Homeschool:1 - Blog:0

I've been so busy homeschooling that I've neglected to blog about it!  However, today we received our Moving Beyond the Page curriculum for next year and we're both super excited!!

Here are our Moving Beyond the Page Box Day photos. I ordered the complete 8-10 curriculum, including books and manipulatives, and there was so much included in our order that I needed help to carry the boxes from the post office to the car! CKW is excited with all the science, especially the manipulatives, so as soon as we finish up our last 7-9 unit (Iggie's House) we're good to go.

Here is the 8-10 Complete Curriculum. Student NOT included!

Concept 1: Interdependence
Dirt and Plants
Native Americans
Ecosystems and Ecology

 

Concept 2: Force and Power

Magnetism and Electricity

The Power of the People

Forces of Nature

 

 

Concept 3: Similarities and Differences

Africa and Asia

Rocks and Minerals

Europe

 

 

Concept 4: Exploration and Survival

Animal Adaptations

Early Explorers

Work, Tools, and Simple Machines

 

 

We LOVE this curriculum! Tonnes of books, lots of projects, skip the worksheets and busywork... Moving Beyond the Page truly makes learning FUN! 

Science Fun!

Moving Beyond the Page 7-9
Concept 3: Cycles
Unit 2: The Water Cycle
Making Water

 



Happy Thanksgiving Eh!

It's our Canadian Thanksgiving today, so I have a bit of free time to update.  We've been busy, busy, busy!

After getting up at 0630 and leaving camp every Saturday morning to drive into the city for 3on3 hockey, CKW decided that riding competitively was more important to him than playing rep (competitive) hockey, so a few weeks ago a new member of our family arrived:  Top Notch Tuppence, a large, Welsh cross pony who has shown hunters, jumpers and evented - just what CKW needs!

They hit it off immediately and CKW has been riding almost every day since his arrival!

We've been 'doing school' four days per week, approximately 3.5 hours each day and then heading out to the barn for the afternoon.  CKW attends an after school group for a couple of hours every afternoon and then continues on to sports and/or piano in the evenings.  During the day on Wednesdays, we get together with our local homeschool group and socialise.  Great for him to have kids to run around with and really great for me to have other homeschooling parents to talk to.  Seriously, I need the socialisation waaaaay more than he does!

Moving Beyond the Page (MBtP) continues to be our main curriculum spine for language arts and social science.  I continue to be impressed by this curriculum!  Maths is covered with Teaching Textbooks, Singapore Math, Life of Fred, and various iPad apps - CKW is a maths lover!  We are also enjoying My Pals Are Here!  for science and supplement with the Homeschool Science Program at our local city science centre.  Our Canadian social science content is from Donna Ward but I plan to purchase CBC's Canada: A People's History as CKW finds Donna Ward a bit dry, and I have to admit that I concur!  We are slogging though Easy Grammar and Daily Grams but I'm not impressed with teaching grammar based entirely upon prepositions and plan to invest in Michael Clay Thompson's curriculum next year, as long as we have the time to fit it in along with MBtP.  CKW enjoys all the 'Detective' workbooks from The Critical Thinking Company and on days that I am not feeling well, I am very thankful for workbooks and computer based curriculum! 

Fall is my favourite season - hope you are enjoying it as much as we are! 

Giant Panda Poster

I am a panda bear

My heart is going to tear

I'm almost extinct!

Don't you care?

Sarah, Plain and Tall

Not his favourite book so far, but as we live in a rural area, he is enjoying learning about farm life in the late 19th century.  Just the other day he asked me to hook up our miniature horse and drive him into town to get the groceries!

Where do you-all find the time?!

The time to homeschool and blog? 

We've been puttering along all fall, continuing to use Moving Beyond the Page as our main curriculum spine, and very much enjoying it!  We are almost finished with the 6-8 level and will move into 7-9 early in 2012.  We're also been spending our time working through Teaching Textbooks 3 and I will order the next level after the holiday rush is over.  Challenging Word Problems and Life of Fred - Elementary are also going well.  We've been using My Pals Are Here! 3/4 for science, as well as several Intellego Unit Studies for both science and social science.  We have workbooks for days when I'm not at my best, but both find that discussion centred around whatever we are reading suits us best.  Fine arts and physical education are mostly done out of house, and as for French - well, let's call it a 'curriculum in progress'...

Kind of like my blogging! 

CKW with his latest Lego 12 Days of Brickmas creation.  Day 2 - Gift Wrapped Present

Finally, An Update!

Things have been going very well, and I can't tell you how relieved I am to be able to write that... 

