We have officially finished nine weeks of homeschooling and in a traditional school setting, that constitutes one quarter of the year. Wow. When I look back at this short period of time I can't believe how much learning has taken place in this household! We'll take it person-by-person.
Matthew: Well, since he is the main focus of our little school, it stands to reason that he should be first. He just loves his schooltime and begs for it every day. We usually meet in the mornings during Anna's naptime so that I only have one other child to deal with instead of two. If that doesn't work, we sometimes meet in the afternoons. I prefer those times b/c the other two are napping and Matthew is constantly begging me for something do to (in spite of the art center I made for him so he can occupy himself.) But he prefers mornings, being a creature of habit. Anyway, we have a letter, number, color and shape that we focus on each week and he knows all of them already so it's just review for him. I'm trying to step up to the next level and have him write, but his fine motor skills are not as developed as his brain, so we muddle through as best we can. I don't want to start a formal handwriting program yet and he is having fun writing as many letters as he can on his own. I have a workbook from Wal-Mart that allows him to trace all of his letters and he enjoys that. In fact, he loves all workbook pages and would do as many as I'll allow! The other skill we're working on is cutting with scissors. I'm trying to teach him how to hold them properly and cut on a line. Not an easy task for someone so eager to cut!
It became pretty obvious that the material presented was easy for him and he was playacting school more than anything. So, I decided to supplement what we are doing by teaching him to read. I chose the book "Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons" because several friends have used it and recommended it. I was skeptical at first, but 28 lessons into the book he loves it! Today he even declared that reading lesson was his favorite part of school time. Now, that didn't come without lots of frustration and tears. Matthew gives up easily when something is too hard for him, so we've had lots of lessons about persevering and lots of pep talks from Mommy and Daddy. My goal went from five lessons a week to three and we divided lessons in half when needed. Rob has even taught a lesson or two just to give him a change of teacher. We keep telling him that he is very smart and that he CAN learn to read. We've promised him a trip to the Jelly Belly warehouse outside of Milwaukee when we reach lesson 50 and have a brochure as the bookmarker to remind him. He's working hard to get to his goal and finished seven lessons this week because HE wanted to! We would have done one more, but Anna woke up :) (Thanks, Mom, for using incentives with us! I have always remembered how you rewarded our work, especially how you promised Joel his Ecto-pack for good grades.)
Benjamin: When Ben sticks around for school time, he does learn a bit. He is picking up his colors and shapes and possibly even his letters. I figure since I did very little formal things with Matthew at that age, I'm not going to push Ben. He just enjoys being read to and he will do some worksheets (which he finds very easy). He's also learning all of the manners and health stuff along with Matthew, which has been helpful. We think that he's left-handed so I'm going to need to figure out how to teach him to write. I may find a lefty that writes well to do it for me.
Anna: She loves to explore her world and is now crawling. Babies are natural scientists, so she has learned about reflections, water going down drains, what everything tastes like, and a bit of signing from her Baby Wordsworth video. At least she moves her hands when she sees the signs :)
Mommy: I have learned that I can do this. I've read scads of books on homeschooling, all from different perspectives, and plan to read Charlotte Masons' work next. I've also learned that I can teach Matthew. That's what getting over the hurdles of the reading lesson has done for me: shown me how to teach my own son. It's pretty cool and I actually got tears in my eyes the first time he read well. Oh, I should say that Matthew always prays before we start "school" and asks Jesus to help him with reading. God really deserves all of the praise and glory for that accomplishment!
Daddy: Well, I don't know about the big guy. He's trying to keep his head above water with his own studies. At least he doesn't have a high-maintainence pregnant wife to deal with this year. (He says I'm medium-maintainence at best.) He enjoys hearing about the kids' school time and they proudly tell him what they've learned. He chips in when he's home. I know he's good for science experiments when we get there!
And that's the first quarter update from Bob's Preschool, a school dedicated to the philosophy that everyone learns all of the time, regardless of age.
3 comments:
sounds like you're a good teacher. :-)
I found that splitting up David's reading lesson during the day helped as well as lots of encouragement. He gets really excited when he's learning a new sound that day.
We also do the tracing in the Walmart books and he really LOVES cutting! He just picked it up one day. The weird thing is that he can only cut with his left hand. I think both of my kids would have been left-handed if we would have let them. John kept taking the pen out of their left hand and putting it in their right. Now David is rather ambidexterous.
I HIGHLY HIGHLY HIGHLY recommend the Handwriting Without Tears curriculum for both boys! Sela is a righty and Evan a DEFINITE lefty (since 10mo we've been able to tell...way back then he was transfering his spoon to his left hand if we put it on the right side of his bowl...he also uses scissors left-handed), and the HWT curriculum is set up to be easily used by kids with either hand preference. The teacher's book even discusses how to teach a lefty, and the practice pages are done in such a way that a lefty isn't "covering up" the example letters.
I started HWT with Sela as soon as she started asking to learn to write her letters, because I wanted to teach her only one way of forming them--and stick with one way from the beginning so she wasn't relearning them a year or two later (in public school, I learned a totally different handwriting curriculum for each of my first three years and it was sooo frustrating having to keep relearning how to form the letters. My handwriting stayed sloppy as a result.).
At this point I'm not looking for neat handwriting from Sela, just focusing on her learning the proper pencil strokes, proper pencil form, etc.
Shanti,
This is an honest question. Why would you NOT let a child learn to write and cut with their dominant hand?
I've had people comment about how sports equipment is going to cost us more because of my son being a lefty, but even that doesn't seem like a huge deal to me.
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