Homeschool Week 13

Things are going pretty well with homeschooling.

At this point miss L knows her sight words from the Dolch pre-primer list. She can read them easily. The problem is that we didn't work on writing them while we were working on reading them. Visualization seems to be something that is really hard for miss L to do and that seems to be a critical component of learning to spell. So... we are trying to practice our spelling in as many multi-sensory ways possible. This day we used do a dot markers to "write" the words. Miss L has always had trouble with strength in her hands. For instance, she has a hard time coloring large areas or an entire picture in a coloring book and writing can be very difficult for her too. In order to keep her from mutinying completely we try to work on spelling not just with writing, but in other ways too.

 

I find that a critical component of our homeschooling routine is my daily coffee. I'm not gonna lie folks, homeschooling can be downright hard. Sure, I have a teaching certificate but it definitely doesn't cover kindergarten reading. I desperately want to do right by miss L. I know everyone does, but I know that I've made a lot of choices *for* her and I don't want to screw this up. She's so precious and she deserves the best, so my daily cup of caffeine helps keep me on my toes.

 

When I have discussions about homeschooling with any of my homeschooling (and non-homeschooling!) friends the subject of planning seems to always come up. Here is what is working for me. I have an excel spreadsheet that I use for weekly plans. I downloaded the template from the microsoft office website. It has room for 8 subjects per day (or periods I suppose for middle or high school teachers) and room for materials, etc at the top (though I use it to keep track of our activities for the day). I often sit down on Sunday afternoons and plan out for the week, but when I'm able I do a month at a time and even though I have to go back through and change them (it just happens) it's so much easier! 

I keep the week's plans clipped to the front of a file box and I keep our books and materials for the week in that box. I have a file folder with the name of each day for any worksheet sorts of things we have and our other materials fit in there too. It's been really helpful!

 

We use tactile letters both to practice handwriting and to practice spelling. We love these letters!

 

We use scrabble letters a LOT. In this instance we were just spelling in this frame, but often I will print out words with lowercase letters and miss L with match the letters to them or I will draw boxes for the number of letters in a word and miss L figures them out. I never knew how great scrabble tiles were for practicing spelling before this!

 

We also practiced with stamp letters this week. It's just another way to get the words onto paper. Sometimes I give miss L all but one of the letters and she fills them in.

 

We also use yarn letters and magnetic letters for spelling. They say that the first year of homeschooling is about learning your child and I have to say that's true for us. I've learned that miss L hates to fail. She's a first born and she's adopted and as I understand it both of those things feed into the fear of failure thing. If miss L doesn't KNOW she can do something, she just flat out refuses to do it. We started out with me trying to really push her to spell words the way I felt like I was taught and that I felt like she should do it. The thing is, that isn't who she is. Miss L needs a way to spell that works for her and these are some of the ways we've found to do it. I hope it's working!!

Homeschool Week 6

(October 9 & 10, 2012) We are really in a routine now. We are still working on handwriting, phonics (sort of, more about this later), sight words and literature. We love our Five in a Row curriculum for reading. Each book in the series (classic and contemporary children's literature) is read once a day for five days with enrichment activities each day. Often there is a big social studies component (usually geography and culture, but there are others in there too) and often opportunities for learning about different art techniques. It's wonderful! This week's book is "How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World" by Marjorie Priceman. There's a lot of social studies to this one, and we love it. Some days miss L wants to read it twice a day!

 

Here miss L is playing a word family game and I cannot remember where I found it! It was online, and was part of a printable kit. If someone knows, please let me know and I will give credit where it is due! Anyhow, it's a fun game. There are words on the apples and you put them in the correct box. Here's the thing... We are STRUGGLING with phonics. Miss L knows all the letter sounds but when you put them together and ask her to sound them out, you can see the look in her eyes that she has no idea what you are talking about. I chose an online program, "Explode The Code" as our phonics/learning to read program at the beginning of the school year. Miss L has trouble with visual and auditory processing skills and this program requires her to work both of those areas. Eventually, she would complete the level that she was working on, not because she learned to sound out the words, but because she'd memorized the words on the screen. I don't know if I mentioned this in an earlier post (but I'm doing it now :o), but I hadn't even heard of sight words (learning high frequency words by memorization) before this school year. Yes, I embarked on homeschooling my child and I hadn't. heard. of. sight. words. It's fine now though, because I have heard of them! AND starting in the third or fourth week of school we started using both sight words (which miss L ROCKS) and phonics (which, well, you know). This week was the week we quit phonics altogether. Miss L was frustrated. I was frustrated. I sent panicked emails to my teacher friends telling them I was thinking of quitting and enrolling her in public school because I felt like a failure and she would never learn to read from me (lucky to have friends who don't mind me being an eensy bit dramatic when it comes to such high stakes stuff!). However, quitting phonics was the best thing we did. Miss L stopped being so frustrated. I stopped being so frustrated and in the end our school district doesn't teach phonics in kindergarten either. One of the awesome things about homeschool is that we can take our time and do what we're ready to do and learn at our own pace. In early October, miss L wasn't ready for phonics and definitely wasn't ready for that program (though people just rave about it, so it's great for some!). We've been so much happier since and we'll revisit phonics in the new year!

 

This week we purchased some cards for ball yoga. We love doing heavy work activities between school subjects (and sometimes as often as between words in handwriting if it's needed) and yoga, because we don't need a lot of extra stuff and we have these handy cards with positions, is our favorite. However, six weeks in we needed something fresh. Enter the yoga deck for kids on the ball. :o) We're loving it and loving something new to do!

 

Here's miss L reading a book lent to us by our favorite reading specialist. It's fantastic!