I have changed the weekly schedule a bit for homeschooling. Matthew was finding daily maths too frustrating, and there's no actual NEED to do maths every day for a 5-year-old (or even a 7-year-old), so I decided to try doing the basic "maths, handwriting and reading" routine on Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings, instead of every single morning. The idea is that on Tuesday we do history, handwriting, and reading, and then on Thursday we do science (astronomy) which incorporates handwriting. So far the reduced maths is much better for both boys, though last week was a short week because of the long Easter weekend and we just did 3 days straight of maths/writing/reading, and the boys were fine with that too. I think it helps that Matthew's maths has changed in this past week - he's getting fairly near the end of Right Start Level A, and there's no more number work for him until Level B! Number work really frustrates him, even the easiest stuff that I can't break down to be simpler! I am definitely seeing improvement over the weeks all the same. But now he will be learning to tell the time; measuring lengths, weights, and liquid volume; learning some basic fractions; working a little with geometric shapes and tesselations; and also geometric solids. He is REALLY looking forward to all of that! By the end of Level A, which I am hoping we'll finish before the baby is due in 6 or 7 weeks (SIX OR SEVEN WEEKS, PEOPLE!!!!! How on earth?!?!), he should be able to tell the time, and the "prize" for completing Level A is a watch from Nana :) He's excited about that too!
Arthur has just finished a fairly intensive section on mental strategies for adding two 2-digit numbers together. It has meant he actually has to use his brain and be challenged, which apparently is "RIDICULOUS!" and "SO UNFAIR!!" and just "TOO FRUSTRATING FOR WORDS!!!!!" This has made maths with Arthur just soooo much fun lately! ;) He has grumped about saying he can't do it (because he doesn't want to try, or make mistakes, which inevitably happens when something is a challenge and you're new at it) and generally taking absolutely ages to complete his maths work. I have found it so hard to keep my cool with him - it is not easy! But he has just sat there until he has completed it, and eventually he reaches a point where he decides to actually tackle it, struggles with the first few equations, and then gets the hang of it and has a real sense of achievement at the end. I always remind him of that pattern the next time we have the same issue, but he does the same thing anyway - albeit acknowledging that I was right just before completing his work! ;)
He is moving onto other stuff next week, and he's thrilled about that (me too!)! I have to look ahead a bit to see what's coming up for him, but I know he has some calculator work for a couple of lessons, and he LOVES using the calculator - it's used very very little in this curriculum so far, as equipping with mental strategies is the main focus. He revisits fractions and geometric shapes soon, and then he's adding thousands and FINALLY beginning subtraction! :) He has begun subtraction last week without me being allowed to teach him the terms "minus" or "subtraction" just yet. He calls it "take X away from" and finds it easy, so hopefully he'll have no issues with it once it's formally taught. He also starts the "times table" (or skip counting) with the multiplication cards next week, but he's not going to be doing multiplication itself until near the end of NEXT year's curriculum.
Talking of which!! We have some funds this month to enable me to buy curriculum, so I have had THE MOST fun shopping for curriculum items that I had been researching and bookmarking for the past year. I bought Right Start Mathematics Level C!!! Exciting!!! I got the
Level B to C add-on package, because we have most of the manipulatives already. There's a note in Arthur's maths book (Level B) this week that says there are 20 lessons left and it's time to order the next Level, but since we're in the UK I thought it would be wise to order it ahead. It hasn't arrived yet. I am pretty sure we won't finish Level B before Elijah is born - if he is born at/after my due date and all is well beforehand, I plan to homeschool up to the week before my due date anyway. We will be taking a big break after he is born. He's due May 23rd and if he comes around that time, the earliest I would be looking to restart homeschooling would be the first week of July. I am definitely thinking of taking the whole of June off school, but I'm relaxed about when we start back - I don't have a set date at all. Benjamin's birthday is July 9th (a Tuesday), so maybe we won't even start back until we get a full week free, the following week? Or maybe Elijah will fit in with our days so smoothly and we'll be chomping at the bit to start in the last week of June? Who knows. But I'm not worried about it anyway - I will think about it a few weeks after I give birth and go from there. The boys seem a bit put out to be stopping school for allll those weeks! ;) I told them they can still do workbox activities to keep them busy, and Daddy will be home for the first two weeks after Elijah is born anyway, so they'll go out and such, quite a lot.
