gently tried to help her with her misspellings (flattery was spelled fatery, off was miswritten oof, guard was gard, etc.) or when she left a word out (your). She quit with three words to go and refused to continue. Eventually, she did write the last three words. But she had to take a break first. I am not looking forward to Day 4 or future Day 3s. I could take her back down to WWE Level 1, but I really don’t think it is necessary. She just needs more practice and more patience! (And I need to continue to have patience.)

My up & coming (pencil-phobic) third grader also started Growing With Grammar 3. It went fine the first two days. She even said she kind of liked it. Today, however, the writing got to her. There isn’t that much, but she was asked to rewrite run-on sentences into two complete sentences. There were about eight of them in the lesson and she balked at the first one. After two separate bouts of crying an hour apart, she took a nap. She’d gotten up at 5 a.m. and I decided she needed to lay down because the histrionics were more like Child #2 than Child #1. She completed the lesson at around 5:30 p.m.

I picked GWG because it is supposed to be easy for the child to do without much direction or teacher-time while also being comprehensive, spiral, quick, and not involve much writing. I have had to go back through the lessons with her each day so far. I will say that it doesn’t take long once she applies herself to the lesson. I find myself spending the time explaining things to her from the student manual and correcting her work as she goes along because she doesn’t seem to “get” the concepts when she puts them into practice. Her sentences frequently don’t end with punctuation and they definitely don’t all start with capital letters. This is why she needs a grammar program. We will continue and see how it goes in a few more weeks.

My little first grade not-wanna-be (she would prefer to stay in K) continues in the Teach Your Child To Read in 100 Easy Lessons book. We left off on Lesson 44 before Christmas due to extreme frustration on both our parts. We lent the book out to a friend in the spring and when it came back, my child actually got the book out on her own initiative and started to “read” the stories. We started back up at around Lesson 15 just doing the story section of each lesson. We finished Lesson 31 today and she does really well. I plan to continue until we get to another roadblock. Then, we’ll switch back to Spell to Write and Read (SWR) phonograms and spelling lists. To be honest, she hates SWR right now, so it is doing us good to take a break.

Both children do some math for about 15-20 minutes. The older child is working on making her addition, subtraction, and multiplication facts come more easily and quickly. We play games, do speed drills (timed/untimed), work with Math Wrap-Ups (timed & untimed), and other activities that is not tied to her official math curriculum. She is already 20 or so lessons into A Beka Arithmetic 3 and I think this time will help her when we start that back up.

The younger child is slowly working through the beginning of A Beka Arithmetic 1. We finished Lesson 19 today and do only about a 1/2 lesson per day (and sometimes less). She is struggling with the concept of reading numbers above 10. (It takes her a long time to “read” 34, 71, 14, etc.) She is also working on her addition and subtraction facts for the zero to five families. She does about five minutes of either flashcard work or oral math response per day as part of each lesson.

These activities have taken about an hour total to complete each day once you subtract the whining and delay tactics each child attempts. I hope the whining gets less as they realize that doesn’t help (i.e., they still have to do the work) and when they get back ‘into the groove’ of doing school each day.

The weather has been chillier than it had been with occasional rain. When it warms back up without the precipitation, they must have their schoolwork done to go to the pool. That will hopefully be a motivating factor as well.

Language Arts for Next Year – Mental Chaos!

As I sat watching my oldest child write from dictation this morning during her spelling lesson (using Spell to Write and Read), I shuddered inwardly in horror. There were words run together, very little punctuation (including, in some cases, no periods at the end of sentences), capitalization in strange places, and of course, many spelling errors.

As much as I share success, here is an example of the opposite:

“onse on a ridingLesonIhad a mad horse he ran off the track and Jopt above four fenses.Iheldonto his nec likoney to a jar andprayed. He final ly stopt and pusht his nose in som levs.”

Now, I’ve written before about Child #1. I refer to her as “pencil-phobic.” She hates writing. She’s always had poor handwriting, although it has improved tremendously. She’s not a natural speller and has limited “mental memory” of words she has read. For example, she is flying through the Trixie Beldon book series, so she sees the main character’s best friend’s name all the time:  Honey. One of her spelling words today was honey. She tried to spell it “huny.”  Even when I directed her with the “hon” part and went over the phonogram “ey” again with her, she didn’t want to put “ey” at the end – just an “y.” I specifically pointed out that this word was spelled the same as the name of Trixie’s friend Honey. No dice.

So, then I turned to Homeschooling Year By Year to see how badly I was failing in her language arts curriculum. When poring over the second grade section while the children were eating lunch, I was reminded again that it recommends Learning Language Arts Through Literature (LLATL). So, I dashed to the computer to look up the program. I’d never looked at it seriously before.

I zoomed through some sample assessments, scope and sequence pages, and sample lessons, then returned to the lunch table full of thoughts. I was planning on using Writing With Ease 2, Growing With Grammar 3, and Spell to Write and Read for next year’s language arts. I have WWE 2 workbook, but did not use WWE 1. I have not yet purchased GWG 3. I’ve been using SWR for a couple of years already. Now, I was wondering if I should “combine” grammar, writing, spelling, and literature in one “all-together” program like LLATL or Christian Light Education (CLE) Language Arts.

We headed to homeschool PE where I was able to talk to another “curriculum junkie” mom who didn’t help out matters as she suggested I look at two or three other “all-in-one” type literature-based programs. But, she did help me think through why I would jump a ship I hadn’t even boarded yet. The only dictation or grammar we do is integrated into SWR and I’ve been more focused on the spelling aspects than any other part.

After “school” was over, I was able to do a little more research into LLATL on the Well Trained Mind Boards and found out that most people suggested that “struggling spellers” supplement LLATL with a stand-alone spelling program. I also saw some people indicated that CLE’s spelling wasn’t very rigorous either.

