The Home School

WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS MANY WORDS 

I'm not sure if I already talked about this or not, but we decided to home school this year.  I think I need to admit that most of my motivations were selfish.  The online school we did at the end of last year required a lot of my time and attention without allowing me to be involved in the things that actually make school fun.  With the two kids in different classes, there were two different teacher's systems to get used to and two different schedules to keep track of, and doing that for three students this year seemed overwhelming.  In the months leading up to the school year, the plans for what school would look like seemed to change every second, and it was hard last year to keep any sort of consistency when the concept of school was being reinvented every two weeks.  I felt like if my time was going to be required to make the education happen anyway, it would be easier and more fun (for me!) to have more control over our schedule, our setting, and the curriculum.  So we went for it! 

 First everyone got a new desk.

I have cousins and friends who have used The Good and the Beautiful curriculum (henceforth G&B) and loved it, and since so many people jumped into homeschooling this year a ton of their stuff was out of stock and they were offering the first 4 weeks of most of their curriculum as a free download until it was available again.  Free trial period--we'll take it!   

I made a new "Homeschool" file in my "Sabrina" folder on my computer and reorganized the cupboards in my kitchen to hold all the new school things.  Everyone got their own bin and box on the Homeschool Shelf and all the art supplies are underneath. 

Our tablets, which till now have been used pretty much solely to hold movies and fun apps for airplane rides and long car trips, suddenly became textbooks!  I took all the fun stuff off and made room for the curriculum.  Merrick was not happy about this.  He loved to play his Endless apps when the kids played Roblox.  Oh, I forgot to talk about Roblox.  So Rafe has been worryingly in love with Roblox for months, but Vivien started getting really into it too, and even Annie somehow got an account.  It's always a miserable experience when Annie wants to play because her mouse and keyboard skills aren't nearly good enough and she can't read yet, but Vivien and Rafe could play for hours and not blink.  I tried limiting their Roblox time to an hour a day after all their chores were done, but there were still so many issues.  There's a whole social aspect to the games that make them especially enticing, since you can get on at the same time as all your friends and interact with each other virtually.  Vivien's friend from school Iliana would try to FaceTime Vivien all day so they could play together, and Elliott and Rafe got in the habit of greeting each other at the door with, "Have you wasted all your Roblox time yet?!"  Then the added pressure of having to get their chores done or else no Roblox time kicked the whining about chores to a whole new level, as soon as their hour of time was up it was like everything they loved had died and the world held no joy, and if for any reason they didn't get their hour of Roblox time in a day it was the worst injustice known to mankind and there were hysterical tears and meltdowns.  It came to a breaking point one day when the kids had just started their hour of screen time and the McEwen girls came over to play.  Vivien didn't even look up from her computer to greet her friend, and after about 10 minutes they decided they wanted to go home.  Bo called me that night and said Aria had cried for hours because she was so heartbroken that Vivien would ignore her that way.  It was so painful to watch my child make a choice that hurt her friend, but it gave me a really great example of how when we choose computers over people we risk losing people from our lives.  Drew and I decided to enforce at least a month-long hiatus from Roblox to help our kids work on their emotional control, their attitudes in general, their non-digital hobbies, and their relationships.  It's been a beautiful month.  I am hoping someday we can have Roblox back in our life without it turning our cherubs into monsters, because the kids really do enjoy playing it, but it is definitely a force to be reckoned with.  Why couldn't it be basketball or something?

Here is a first day of school picture:

This is our schedule.  Things that are crossed out were the original plan.

Monday

Bike Ride

Spanish @ the Richardsons

G&B Language Arts and Handwriting The Dart

G&B Math

G&B History

Music practice

Tuesday

G&B Language Arts and Handwriting Poetry Teatime

G&B Math

G&B Science

Spanish-series and Muzzy

Music practice

Ballet for Vivien

Wednesday

G&B Language Arts and Handwriting The Dart

G&B Math

G&B History

Spanish

Music practice

Swimming

Thursday

G&B Language Arts and Handwriting The Dart

G&B Math

Science

Music practice

Friday

Free day/makeup day

Merrick pretty much does his own thing all day.  Sometimes he'll come stand behind my chair and watch Annie's math lesson, sometimes he'll listen to the read aloud for history or language arts, and he always comes in for Muzzy, but most of the day he and Allen (who is doing online preschool and whose mother is working from home) are just free range.  Maybe as the year progresses I will feel up to adding in some preschooly things with him, but for now, he's on his own.  Drew reads him bedtime stories at night, so at the very least he gets that.  Thank heaven for Drew.

