Finally a chance to post about homeschooling! I am loving it, and despite the slow start this year with a BIG gap while I was morning sick (which still hasn't quite gone yet at 18 weeks, but it's MUCH better now!), things are going well and I am happy and confident about it. It's much more laid-back and unstructured than I originally planned/thought it would be, but that's just happened by chance and it is working very nicely like that for now. I think I will need to become more structured with it eventually, but I'm happy with it for now.
School takes place when Benjamin goes down for his morning nap. Nathan is dropping his nap now so he's almost always up with us when we do school, but it is working okay. He and Matthew play, or draw at the table with us. Or both! Matthew prefers to watch Arthur's lessons for the most part, but still plays or draws too. I sometimes have real trouble keeping the little ones quiet or well-behaved enough to actually DO school with Arthur, and on those days I sort of want to pull my hair out and genuinely think I will NEVER be able to do this properly! Those days are not so fun. But overall I LOVE homeschooling. The boys are getting the picture about what to expect (behaviour-wise) during school time, and it's such a short "school day" anyway - we only do phonics/reading and maths right now, and each of those take maybe 20 minutes if that. I like to leave an hour or so for school, and I usually do something with Matthew when I am finished with Arthur too. Some days we play games from the reading curriculum and just continue until Benjamin wakes. It is working well for us to time it with his naps. It's really hard to do school when all four boys are up and milling around the school table! I found that I couldn't do it, and had to shift things to when Benjamin napped, for now.
Arthur's Right Start Mathematics curriculum (Level B) for the next school year has arrived, and I am being VERY controlled and not opening it yet! We still have about a third of the Level A curriculum left to do, but we probably do about 4 lessons a week (we have maybe 30 lessons left, or less) so I am thinking we might be finished by early September or so. I am planning to change our school year to match the calendar year. We started last year on Sept 28th - a little later than schools do here. Schools break up for the summer at the end of this week (except for private schools which break up a little earlier in July), but I expect we'll continue without a break. We currently have quite a loose schedule and aim for a 4-day school week, which is my long-term plan. That leaves one day a week for fun outings, field trips, and just projects at home that school does leave much time for on a normal day, like baking, crafts and so on. I like outings on weekdays because other children are in school so there are no crowds or queues! :) Arthur is not interested in taking breaks from school - and we take spontaneous breaks anyway where we feel the need, so we are not really going to do school holidays. I will expect to be taking most (if not all) of December off from school though, as the baby is due on the 13th. And all of January. I hope to get back to school by the end of Jan, but MOMYS (Mothers of Many Young Siblings) ladies are saying that with a 5th baby (and now I think of it, this should apply to any other baby, not just the 5th!) you should expect to take at least a month off afterwards, in terms of normal household routine and homeschool. So I will try to set my goal for starting back at the beginning of February. I like the idea of starting a fresh academic year after a big break like that, and that will also give us some extra time to tie up things like the Maths curriculum we're doing without rushing it.
Matthew is SO desperate to start school! He begs every. single. day. He only just turned 4 last month, but if he was going to public school he would be starting in September! That seems crazy to me! But true! :) He seems so young still, and I am not sure he's quite ready, but he's SO KEEN to learn the stuff that Arthur is learning. He watches Arthur's lessons with great interest and tries to copy part-whole circle sets and numbers and so on, on his drawing paper next to us, as I work on those things with Arthur - they end up with sweet little squiggles drawn on them, which are his "letters" and "numbers", and he is so proud of his efforts! He does do some worksheets to practise writing letters and numbers, but really we are still working on the fine motor skills of holding his pencil properly and control, etc. I work through a Kumon workbook with him - a couple of pages every day - to improve his pencil control, and that's fun for him to do. I do that after Arthur's maths and reading lessons, and Matthew looks forward to it so much! I am excited about starting to homeschool my second little pupil! :) But I would prefer to wait till February, as he will be that bit older. I am increasingly not sure that he can wait that long though, so I am thinking I'll review the situation in September, and probably end up starting him on Level A maths at that time, even if we break the lessons down into two parts (his attention span is SHORT) and do one part each day. The lessons are really short anyway, but that might be even more suitable for him.
