School Room 2012

Last year my school room was hyper-organized. I was adding Annika to the mix and new it would only work if everything was neat, labelled, and ready to go. It also had the alternate goal of helping Annika feel like she was in school.

This year we sent Annika to school. I liked having her home but she hated being home and didn't let us forget it, while things at school aren't perfect by a long shot, she's happier and everyone is calmer.

Since we didn't need the same kind of formal schoolroom we had last year, I was able to get rid of a bunch of stuff. The biggest thing we got rid of was my big desk. And the bigger bookshelf. I put everything I am not using right now in the linen closet.

So far I like it. The room is more open, which is nice and it looks more like a room than a collection of desks.

Back to School

This is the week. Annika went to second grade at a local elementary and Harry and Sam started sixth and fourth grades at home. Emma is a K4er, something completely made up but that makes her feel better about not going to school with Annika. She so wants to be a kindergartner and completely missed the cut-off. In other news the ants have invaded as they always do this time of the year and I spent my summer planning time watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

I won't say much about Annika's school. She is so far doing well but has been coming home exhausted every day. The don't use any scary math programs like Everyday Math but I'm still going to supplement after school. (She doesn't know that yet but I'm sure she'll be thrilled. (You got the sarcasm, right?))

We have a few big goals this year. Harry needs to learn to sit still and concentrate for more than thirty seconds at a time and how to problem solve and Sam needs to realize how smart he really is and have confidence in what he does. So everything we do is structured around those goals. For instance, Sam reads at a high-school level but I'm taking him back in some of his history and science readings so that he gets the content he needs and he knows he understands the work right away. Harry will be required to find a science problem/question to answer. He's interested in cells so we're going to find out all about them which will lead into biology and by January I want him to have a hypothesis he can work on for the rest of the school year.

Other than that we're pretty much continuing on with everything we did last year. I think the only big change is with Sam's math. I've moved him from Math-U-See to Math Mammoth. I can go into exactly why if anyone is interested. Just let me know.

And now for some pictures.

Whew.

Annika just came down the stairs asking, "did you know Emma is asleep on the stairs?"

I had to answer that I didn't. The last I knew of Emma, she was in her room for saying that she doesn't like me because I made her wash the chocolate Popsicle off of her face.

Annika was concerned with none of that. She was trying to get a great big box downstairs so she and her friends could color on it. Her next sentence was, "it's okay though, I got the box still."

Gotta love the one-track, six-year-old mind.

Beast Academy + Perfectionist = ?

Most of my kids are perfectionists. Learning comes fairly easily to them so they tend to be very reluctant to try new things that they might not be really good at from the get go. I don't want them growing up fearing things they perceive as difficult so I try to give them little bites of challenging topics. The most recent thing that I've found to torture, um, challenge Sam is Beast Academy, by the same people that wrote The Art of Problem Solving.

I knew he would love the comic book format and that the work would not be easy for him. He has been steadily working through Math-U-See since first grade and is really good at the straight-forward format. I also know that Sam, more than any of my other kids, shuts down if things get too hard. I need to be aware of all of these potential pitfalls and help Sam work around them without making things too easy. So how do I do it?

1. We do Beast Academy first. That way I know he's just had breakfast, a break, and sleep so any grumpiness is not from external factors. Although I have been known to send a truly struggling child to get a quick drink of water or to wash his face just to get away for a minute or two.

2. I work with Sam, or whoever is being challenged. They each have their own spots at the desk but for hard stuff they sit across from me so I can watch. Is Sam reaching the end of his rope? Is Harry fidgeting more than normal? I monitor it and either end the session or send him for a drink.

3. I give hints as appropriate. I won't give answers but after I see the child working for a few minutes (exactly how many changes with who or what they're doing) without making progress I'll ask them if they want a little hint. And I'll make sure that the hint is enough to get them going again.

4. We keep the sessions relatively short. Where I might be inclined to have the child do the entire section, I'll keep it to three or four problems. We might come back to it later in the day, but most likely the next day.

5. We keep it light. I use a lot of humor to pull Sam away from the edge if things are going bad. This goes for all of my kids and a lot of different situations we find ourselves in. If I'm trying to get them to tell me a narration on Black Beauty and I want to know where the Black rode to, I might say, "He rode to the moon, right?" It breaks the tension and helps him get the real answer out a little bit easier.

I want to challenge my kids, not torment them (although if you ask them I don't think they'd see the difference). So I set them up to succeed. It's not that different than what any parent would do, these are just things I've noticed after working with Sam for years and watching how he thinks. If I were to tell him to sit at his desk and work on the section by himself he'd sit there crying for an hour never asking for help and just thinking about how he can't do the work he needs to. This gives him a chance to grow in knowledge and confidence and really, it doesn't get much better than that.

Quick! You have One Minute...

to talk coherently about homeschooling.

What do you say?

Me? I start off with the general disclaimer, I'm a homeschooler, not all homeschoolers. I do what works for my family, it's up to you for your family.

Then I talk about structure: The continuum of unschooler to completel school-at-home(r)

Third: We don't lock our kids in basements. We're actually pretty busy (Plus we live in California, there are no basements here.)