I think I will go through each of the subjects and talk about curriculums I chose and how they're going.  Sorry, this is a boring post for present people, but Future Sabrina will appreciate it, I think.  Or at least be able to shake her head at it and chuckle about how stupid Present Sabrina is.  

Spanish

I found a cool little curriculum for Spanish here: Speaking Spanish with Miss Mason and François  It has a short series of sentences that you would use in everyday situations and you learn one each week.  The first one was, "I take the book. I open the book. I close the book./Tomo el libro. Abro el libro. Cierro el libro."  We meet with the Richardsons on Monday when the series is introduced, then we work on it at home throughout the week.  

Here is Merrick practicing riding his pedal bike to the Richardson's house a mile away while I jog along beside and give many, many encouraging pushes.

Vivien and Rafe know a lot of the Spanish words already from school, but it's nice to hear them actually speaking.  I am astonished at how well Annie is doing with it.  Children that age can learn so much!  I also bought a 2-year subscription last spring to a language learning course made by the BBC called Muzzy, because it was 67% off during all the school closures and I was worried about them only hearing my sad Spanish and falling behind.  We take one 15 minute episode each week and watch it together every day.  My Spanish "program" is definitely heavy on listening and speaking, but with Annie such a new reader and Vivien and Rafe so loathe to write, I think I'm ok with that right now.  

Language Arts and Handwriting

Here she is, hating writing:

The G&B Language Arts program sounded super cool, and they're totally free for pdf versions of Grades 1-5.  It has geography and art appreciation woven into it, there are fun Challenging Word Climbs, it's very, very thorough, and it's designed for you to be able to teach 3 kids at once, giving the two kids who are not in their one-on-one lesson with mom independent work to do.  But after our 4 week trial, it became clear we needed to do something else.  Vivien and Rafe hate writing.  They hate the mechanics of it, and they hate thinking of things to write.  On Mother's Day last year Rafe had an online assignment to write 2 sentences about his Mom and he was like, "Mom what should I write? I can't think of anything!!"  And it was sweet, sweet payback for that time I was a teenager and they asked me to speak in sacrament meeting on Mother's Day, I forgot about it until we arrived at church on the day, then I turned to my own mother in a panic and said I had no idea what I was going to say.  So charming.  Anyway, The G&B requires a lot of writing.  Vivien hates it.  

The lesson will give them a painting to look at and talk about, then have them write about it.  There were tears pretty much every day, but Vivien had a complete meltdown over one painting.  "I've seen so many pictures of mountains and trees and nature! It's just so random!  I don't like this painting!"  "Ok, that's fine, you don't have to like it.  Why don't you write about why you don't like it?"  "I don't know why! I just don't like it!"  Boo-hoo-hoo.  

Rafe doesn't cry as much, but he's not much better.  Please sample his thoughts on this painting:

And poor Annie was so overwhelmed by the way the reading was presented.  The b/d/p/q thing was just really throwing her off, and she was getting so confused by all the different vowel sounds.  I kept thinking we just needed to push through and get used to it, but then we had the spelling tests.  For the first 3 weeks of the course the older kids each had a list of spelling words they practiced every day during their independent study time.  They were really creative ways of practicing too--writing them with whiteboard marker on the window, laying on the floor and lifting a leg for each letter as you spell it out loud, clapping for each letter, spelling it while looking at it then covering it and spelling it again, etc.  SO much practicing.  Then I gave them their spelling tests and they both missed almost every single word.  "mothre cerri throo secint enuf" It was the first time I thought to myself, "Oh my gosh, I might have ruined my children by pulling them out of school for this year.  I may not be able to do this."  I spent the rest of the week in crisis and cancelled school and started weighing different options and thinking and worrying and wondering if I should just bag it and send the kids either back to Puesta or try to get into Family School or even just send them to the perfectly good school that we actually live in the boundaries for.  I talked to Paula about some of my struggles and she gave me some good practical ideas for the specific reading/writing problems that made me feel like it was possible, I just needed to engage as a teacher a little bit more and less as a finisher of a curriculum.  I finally decided to go back to my tried and true "Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons" with Annie, then for the older kids I decided to spend some more money on a writing program I had found on the internet awhile ago that sounded promising.  It's called Brave Writer.  This is on their About Us page: 

"Kids are tremendously interesting people, even the ones who write poorly. My goal is to help you do your job to draw out the fascinating mind life of your children so that you can capture those precious thoughts in writing. What's on paper ought to be a fair and insightful representation of all that goes on in your kids' busy heads. When it is, you and your young writers will love the results.