I think I’m panicing because I’m looking for some less teacher-(time-)intensive programs to use next year. I was thinking that instead of using three separate programs, I could “get it all” in one in less time. It sounded great. Upon reflection, I’m not sure I would “get it all” and I would probably spend just as much time as I will using three separate programs.

Since I already have two of the three programs purchased, I am not going to throw more money out to get LLATL. At least, not right now.

While the crisis in my head isn’t over, I’ve come to the decision that my previous decisions stands. Child#1 does need to have the instruction and work in GWG 3 & WWE 2 as well as a rigorous spelling program (like SWR). I guess we’ll just have to wait and see how it helps out her language arts progress next year.

P.S. We might be starting GWG & WWE in the summer instead of waiting until the fall. But that’s for another post.

Homeschool Record-keeping

Depending on which state you live in, the requirements for record keeping for homeschooling differ. Even if your state doesn’t require records, it is a good idea, in my opinion, to keep some records and some examples of your students’ (children’s) work.

Let me give you an example. One of the women in my local homeschooling group was asked by her husband to send the children to the local public school this year instead of homeschooling them. (The details are not important to my point.) She was asked by the school principal for any records she had. Caught completely off guard by the request, she said she didn’t have any. Later, she was able to reconstruct a list of activities, curriculum, and level of achievement in language arts and mathematics. She candidly admits she gave a bad example of a homeschooling parent.

Everyone has a different method – including no method at all and no formal record-keeping. I am writing this post for two reasons – 1) to encourage you to keep some level of records, even if it is only a picture or two of science projects completed or an end-of-the-year math test; and 2) to explain my own record-keeping method.

Each year, I purchase a student calendar/notebook that is my child’s own to draw/write in, but which also serves as my record of what we did each day. If a day was particularly good or bad, I write a note to that effect on the side. If there is something that needs to be celebrated or worked on, I include that in the communication section of the notebook for that week. When my spouse and I don’t see each other much due to work schedules, he can pick up the notebook at any time and see what we’ve been working on as well as how things are going.

This year, I have two notebooks – one for each child that is “schooling.” There is some repeat information (religion, science, history, kindergarten electives) written in both, but each is updated daily. The lesson plans that I worked on over the summer for the different curriculum are very helpful both in knowing what to cover each day, but also when recording what we did. If we did exactly what the lesson plan called for, I can use the page numbers listed in the lesson plans rather than pulling the book back out to check to see how much we covered.

One thing I noticed while looking back over the past week worth of notebook notes – we do a LOT each day.

On a side note, it is a good thing we are running a week ahead of my original lesson plans in Language Arts (Spell to Write and Read, SWR). The consonant/vowel reference page that I thought should only take us three days to complete (while doing other things) has already taken four days. We will probably take two more days to complete it at the pace we are currently setting. While dictation is going well and Child #1 is doing great with phonogram review, she simply hates to write. She doesn’t mind using the white board, but I make her copy down the words in her Learning Log and it seems she takes more time to complain than to write. And, as in years past, I find I can get her to write them if I provide an incentive of some sort for getting done (e.g., an extra hug/kiss or a sip of a carbonated beverage). I try not to resort to that on a regular basis, though.

The Best Laid Plans . . .

I have my book of lesson plans that I refer to daily to see what I thought we would do each day. We have only had three full days of school and already I am glad I am so flexible.

For example, this summer, Child #1 went after the Singapore math books I purchased for her to keep her math skills fresh. It went so well that the built-in review of A Beka’s math program is almost boring for her. I pondered simply skipping the first 29-some lessons completely, but think a little review is good. Besides, I haven’t been doing the mental math with her that A Beka’s program encourages. My lesson plans had us finishing Lesson 5 at the end of this week. We finished Lesson 8 today.

In another example, I planned to ease into Spell to Write and Read. I figured it would take about two weeks to review the 26 (alphabet) single-letter phonograms while doing some other fun games and such. On Day 2, Child #2 remarked that she knew all these so could we go a bit faster? So, the next day, I tested her on her knowledge. When I held up the phonogram card, she was to say the sound(s) as quickly as she could. If she hesitated or got them wrong the first time through (even if she corrected herself), I counted them wrong. She got 25 of the 26 single-letter phonograms perfect. She also knew 24 of the remaining 44 phonograms immediately and perfectly. So, a week early, I gave her a new Learning Log and we started on the Consonant/Vowel reference page.

I have also learned that I might have been a bit optimistic in how many pages we can cover each day in Story of the World I and Apologia’s Astronomy. Child #2 is doing great with Learn to Read in 100 Easy Lessons and is completing, on average, three pages per day of Singapore Earlybird Math (1B).

Happy Labor Day!

I have no plans for anything “special” on Labor Day. My spouse is working and we are getting ready for school to start tomorrow!

Just a note about what we did last week before the official start of school:

History (Story of the World I)- We did some pre-reading from library books – mostly about Egpyt.

Math (A Beka 2/Singapore EarlyBird 1B)- Both older children completed a few pages in their workbooks. We breezed through three lessons already in A Beka Arithmetic 2. The math supplement books Child #1 worked on during the summer kept her pretty much up to speed. I plan to speed through the ‘review’ that is built in to the beginning of the math book. (How do year-rounders deal with this, I wonder?)

Spelling (Spell to Write and Read) – I gave Child #1 a spelling diagnostic test. She scored at the same grade level as her final spelling diagnostic at the end of May. Nothing gained, nothing lost. Still pencil-phobic!

Science (Apologia Astronomy) – I read the first page and a half of Chapter 1 aloud to all the kids to get a jump on that first week’s planned work.