After that? A few things that I like about homeschooling. An anecdote or two about how sweet it is to see the kids learning together. An impressive thing that happened this week (hopefully there was one). Yes, it's bragging, but only for five seconds.

Finally...I love homeschooling, I breathe homeschooling, and sometimes even dream homeschooling. So there's no way to cover the topic in one minute. Call if you have questions.


So, what glaring mistakes have I made? What did I leave out or put in? How would you do it?

Next Year: The Annika Chronicles

I've been putting this off for a bit. Curriculum has been chosen, plans are set, and things are moving along. Harry will be in 6th, Sam in 4th, and Annika in 2nd grade. Emma will be a preschooler again. (She has another year before she's eligible for school. I'm hoping she'll still be happy to be a preschooler for one more year.)

Among the regular plain-old changes that advancing a grade brings is another, bigger change. Annika went to our neighborhood school for kindergarten and loved it. And by 'loved' I mean cried-if-she-missed-a-day, begged-to-go-on-Saturday loved it. She had a blast and met a group of girls she is still friends with. To say that she wasn't super-thrilled about coming home from school is an understatement. I naively thought it would get better as the year went on and it has to an extent. She has both loved and done well at her charter school, where she goes to one day each week for fun classes. She has taken cooking, arts & crafts, Greek & Latin Roots and other fun things. She also begged to take a math class toward the end of the year and I'm pretty sure it was at least partly because it reminded her of school.

Annika is chaos embodied. She has to be doing something all hours of the day. She gets up much earlier than the rest of us and wreaks havoc early in the morning. As a consequence of that though, she generally goes to bed easily and I can breathe. I originally sent her to school to get a break from this chaos and to preserve a relationship that was, quite frankly, fraying at the edges. I didn't want that to happen at the age of five, so kindergarten came at a good time.

Partly because of the chaos and partly because of my own deficiencies, we never got into a groove this year. You know, where things go relatively smoothly and you realize that "hey, there's a lot of great learning happening here!" That's not to say that learning didn't happen, it was just more disjointed than I'm comfortable with. And next year with Harry in middle school...eek. I need the groove and organization and all of that.

So I've decided to try to put Annika back in school. The wrinkle here is that I'm not going to put her into the school she went to for kindergarten. I'm trying to put her into the school her best friend goes to. I know the principal there and some of the teachers. I think it's a decent school. Not as good as home, but that's life. If all hell breaks loose and things go poorly I know that I can pull her out, but for now the plan is for her to go to school there through elementary.

And because I made this decision and the universe is kind of cruel like that, we had an absolutely fabulous day of learning today. Nothing like that to set your mind spinning again. So, what curriculum is my second-grader going to use next year? Whatever the school has (and a bunch of stuff that I have, just don't tell Annika).

Soo...

I meant to come back and finish all of the challenges in March, but it just wasn't meant to be. I took most of the pictures though, so maybe someday I'll have a chance to post them.

Instead I bit down all of my fingernails waiting to see if Harry got into a local charter middle school. Long story short...he didn't. Everyone but him is kind of bummed. He doesn't want to go to school, but I know he'd do fine if he did.

So March was a blur trying to get work finished and trying harder not to check my email a thousand times a day. (Yes, I'm that Mom.) April has been better. We took the week after Easter for Spring Break and spent it outside. Since then I've made more of an effort to go outside for a major hike each week. Or at least if it's not a major hike, more outside than just going to the park. That's been a lot of fun and it's really helped our weeks go better. (Okay, week, since we've only been back for a week.)

Soon I'll have our curriculum picks for next year up, but that requires me to actually know what they are, so I should probably go and figure them out.

Thanks for your patience while this space veers from completely dead to lots of silly little posts.

(Emma) Jane Says:

Actual conversations I've had or overheard involving Emma:

At Costco, waiting for our tires to be rotated:

Annika: "This is taking a while."

Emma, nodding her head in agreement: "And a long time."

Looking out the window to where the tires are taken off,

"Mommy, what is that thing?"

"I don't know" (we'd been there for 2 hours & I just couldn't answer one more question.)

Figuring it out for herself, "Oh, it's a lifter upper."


Later on in the car. We were listening to NPR advertise their latest getaway to Paris.

"Mommy, we should go too!"

"mmhmm"

"Tomorrow because tonight they're closed"


And thus concludes the latest installment of "What My 4-Year-Old Is Thinking."

It's Pi Day!

Pie for dinner and dessert:

The Desk in Action

I don't make Harry sit under there, he just really likes it!

More Info

It occurred to me that I really didn't give much info to the picture challenge that I'm doing.  So, it's found here, at Home is Where You Start From. I like the challenge of taking a picture each day, even if I'm not real good at actually following through with it.

Snacks...

Sometimes it takes a little something extra to finish your math:

Books

The first one is of my bedside table. There are a ridiculous amount of books here in various stages of being read. Some are long-term, pick-it-up-when-you've-got-a-minute books, but sadly there are a lot of library books here too. And even more on my kindle. You know the saying about your eyes being bigger than your stomach? Well, mine are bigger than the amounts of time I have to devote to reading. Not that that's ever stopped me before:

Sky

I took this so my Mom could see Emma hanging out while Harry had his horseback-riding lesson.