So when we DO start back, Matthew will hopefully begin a fresh new curriculum, starting Level B before Arthur has quite finished it. Arthur shouldn't have more than a couple of weeks or so left of Level B lessons, and then can go straight on to Level C from there.
I also ordered
Morrell's Handwriting Book 2 - there are two books of photocopiable worksheets, and we have been using the first one this year. Their handwriting is improving, more noticably with Arthur. He needs a little more work on how he's forming his letters, though the finished product of his sentences is getting really neat and tidy now. He is eager to do joined-up writing, so I have bought the second book (which focuses on cursive writing) in anticipation. I think he'll move onto that sometime over the summer or autumn, but I am not sure about Matthew starting that with him yet.
Arthur is doing great with his reading! He is near the very end of the
Rocket Phonics curriculum, which is roughly a 2-year course (though you go at the child's pace for however long, basically) from knowing no phonics sounds, to reading at secondary school level. He was better challenged by the last section he did in the book, having to use the "helpers" to decipher some of the words for the first time since the early months with the curriculum. Words that stumped him without the helpers were things like "colonel". At the end of that section he had another test, which I wondered if he would struggle with a bit, since he had been more challenged in that section. He had a list of 100 words (or so) to read straight off as I pointed to them. I thought he might be okay because he had to get 85% of them correct to be ready for the next section. He got one word wrong! I was so surprised! :) He has moved onto stories at a Year 7 reading level (6th Grade) in the next section and is learning about 'ph' sounding like 'f' and 'eu' sounding like 'yoo', that sort of thing. He reads on and off throughout the day, just picking up one of several books that he might have on the go, and reading on the sofa or floor (oblivious to the many small boys gallavanting around him!) for a while and then suddenly hopping up and joining in somebody's game or activity, or starting something else of his own. I sometimes suggest he takes a book upstairs to flop on someone's bed to read, but he rarely does. He prefers to just be amongst everyone and read! I think that would drive me crazy, if it were me, but he prefers it anyway.
I recently put his reading books in a more accessible place for him - they were next to our school bookshelf already, but in clear plastic boxes stacked up, and they looked messy and were not easy to pull books out of when he wanted them. I just wanted them out of the way of the littlest boys (the smallest of which eats paper for a hobby, lol!). I saw an idea on Pinterest for using wooden spice racks from Ikea for little bookshelves, and LOVED it immediately. I love how it's such a space-saving idea, and we need that kind of thing desperately in our tiny house! I kept a look out on eBay for ages, and finally won a lot of 4 Ikea spice racks for a few pounds plus postage! :) They've been here months, but I only got round to getting out the power drill and installing them last weekend. I wish I had a "before" picture, but here is the "after" picture all the same!
I love how they match the beech furniture we already have, and how clean and attractive the look is, with the books facing out. Arthur is so excited to have his books stored there, and takes a book down from there many times a day, replacing it carefully not too long after. I think it's a novelty effect, but he is loving using the shelves! There wasn't room for all four shelves there, but I used three of them, and they store just under 40 of his reading books, which is not bad! His main choices at the moment are Roald Dahl books (lots of giggling from behind a book!), and he has recently picked up Tom's Midnight Garden for the first time. He LOVES Matilda at the moment. He has read all the Roald Dahl books many times, like the Enid Blyton ones, but he never tires of reading them over and over again, sometimes the same book twice in one day! I'm thankful that he's not bored with a book he has already read, because otherwise I would be starting to panic at keeping up with supplying books for him to read! He reads the Little House books and occasionally has a go at the Paddington Bear books as well. I recently added a couple of things to his collection - a compilation of Mrs Pepperpot stories (which he read in a day) and also a box set of the first four Boxcar Children Mysteries. Those are American stories that I had never heard of, let alone read, until recently. But the reviews from friends and Amazon customers alike persuaded me. I am going to read them first though, but they look lovely!
Arthur reads a lot of reference books outside of the story books, mainly geography and history, but some science stuff as well, and nature. Whatever takes his fancy really. We have quite a few good reference books for older children that we've been given, which are just right for him when he is interested in something.