"That, in a nutshell, is why Brave Writer exists.

"Self-expression in written form should not be so infuriatingly difficult to teach. Yet it is for many of us. There's a reason for that. Educators who write writing programs are not necessarily professional writers. They approach writing as a subject to deconstruct and explain in a classroom. They craft assignments that require children to solve the puzzle of the instructions, rather than tap into their thought lives and natural vocabularies.

"Professional writers, when they teach writing, focus on the writer instead—-What do you have to say? They help the intimidated would-be author to feel emotionally safe to take writing risks.

"Brave Writer is designed to enhance the parent-child relationship through the teaching of writing. It is my contention that writers are grown best when students feel supported and free. Parents feel best when they have strategies they can trust to advance their twin goals: peace and progress in the writing process."

We just finished our first week.  There are a couple different pieces to the curriculum.  The mechanics of writing are taught in something called The Dart.  Each month you read aloud a different book to the kids.  Every week there is a passage taken from the book that you use to teach punctuation, grammar, spelling, etc. and you use copywork and dictation to practice the physical aspect of writing.  So for our first month we're reading Charlotte's Web.  The passage last week was the first line: "Where's Papa going with that ax?" said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.  Every day we read aloud a chapter from the book together (the chapter where Wilbur escapes from his pen is GOLDEN!).  On Monday I introduced the passage.  On Tuesday we had a break from everything and did a Poetry teatime.  What?  I didn't even take any pictures.  But it was fun!  I got the china teacups out and a table cloth and made fancy foods and some blueberry tea we got from Heather for Christmas and we sat around for an hour and read poetry to each other (basically all our picture books that have rhymes).  Rafe said in a strained voice towards the end that he didn't really like the flavor of the tea--it's the first time he's had it, so I just added honey until it was mostly honey, then he could finish it.  The rest of the week we'd discuss something from the passage.  We got to talk about apostrophes, quotation marks, proper nouns, compound words, double t's, where/were, and using a hook (or an ax!) to grab your reader's attention from the very beginning.  Then on Wednesday I had them copy the passage, and on Thursday and Friday I dictated it to them.  

Dictation

We also had a little spelling bee on Friday, because Vivien got some things wrong in her dictation and it sent her spiraling, so we had to do something silly to make it better.

Next month when we feel comfortable with The Dart there is another piece of the curriculum we are supposed to add that's supposed to "activate my child's writing voice and create a nurturing, tear-free relationship with me, the parent-editor-coach-and ally."  And then after we get used to doing that and The Dart for another month, there's a third piece that's supposed to marry the two together for a month-long writing project at the child's level.  There was significantly less crying about Language Arts this week, so I call that a step in the right direction.  The only thing I'm going to have to do is add in some more art appreciation/art making.  We can go to museums for the first, when they open again.  For the second I will have to come up with some projects, because Vivien really liked the ones that were included in the G&B.  

Even if they included a little bit of writing with them.  

Here she is writing instructions on how to make her favorite of the fruit flowers she designed.  

Math

I had Rafe and Vivien take the pre-assessment for the G&B math courses and they both tested below their grade level, so I started them where the assessment recommended, but after 3 weeks they were both SO BORED.  So, I just took a week and we reviewed all the things they hadn't known on the pre-assessment and bumped them up to their actual grade level, and now I have no worries about math.  It's even fun!  There are a lot of games mixed into the curriculum.  Annie's lessons always begin with a Shape Shuffle.  We lay out a card for each shape upside down, shuffle them up, then she chooses one and fills in her graph.  As the lessons progress we start to compare which shape has been picked more than the others and stuff like that.  She loves her math!

The course came with a beautiful Activity Box that has pattern blocks and counting cubes and game cards and beautiful activity mats and stuff like that.  

Here are her counting bees.  She's started doing this thing lately when she's thinking where she makes her lips tight and small so they turn white and disappear.  It's a funny face.  

Vivien and Rafe's classes both have Activity Boxes, but I have been unable to snag a physical version of Rafe's before they go out of stock.  They have a text alert system to let you know when things are back, but they're usually all gone within 10 minutes and their site gets so bogged down I haven't been able to get my order through the last two times I've gotten an alert.  Maybe next time!  

Here is the first page of Vivien's math journal.  I really like that now Drew gets to have a beard instead of the moles she used to draw on his head.