She notice Emma, but also something I missed: the beautiful blue sky in the background.

Creating...

A new school plan for a certain sweet and adorable 6yo that isn't quite ready to be "classically educated." so we're going the "read a lot of books, hope something sticks, and try again next year" route.

Wordless Wednesday: Homeschool

Preschool Fun

A friend and I do a little preschool once a week for our four-year-olds. It's scheduled when Harry & Sam are in classes, so they're out of the house and Annika is my Special Helper.

Anyway, today we read about caterpillars and butterflies. We also made this adorable craft from pinterest, where everything fabulous and guilt-inducing is found.

I love preschool day. It's work but it's also Emma's day to have some undivided attention. And for a 4yo that's the youngest in a homeschooling family, that's pretty rare, and dare I say, special.

Good Things

Most afternoons Emma sleeps and the rest of us try frantically to finish as much as we can before we head out for activities. But somehow today we were able to finish most everything in the morning.

That makes for a more peaceful afternoon, even if Emma is awake.

Here are some quick pictures from a minute ago:

Playing Sorry with Cinderella and the Cat

Playing physics games

Weaving on her loom

Changes: A Math Story

For the record, I hate change. So I swore that I wouldn't become a curriculum-hopper when I started homeschooling. I would stay with something and make it work.

You all can laugh now, if you need to. I understand.

That philosophy lasted me a couple of years. Things went swimmingly for Harry and Math U See until they suddenly didn't anymore. I remember it vividly, he was at the end of Gamma where the multiplication changes to multi-digit multiplication. It didn't stick and he was ending every math lesson in tears. So I let him off the hook for the rest of the year and we just played math games and did lots of printable math worksheets. His confidence was so low that I had to bring him back to where he trusted that he could do math.

I switched him to Singapore Math at the beginning of fourth grade, which started out great. The books were engaging and he loved it. I did too. Sam still worked with MUS and did really, really well. He could finish a level in a semester. But we stuck with it because it was working well. I thought we had it down.

And we did, until...Annika came home for school this year. So now I have a 5th grader, 3rd grader, and 1st grader. I started Annika on Singapore. They did not get along. There were battles of epic proportions to get her to listen to me and to actually do the work. She is good at math but she suddenly was saying that she isn't. I freaked and got rid of all of the Singapore 1A books because I'm not having my incredibly smart and talented girl telling me that she isn't good at math before she even hits seven.

I stepped back and tried to figure out what to do. I went the route of playing games and printing stuff until I decided to try MEP. So far so good. She's working through Year 1 and a lot of it is easy, but there's enough of a challenge that I'm okay sticking with it. Annika doesn't tell me that she's bad at math anymore and I'm hoping she doesn't actually remember that she thought she was. She does about three lessons a day, but worksheets to only two of them. I know it doesn't make sense, but it works for us.

A funny thing happened when Annika came home for school. All hell broke loose. I don't know how else to describe it. She's high maintenance and trying to teach two separate Singapore levels and stay on top of Sam and his MUS was too much. We were spending half our day on math. So I decided to give Math Mammoth a try for Harry. He needed a little more practice with fractions, so I got the fraction book to try. He liked it (I feel like saying it like Mikey) and we switched after Christmas to MM for Harry's math.

Sam is just plugging along with MUS and doing well, so he's not changing. Ever.

Really, I swear. No more changes.*

*Unless absolutely necessary. I get to decide what "absolutely necessary" means.

New Desk

When we bought this house four years ago, part of it's attraction was the large loft at the top of the stairs. The model had a built-in desk along one wall that we really liked. Eventually we looked to see how much it would be to have someone build us a desk and it turned out to be way more than we wanted, so Jason decided to build it himself. (I'm pretty sure he wanted an excuse to buy tools too, so it worked out for everyone.)

Anyway, this is the desk in the garage:

It is really long because it will go across most of one wall. There will be three "slots" for kids to use and they'll put their books in the shelves underneath. As of now there is trim on it and Jason is ready to stain the wood. After that he'll put something on it to protect it from little people's pens and pencils. Eventually it'll make it into the upstairs.

This is part of the wall it will go across:

Why yes, that is the head of a four-year-old

Not an exciting wall, yet. But soon...

This is Valentine's Day

This is the box that has held all of our Valentine's Day mail.

This is Emma telling me "how beautiful" her Valentine is.

This is Annika opening her Valentines and gasping for joy (seriously)

This is the display the girls created so that anyone who walked through the door could see their beautiful Valentines.

This is the pile of Valentine's Sam opened. No pictures, but trust me, there was excitement!

This is Harry's stack. He's too cool for pictures and gasping, but I heard a bunch of "oh cools" and "I love this ones."


Finally, and no picture for this, but this is their Mom saying thank you to everyone that participated and spent the time to send Valentines to a bunch of kids you don't know. It really made our day! Thank you.