Arthur's current phonics/reading curriculum is Rocket Phonics. I can't say enough great things about it! It's a different method to the Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons, which I ALSO can't say enough great things about, but somehow Rocket Phonics is SOOOOOOO much better. It's great fun, very active, and an absolutely genius method of teaching a child to read with the 36-sounds helper system. I thought it would be complicated to teach him about "helpers" but nope. He has taken to it so quickly, and the fabulous system means that he can decode ANY word and read it without trouble. He is really enjoying the funny stuff he gets to read as well, and I know he will love reading the clues to the treasure hunts we're about to start (and the prizes that are INCLUDED in the curriculum!!! Soooo great!).
Matthew is learning the phonics sounds - we learn them by playing Go Fish and Bingo and such, as the curriculum suggests. He really isn't "getting it" yet, but that's okay. We will continue to play the games until he does - he LOVES playing them, and there's no timescale or deadline. So I guess I am already sort of homeschooling Matthew but in my mind, because I'm not "officially" doing so, I sort of don't see it that way yet! ;) Silly of me! Nathan surprised me recently by recognising and naming his numbers up to 10, and the letter "t as in tiger" on one of the Rocket Phonics flashcards! I am teaching him NOTHING because I am focusing on the older boys, and Nathan's only 2, but I guess he's hovering around absorbing stuff and taking more interest than he lets on! Have I mentioned lately how much I LOVE homeschooling! I am just as eager as Arthur to NOT take breaks. I love teaching my children!
Arthur adores maths. Reading he likes too, but he often gets frustrated with it because he is impatient and perfectionist, and those two things are not a good combo for learning to read! ;) He won't slow down and READ the word when he is in a hurry to see what something says, and if he makes a mistake therefore, and has to go back to re-read a word, he will just throw his arms up, act frustrated and refuse to do any more that lesson. I struggle with this as I find it REALLY exasperating! But we're persevering! He has no trouble learning anything so far, it's just the slowness of doing some things that annoy him! It's so bizarre to watch him write equations (lately the maths lessons are all about basic equations) with his own hand! I keep sort of staring at him writing in disbelief on occasion, because suddenly I can't fathom how my little baby turned into a boy at the table writing out __ + __ = __ correctly and at speed with his own fair hand! I love teaching him, I LOVE it. I'm so thrilled to be the one who has the privilege of seeing him grasp concepts and learn how to do things for the first time, and seeing the development beyond that, and I'm so excited about the years to come! I'm so happy that he's enjoying learning. The other day he came running to me in the kitchen to show me that he had broken into the pens drawer (NOT allowed without permission!) and written up his arm: 5+2=7! ;) His response to me telling him off for breaking into the drawer and writing on himself was, "But Mummy, it's the right answer!" ;) Unfortunately his brothers tried to copy him and, having no exposed skin at the time, scribbled on their sleeves and jeans with highlighter pen. Urgh! I still think they're sweethearts though, even though we have a few little issues to take care of! ;)
Right Start Mathematics is brilliant. I can't imagine needing anything else but Right Start for my little ones, up until the curriculum ends. They do Levels A-E and then applied geometry and algebra. Right now I am thinking we will have to drop maths lessons to 2 per week instead of doing them daily, once we start Level B in the new academic year, because otherwise if we keep up with doing school better than we did this year, we'll finish it in about half the year. I do want each Level to stretch to the full year, so I think I will do it that way. I don't think Arthur is going to be pleased! He LOVES maths. If he really wants more, I might fill it in with Math Mammoth on alternate days or something. I still have the first year curriculum but we haven't used it so far - Right Start has been all we've needed. If we were only doing Right Start every other day right now and Arthur wanted to do maths every day, I think we would be using Math Mammoth. But we got "behind" and so we're happily doing maths every day, which suits us well! :) It's so much fun! I have had to make a few little changes, like for the lessons on currency, obviously. I don't use any of the manipulatives or tools that came with the curriculum because they're only in US dollars, Canadian dollars, and Euros. I just use real coins (we have a LOT of loose change lying around that is now bagged in coin types and finally being put to good use!) and teach from the lesson with £ and pence instead. I thought it might be a faff to arrange but it hasn't been at all! :)
Arthur has completed nearly all the objectives for the Level A curriculum (I review his progress quarterly - they have a sheet for this). He still hasn't covered learning to tell the time or fractions because they're at the end of the curriculum, and he's constantly asking when we'll do the "clock lessons" as he's really eager! But he can tell time already to the hour and the half hour, which is all that's covered in Level A anyway. It was reassuring to me a month ago when I was panicking a bit about it being summer and us NOT being where I had planned for us to be as far as school goes. I felt so behind - though I DON'T have to see it that way at all, homeschooling is rather freeing in that respect but it's all too easy to fall back into "comparing" and over-zealous personal expectations when you're a homeschooling mama, I am learning! Anyway it was so reassuring to do a routine review of his progress and discover that he had almost achieved all the goals for the first year of maths anyway! :) There's a lot of practice and building on things already learned, in the rest of the curriculum, which is nice. Arthur is SO excited to start Level B!