The black boxes on top of the school bookshelves in the photo are our workboxes. I can't remember if I've put a photo of them here before (or even taken one?!). We buy nappy wipes in boxes of 12 packs at a time (I have three full-time in nappies - soon to be four if I don't do something drastic like potty train someone! ;) ), and those boxes seemed perfect for repurposing. I just covered them in black sugar paper and made labels for the fronts with each boy's name. Samuel doesn't have a workbox - he's only 15 months old, but I made them before he turned one and now at 15 months he is VERY eager to be involved with workboxes, and if there was space on the top of the shelf I would add one for him now. It's the perfect size for 4 boxes, so I just put extra in Benjamin's box at the moment and give Samuel one of those when we start workbox activities, so he feels involved! It's usually something like a container of plastic safari animals or something like that. I cleared out the mess under the school table recently and have used several more nappy wipes boxes to contain baby toys and things under there. Ideally I would like a piece of slim-fitting furniture to go at the back under the table, to contain stuff, but I am biding my time on eBay! ;) I added some toddler jigsaws (the lift-out peg type), their yellow giant peg board, and a couple of other toddler activities that Samuel is really interested in, to keep at his level. He plays with those things a lot at the moment.
The TV is another eBay win - our house is starting to be made up of mostly eBay wins, haha! Our old TV broke, and we had no money to buy a new one. It wasn't a big deal since the boys haven't watched ANY TV other than DVDs since March 2010! Two years of no CBeebies - I can't tell you how overjoyed I am about that! ;) They were so hooked on it before. They have times where they watch too much TV (DVDs) but I am trying to limit it. In a good patch, they rarely watch any, but we haven't had a good patch for a while... Anyway, I found a flat screen TV the right size to sit in front of the school bookshelves (conveniently blocking little hands from getting into the games and puzzles inside the cupboard doors!) at eBay for £30! :) It was local enough for Neil to go and pick up, and it seems barely used to us. Yay!
Oh this isn't very "school update" ish, is it?!
So I bought one other curriculum item that I had been watching and wanting for a long while -
All About Spelling! I am really excited about it! So far I haven't done any spelling at all with the boys, and I like this programme a lot. But it uses its own phonics alphabet, and it differs slightly from the Rocket Phonics alphabet, so I didn't want to confuse the boys by using the two side by side, before they were confident readers. I decided to get to the point of completing Rocket Phonics and then replace the time spent on that during school with All About Spelling. So Arthur will start spelling lessons soon, and Matthew will not for a while. He is now reading sentences and doing well! He's much more motivated and excited about reading now that he can actually read things that make sense to him, but his progress is much more slow and steady than Arthur's ever was. He isn't slow, he just isn't Arthur, and that is fine. The whole thing is a big learning curve for me. I know how to teach an "Arthur" so far, and that is all! Matthew isn't like Arthur, he's just different, and so I must learn all over again how to teach.
We are not really getting history done every week, nor science. I am not stressing about it really. The boys are eager, and if we have chance we do those subjects, just working through the lessons. Sometimes they behave horribly during the main part of school and the consequence of that is they don't get to do the fun stuff that would have followed if they had behaved better for me and not delayed things. I reeeeally hope they're learning from this! If they are, it's a slow process, but sometimes Arthur seems to make the connection.
I actually decided to split lesson 2 of the
Apologia Astronomy course (The Sun) into four different lessons, and made a lesson plan for each one with some extra activities. I like a more relaxed approach and it allows us to explore the subject more thoroughly anyway. I like adding craft projects where possible, so it helps me fit that in as well. The boys are on the young end for the course, so breaking it up and adding crafts is good! :)
In history we have done two projects that the boys have really enjoyed! Using
'The Story of the World: Vol. 1 - Ancient Times', we're learning about the ancient nomadic people of Egypt who settled at the Nile where the land was fertile. I didn't go for the activity suggestions that were made for the first chapter, so we started on one I made up. It turned out great, and it has taken us weeks to complete it, adding bits and pieces here and there where we've found time. I decided it would be fun to make a diorama with "mud huts" - which we had just been learning about the nomads building by the Nile.