Science

The G&B people have a Marine Biology Science unit for free on their website, so we started with that one.  I like it, mostly.  I think some of the explanations go a little too deep without appropriate breadth, but the kids know so many ridiculous ocean facts from watching Octonauts that it hasn't been too bad.  The experiments and activities have been engaging. 

 We did one on the salinity of ocean water and had 3 cups, one with tap water, one with salty water, and one with sugary water and we floated eggs in them.  Rafe insisted he wanted to drink the salty water after.  He didn't like it. 

There was a fun art project for our sea turtle lesson too.  I love what they each came up with!

History

I'm using Year 3 of the G&B History curriculum.  They have 4 years available and each year goes from ancient to modern history, stopping at different places along the way.  We started this year in Ancient Mesopotamia/Israel.  Since it's a Christian curriculum all the Bible stories are included in it as well.  

Here are the kids holding up their arms like Moses to keep the battle going the right direction while I read the story to them.

There are suggested read-alouds that go along with the material that the kids have loved (we're reading The Golden Bull right now and will start Slave Boy in Judea next).  There are audio dramatizations that go along with some of the lessons.  There is a board game that we play every few lessons or so about the Bill of Rights.  And there are fun activities too.  We learned about the Phoenicians and their purple dye they made from seashells, so we got to make our own dye out of blueberries.  The girls chose things to dye, and they turned very purple, but then I washed them with Tide, so now they are just old whitish grayish looking things.  

Music

I am teaching every kid one instrument, because that's all I can handle right now.  

Our cute high school student guitar tutor graduated and went off to college, so we are just doing our best on our own with a beginners classical guitar book for now.  Vivien does hate to practice, mostly because she hates to do things wrong and gets very frustrated.  But we are sticking with it, by gosh by gum!  And I think she likes to be able to play her songs for people.  They are always satisfactorily impressed.  

Rafe is learning piano on a path to the drums.  He does not cry about practicing, but he does scowl if I make him play things more times than he thinks he should have to play them.  We're just going through the Alfred books.  He liked it when we learned Strange Story and I would sing along with him in my spooky voice.  He has the notes of the keyboard down pat thanks to the little note buttons Nana sent back when Vivien was taking piano for a bit.  

And Anniebobannie is rocking her box violin.  We have now gone a full week without it getting dropped on the floor.  Wahoo!  We are working hard on marrying a rhythm to a motion, having her "play" taka taka stop stop on her straight left arm with her right hand.  And of course cementing her beautiful playing posture and bow hold.  Go Annie! Go Annie!  Did my mommy have this much fun with me when I was 5 and was her guinea pig?  Oh shoot, I just remembered that she should be listening to her Book 1 CD.  Maybe that's why I needed to write this post...to remember all the things I still need to add to my Homeschool plan!  Curses.

PE

This subject is particularly deficient.  I guess they're getting their exercise with our climbing rope and our trampoline and all the dangerous wall climbing they do.  And the weekly bike ride to the Richardsons!  Mustn't forget that.  I'd really like to take them swimming once a week, but the pools are still closed here, and while I do have friends who have pools that have let us come swim some weeks, it started feeling awkward so I scratched it.  

We got invited to a homeschool exercise group by another mom in the ward for Tuesdays and Thursdays, but when we arrived...it was basically sneaky Sunshine Generation.  Annie was a good sport, but Vivien and Rafe were not excited.

Vivien has started ballet once a week at Dance Theatre of the Southwest and is liking that pretty well.  Annie said she wanted to wait on ballet, so for now it's just Vivien.  

Here she is getting fitted for shoes.

And here she is being hustled to the car in her uniform.  We have been braiding her hair back every week because it is too short for a bun.  I am not a good braider, so it's a bit of an ordeal.  We've found if she reads a book while I do it there are less tears.  

What we are lacking the most in our PE plan is hand-eye coordination.  Must find some way to incorporate throwing and catching...  

Come Follow Me

This was happening really well last year at the end of school, and for some weeks in the summer, but I haven't quite gotten my feet underneath me yet to make it a fixed part of our current Homeschool schedule.  I've just been letting the kids sleep in as long as they like and starting school whenever they're ready (sometimes not till 10!) but I think we're going to have to be a bit more organized if we're going to make sure this happens.

I shall close this post with me in my teaching spot.  This experience feels a bit like becoming a mother for the first time all over again.  I thought I was smart and good and patient and understanding and observant, but I was wildly unprepared for how difficult this is.  I am getting to work on so many things!  But I hope by the end of this year I will be a little bit less of a monster and my relationship with each of my precious students will be deeper, clearer, and more beautiful than before.  Or maybe we will all need therapy.