Merit badges

I got a great idea from a homeschooling friend. She was looking for a way for her son to see evidence of the progress he'd made and what he'd learned, but she didn't want to use grades. The solution came to her from an email list -- merit badges! I loved this idea, and immediately made it our own.

I've worked up a number of badges, some of which Nugget has already earned and some of which she's in progress on.


Some are based on curriculum we're using, like levels of Hooked on Phonics, Handwriting Without Tears, RightStart, and Ready2Read. The SeaWorld camp one is for her camp experience this past summer.

The "Dolphin Tale" one she'll earn when we work through the curriculum from Homeschool Movie Club and we see the movie.

The others are my own creations:

Calendar:

• Recite days of the week in order.
• Recite months of the year in order.
• Recite seasons in order.
• Know today's date, including year.
• Know what day is tomorrow and what day was yesterday.
• Know the months of major holidays or celebrations (New Year's, Valentine's, her birthday, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas).

Aesop's Fables:

• Read and do coloring sheets for all fables.
• Summarize the story and moral of 5 fables.

Trees:

• Know the difference between deciduous and evergreen trees.
• Identify major tree parts.
• On a walk, identify 5 neighborhood trees (magnolia, palm, pine, oak, orange).

Nugget is quite taken with this idea, especially after seeing her (Eagle Scout) daddy's badge sash. Unfortunately, I have no way of making woven patches; instead, I'm just printing them on cardstock and hanging them in her homeschool corner in the dining room.

We'll see how this goes!

Homeschool annex

Here's a peek at our homeschool annex. Our Montessori works are in the master bedroom, but we haven't been able to get into there lately because Sprout has taken to screaming when I leave his sight (we're on the last 2 teeth, so I'm hoping this calms down soon!). Instead, we've taken over a corner of the dining room.


This has slowly grown and is working well for right now. The table and chairs are a set from Ikea that's moved around our house as the needs have changed. I love them!

Next to it is a set of plastic drawers. Each drawer holds the materials for one subject (and one drawer for trash). I turn this around when we're not doing work so Sprout can't pull them all out.

On the back wall is our calendar. It reads:

Today is
Friday
August 26 2011
The weather is sunny
High temperature 92 degrees
Tomorrow is Saturday

We change this every morning and color in the weather graph (above the calendar). We're going to do a weather graph for each month, so we can see how things change during the year. Next month I might incorporate a line graph for the high temperature.

On the wall facing Nugget is a bulletin board. Across the top (barely visible) are some Aesop's Fables coloring pages. Below that, our Handwriting Without Tears letters. The major focus on the board is the materials from the Moffatt Girls' Ready2Read program. The caterpillar is made up of the sight words we've done, and below that is a garden of word families.

I really love this small, unobtrusive corner. Of course, other materials are spread throughout the house.... globes on the sideboard, books throughout the living room shelves, art supplies in the kitchen.... I'm so excited for a time when Sprout is less destructive and homeschooling can take over the whole house!

Happy Not-Going-to-School Day!!

Today is the first day back to school in our county. Nugget is 4, not old enough for Kindergarten. But in our state, we have Voluntary Pre-Kindergarten (VPK). It's offered through preschools and private schools and is free if you want to do it. Every 4 year old we know who will be going into the school system goes to VPK; anyone who's left plans to homeschool for the early years.

So the questions have started -- we went to the (quiet) grocery store this morning and the cashier asked, "Your kids aren't ready for school yet?". I passed it off to Nugget ("Nugget, do you go to school?"), because I've found those questions are best defused by an extremely verbal child expressing her excitement at homeschooling.

Here's how our "first day of VPK" is going to go.

1. Calendar and weather at breakfast (including graphing how many days of each weather per month).

2. Fine motor skills through dressing and undressing stuffed friends.

3. Library storytime for listening to and following directions from someone other than a parent as well as paying attention in a group setting.

4. Baking cupcakes for practical life (measuring, mixing, following directions).

5. Arts and crafts through decorating for our Not-Back-to-School Party.

6. Academics:

a. Writing -- finishing up our preschool handwriting workbook and preparing to move into the Kindergarten one.

b. Reading -- done with Kindergarten level Hooked on Phonics and moving into first grade level phonics, reviewing sight words and word families, reading lots of early reader books.

c. Math -- halfway through Kindergarten level RightStart (level A), working on mental math such as breaking a number into parts (what are all the parts of 4? 5? 8?) and the concept of getting change for a purchase.

I know that homeschooling isn't for everyone. I know that logistics or finances or simple preference mean that we're in a small minority. But I feel very lucky and oh so happy that we've been able to make this work. It really feels like the right choice for our family, and as Nugget gets older and into real school age, I'm more and more sure that I want her home with our family.

Convenience!

I love the ability to "do school" anywhere. We had about a 45 minute drive home from a playdate the other day. Just a few minutes into the drive, Nugget started figuring out and talking about various addition facts (up to 5). So I picked the thread up and we chatted about those for a while. Then we moved on to the 5+x facts that RightStart Math emphasizes. We made a little game out of both. Then we reviewed odds and evens, then Nugget decided to count to 100. THREE TIMES. By the time she'd finished that, we were almost home -- and math was done for the day!

