Summer School Summary

With most public and private schools starting school (the local public school starts this week, most schools in the surrounding cities started a couple of weeks ago), we are just wrapping up our summer school. I’m hoping to get in another five days of work – or a week and a half of “real time” for us. (We have doctor’s appointments that will take up one day this week and we are taking a day for a field trip, so we will only get in three days of “school” this week.) Then, I’ll have anywhere from a few days to a week or so to complete “baby preparations.”

We will then be taking a school break for eight weeks or so – until the first part of November, hopefully. The plan is that we’ll start back up slowly, ramping up to “full school” by January. It will be difficult to cover a full year of school in a half a year’s time, but our summer schooling has given us a real head start.

For the eldest, we will be 41% (finishing Chapter 2 of 5) complete in Growing With Grammar 3, 28% complete (Week 10 of 36) in Writing With Ease 2, and 20% complete in A Beka 3 Arithmetic (Lesson 35 out of 170).

For Child #2, we will be on roughly Lesson 75 or 76 out of Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons (100EL). When we restart school, we’ll skip the rest of 100EL and go right into Spell to Write and Read (SWR) which we started during the previous school year. She’s zipping right along in A Beka 1 Arithmetic as she is currently on Lesson 45 of 170 – representing 26% completion of the book.

We have not started our science or history studies yet, but have a plan to complete those by the end of June or so, depending on when we get restarted this fall. By the end of the traditional school year in Spring 2010, we should only have history, science, and perhaps some math still to go to complete our delayed school year.

The children think it is funny when adults stop them to ask why they aren’t “in school” because they have been “doing school” all summer. It will be more interesting to see what they say when they are asked in a month or two why they aren’t “in school.” I am sure they will continue to be looked at askance as the oldest definitely looks “school age.”

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.