Next year, for Arthur, I plan to add in some other subjects, but right now I am not thinking to do too much more. He currently practises handwriting about once a week - I help him write a letter or postcard to someone in the family and he draws a picture to go with it, and we take a trip to buy a stamp and he posts it himself. He loves doing that, relatives love getting his letters, and he is improving his writing and getting regular practise. I plan to increase the frequency of handwriting practise next year, start some spelling at some point, and continue with the Rocket Phonics. The curriculum is generally expected to take about 2.5 years to complete, at which stage he should come away from it with a reading age of about 10. It's a FANTASTIC programme! We just carry on working through it at his own pace.
I want to do more Bible lessons, and also start both of the older boys on drawing instruction lessons - I have the book I want to teach them from but I need to prepare by completing the course MYSELF first! :S I am ITCHING to start a science curriculum, and plan to do Apologia Science (sorry for lack of links - it's late!) for that, starting with the Astronomy course, but I am going to make myself wait (this is NOT easy, I cannot WAIT to start this! It looks so great!) until I can take both Arthur and Matthew through it at the same time - probably towards the end of 2011 or maybe when Matthew begins his second year.
Right now we do geography, history, music and science in "un-schooled" format - learning about things the boys are interested in as they arise. We got Benjamin a CD of children's African music for his birthday (that boy loves to bop to a beat, particularly an African beat for some reason, so I chose this CD for him and he loves it!), and the boys all love it. I didn't really expect it but it has turned into school for us too, because they are learning about the different rhythms and sounds, and dancing to it a lot and even mimicking the different languages to sing along. We are learning what the song titles mean in our own language. We have studied maps of Africa and our globe, naming the various countries in Africa and relating them to the countries where each of the songs come from. Some of the maps we've got have pictures of animals native to those countries, so we've been learning about those too.
We are learning a lot about dinosaurs, since it's a huge subject of interest for the boys - they ask questions and we go online and find the answers! Little Nathey is often heard in his tiny chipmunky voice talking about "parasaurolophus" and "euoplocepalops" (okay he always sweetly mispronounes that one - it's 'euoplocephalus', but I LOVE how he says it, hehe!), which sound such BIG words for a little 2-year-old to say. It's just that they're part of normal conversation around here (and plastic miniature dinosaur play!) most days, so he picks it up. I still plan to do unit studies on things like this, but I haven't got those off the ground yet. I have a Stegosaurus one in the works and really I have everything I need to carry it out (a week of daily lessons, covering art, history, geography and science, related to Mr. Stegosaurus!), but have yet to put it all together and then actually DO it!
We read aloud a LOT. Arthur learned a lot about the history and geography of volcanoes when the one in Iceland caused all that trouble recently, as he was fascinated by it and we checked its progress online daily and watched YouTube videos for kids about volcanic eruptions and the science behind it. He uses volcanoes a lot in his imaginative play with Matthew now! :)
Oops I have just noticed the time! :S I could talk about homeschooling all night! I must go to bed - it's not crazy late like it often gets with me, but I need an earlier night tonight. I have just been soooo tired these last few days. I think it's pregnancy related because my bump has grown a lot in just these few days! I think my littlest sweetie is having a growth spurt! :) So glad to have managed to update in more detail about all the school-related stuff I have been wanting to mention! I'll update again soon!