In a rhythm

We've settled into a really nice rhythm for the last month or so. I've been quiet because, although this is working really well for us, it isn't the creative sort of homeschooling that makes for good blogging. I thought I'd share where we are right now, anyway.

The way we've worked homeschool time into our schedule is during Sprout's nap. He goes down just before lunch these days; Nugget and I eat together and usually start working toward the end of our meal. We get homeschool time in nearly every day; I'd say we miss 1-2 days a week because of being out-and-about or deciding to curl up with a chapter book instead. But we don't take official days off -- if we're home and in the mood, we do work, even on the weekends.

We're still focusing on the three main subjects. In reading, we're at lesson 60 or so in "Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons", and we're about to start Unit 4 of the Moffat Girls' phonics program. Nugget reads through the stories in "TYCtR" without difficulty, and when encouraged, can read through beginning reader books. But, oddly enough, she still hasn't taken off into reading. She still LOVES to be read to and loves to sit and look at books to herself, but she has to be encouraged to actually read something. I figure things will just click someday, and we'll keep going through these programs as long as she's enjoying them and they aren't stressing her out.

In math, we're chugging through Level A of RightStart Math. I'm loving how this is done, and Nugget is picking it up really, really well. She's having a bit of a hard time with the geometry, strangely enough, but the number work is falling into place really quickly.

And Handwriting Without Tears is always a favorite. We're nearly done with that, in fact -- another week or so to go. I'm not sure what we'll do when that's done; whether we'll move into the Kindergarten version or take some more time to refine her fine motor. She's doing a LOT of writing in her daily life now -- labeling her drawings, writing cards to people -- and I love seeing her practice reflected in her play.

Supplementing math

Math has been going ok with Nugget. She's got the golden beads down pat, we've done an introduction to golden bead addition, worked with the hundred board a few times, used the number rods to find the various combinations that made numbers from 1-10, and formed teens with beads. She did the work readily enough... asked to "do math" during homeschool time... but wasn't really taken with it.

The other day, a post by Laura (formerly of My Montessori Journey, now of Walnut Hill Homeschool) got me looking at Right Start Mathematics. It's a math program written by a Montessori teacher, but not a traditional Montessori progression. It emphasizes understanding over memorization and working problems mentally (using an abacus as an aide in the beginning). I was really taken with it because it teaches solving problems the way I've learned to do it but NOT how I was taught. Things like "seeing" the numbers up to 5 instead of counting them, learning 6-10 as 5 plus something else, and adding larger numbers by "making 10".

I fell so in love with it that I bought levels A and B (used). We're going to combine it with elements of Montessori to make something that works for Nugget -- and really engages her. I want her to see math as puzzles and patterns instead of just columns of numbers. Yes, memorization of basic facts has its place. But a lot of that comes free with practice (and with the math games that are included with Right Start). I want to make sure she sees the fun and beauty and usefulness in math first.

To that end, I've made sure to watch some of Vi Hart's mathematical doodling videos with Nugget peeking over my shoulder. It's worked -- we've spent the last couple of days drawing "math pictures" on a huge sheet of paper and playing "math games" to color them in.


This is the math that I love!

Our reading program is clicking!

It's been a little over a month since we started using "Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons". It was a slow slog in the beginning, but Nugget was happy to do it every day because it was really just a review of the letter sounds she already knew. When we started to move more into actually reading words, it got harder and she wasn't as enthusiastic. But we stuck with it. And she was doing great! Sounding out words really well. Then the book started emphasizing reading things "the fast way" to start with, and it got tougher. I could tell she was bumping up against her limit.... but I could also see that she almost had it. She resisted pretty strongly for a couple days, we had to repeat one lesson because we stopped in the middle of it.... but then something clicked. And now she really is reading!

It's still pretty basic stories ("We see a duck. We can sit in the sun with that duck. It is fun in the sun."). But she finally seems to be realizing that she can do it. We've worked our way through "Hop on Pop" (with her reading or remembering most of the words, and me helping as necessary), and she's showing an interest in the words around her.

I've decided to start adding in some other reading work to bolster what she's gotten from "Teach Your Child to Read....". Today we started in on the first unit from The Moffatt Girls. I like that it gives her more practice with the sight words that we're already seeing in our phonics book. It's also a nice change -- where "Teach Your Child to Read...." is black-and-white, lesson-on-lesson, this is more like a program you'd see in school with coloring, pasting, singing, etc. Nugget gets a kick out of that sort of thing (although it also distracts her, which is one reason why "Teach Your Child to Read...." has been so effective, if not the most exciting thing).

Can I just say how happy I am that camp is over? She's so much more interested and engaged today, instead of being so drained. We did a ton of homeschool while Sprout was napping, and she's still going strong! In fact, right now she's writing and illustrating her first story!!

"I see a cat."

(Boy, do we need to get moving on that handwriting program! LOL)