We started with a piece of thick cardboard (unbendably thick), and drew a wavy line near one end to mark the edge of the River Nile (I keep typing Neil, haha! I guess those letters are normally arranged that way when I type them!). The boys painted a sheet of aluminium foil with blue acrylic paint, and after it dried, we cut it to the wavy line shape on the board, and glued it on. While it was drying, the boys built their mud huts! I cut wide strips of corrugated cardboard and bent it into a "hut" shape, and cut a doorway on one side. Then I cut a square for each flat roof, and hot-glued them to the huts with my trusty glue gun! ;) The boys LOVED watching me use the glue gun! They tore up strips of kitchen roll and used watered-down white glue to paint layers of glue and kitchen roll onto their huts for some texture:
That was the end of that session, because everything needed to dry. The acrylic paint had dried really fast though, so we could cut the river to shape and glue it onto the board:
We had to wait a while before getting a good chance to do another "messy" session! The next stage was gluing sandpaper to the rest of the board (cut to the shape of the river edge) for texture. After that was dry, the boys painted most of it green with acrylic paint, leaving a little bit of "sand" for the edge of the river. They also painted the dried mud huts brown, and then we left that all to dry:
On the next session, the marvellous glue gun came out again, and I hot-glued the huts to the board. The boys glued on some shiny fabric fish that we had in the craft chest - a pile of "caught" fish by the river, and one still swimming (Matthew begged! He really feels for creatures being caught!). They tore up a couple of cheap green scouring pads to glue on as bushes and shrubs, but that was unexpectedly hard work for little fingers, so the bushes are rather square looking! That's all we got done that session, but I didn't get a photo.
Over the next week or two, every time we went to the park, the boys picked up a few little stones and twigs to add to the mud huts diorama. Finally we gathered them all and since they were small enough, we didn't need the glue gun, so the boys used white glue to stick them all over the land. They had so much fun making the diorama, and the only change I would make is to try and gather everything before starting, and then focus on getting it done in a shorter time-frame. They enjoyed it anyway, but doing it over a week or so would have been better than a month or so, I think! Arthur is going to write a label to go with it, saying what it is, and then we need to find somewhere suitable to display it for a while. Here's the finished product!
The next history project we worked on was an activity straight out of the curriculum activity book - I LOVED this idea! It was about farming the land by the Nile. They learned about flooding and irrigation, the way it happened seasonally. I bought a big foil baking dish for the project and some potting soil. The instructions called for grass seeds, but those take 3 weeks to grow and we don't have the space to have soil and manky water sitting around for 3 weeks without flies and smells bothering us! So I bought cress seeds instead. Those can be harvested within a week, and you can eat them! :) Real crops!
We followed the instructions and made a foil river bed in the soil, and weighed it down - instead of using pebbles and stones, I chose to give the boys some of the blue glass pebbles that I had bought at Poundland recently, because I thought it would give the water a nice blue look.
We made the river fan out into a delta in the north, and the boys put rocks on the south-east part of the Nile to represent the mountains from which the floods would come. They sprinkled all the cress seeds over the soil, and then they took turns filling the river with water.
The idea is to flood the Nile and irrigate the soil like in ancient times, and then wait to see how the crops grow from that episode of flooding. If we used grass seeds, we would re-flood every week, but a one-off flood was all that we needed with the fast-growing cress seeds! They were SO excited to flood the Nile that they were just squealing by the time the river was near to overflowing! After the land was flooded, they got to work adding a few plastic animals from our collection that were appropriate for Egypt - just some gazelle type creatures and a few hippos! Apart from flooding the Nile, I think their favourite part was making the hippos wallow in the mud! ;)
The seeds started to sprout within 36 hours, and ALL the boys were really excited to check them many times a day. There was always a noticable difference between breakfast and lunch, and then again from lunch to bedtime. I'm really pleased to have chosen the cress over grass, because it was much more satisfying to them with how fast it grew. It was great fun to do! And I was GLAD to harvest the cress and clean up/throw away the project after only one week. The river went down as expected over the week, right to the pebbles, and it became kind of yucky with a film over it. It didn't smell too great as we were cleaning it up either! I am so glad not to have kept that hanging around for another couple of weeks! Here's their Nile project exactly one week after starting it, just before we harvested the "crops" and cleaned up. You can see the water looking kind of yucky. And look how tall the cress grew!! The animals were hard to find! :)
Phew! That's long enough for one entry! I think I covered everything I wanted to, for now, so that's good! :) I will post photos when we do a project for history or science, because it's fun to keep track of what they are doing and we don't have a printer so I can't print out pictures to put in their history and science workbooks :( So it's good to have a place to record it all, until we eventually get a printer.
I will hopefully be back soon. I have sooooo many other things that I want to be writing about here, but as always, so little time to do so! I have lots of photos to post. I will try to update again soon. I know I am WEEKS behind at my
pregnancy blog, so I need to update there next, when I get chance!