It took me over a year to decide exactly when would be the best time to remove CKW from public school and begin homeschooling.  For reasons having to due with my health, I knew that I would not be able to homeschool until he was old enough to work at least somewhat independently, and up until late last month I honestly wasn't sure if this year was going to be 'The Year of Independent Work' or 'The Year of Homeschool Hell'!

Finally we had a day where CKW finished up all his work before lunch.  I can remember the time as if it were yesterday; it was 11:47 and we called it a day.  When I congratulated him and told him that he was free to do as he pleased for the afternoon, the look on his face was priceless.  "Can I play lego?" he asked.  "Can I go outside and fly my kite?"...  "Can I ride my dirtbike?"...  After five or six anwers in the affirmative, I guess he realised that I was serious and he broke out into a huge smile.  Since then, we haven't had many days that extend beyond lunchtime and, thankfully, much less wasting time, fooling around, and general 'pain in the butt' behaviour.  He is learning, and I am able to rest as needed.  It's working for us!  It's really working!!

With respect to teaching/learning styles, I have found that 'flipping the classroom' is the way to go at our house.  At the end of each homeschool day, I have CKW watch BrainPop or Discovery Education (for example) videos that introduce and explain the topics we are going to be discussing the following day.  This often gets him interested enough to independently locate supplemental reading on a topic that afternoon/evening, and consequently our teaching discussions have been at a much higher and more in depth level.  His comprehension and retention have also improved.

Writing continues to be our bugaboo, but things are improving.  CKW is doing all the writing required, including making use of the more advanced options when offered, in the 6-8 level of Moving Beyond the Page.  We are also doing The Wand program from Bravewriter.  This program started out quite slowly (it is suggested for K-2 students) but it has been encouraging for my struggling writer since the writing demands are light and the spelling and phonics review is helpful.  I will wait until the program is finished to make a final decision, but I think this will be something that we continue with in future years.

All in all, it has been a successful first month (or so!) of homeschooling.  Hopefully I will be back next week with an update, but no promises!

Wants and Needs

Today we worked on our Moving Beyond the Page curriculum.  We are going ahead with the 6-8 level and the first concept is Community.  Unit one of this concept is Communities Around the World and today was Lesson Four: Wants and Needs. 

CKW's favourite part of the day was making a Wants and a Needs collage.  As soon as I mentioned that he would need to go to the arts & crafts centre to get the scissors and glue, he literally screamed out "COLLAGE!"  The poor boy is well aware that I am not very artsy and I think he was afraid that he was going to miss out on all the fun stuff. 

So, without further ado, here they are!

He needs healthy food (berries), water (he said preferably not bottled, but he couldn't find a picture of a tap), shelter (that's quite the house), clothing (looks suspiciously like paddock boots to me), medical care (rabies vaccine from one of my veterinary magazines!), and then...  then I saw the picture of the Kardashians!  WTH?!  We don't watch much television, and what we do watch certainly isn't that show!  However my fears were put to rest when he said he didn't know who those people were, but it was the only picture of a family he could find and he knows we all need luvins!

Apparently he wants a car, an ipad, junk food (pop and pizza) and a really good cross-country horse.  Unfortunately, the horse in the photo looks very much like the one who kicked me in the head, so he'll have to stick with his pony for now.

We spent a lot of time discussing domestic and international poverty and what we can do, both as individuals and as a country, to help those in need.  Now that's what I like about MBtP!  I might not have thought to bring these topics into the curriculum on my own ("Just the facts, ma'am"), but important issues like these are definately things that I want to take the time to discuss with CKW, as soon and as often as possible.   



Do I Have To Write It ALL BY MYSELF?!

CKW is a very reluctant writer - his brain (and mouth!) goes far too fast for his handwriting.  He produces a tonne of ideas, but has trouble getting them onto the page in paragraph form, and sometimes even into sentences.

We had planned to do the full Moving Beyond The Page (MBtP) 7-9 level this year, but the writing was quickly proving to be more then he could handle.  He was really starting to resist even attempting the process of writing, so I backed off and decided to save the 7-9 level until next year and, instead, we are doing the two language arts heavy concepts of 6-8 level this year: Community and Culture.   However, I have informed him that am not scribing anything for him in MBtP!  We do plenty of outside science and social science studies, and if I find that the amount of writing expected in MBtP for a particular day is quite heavy, then I will scribe for him in other subjects, but I really want him to learn to write on his own.   We are also doing (see links at the side) MCP Phonics C, Spelling Workout B, Easy Grammar 2, BraveWriter - The Wand, and WriteStart Primary C this year, so we are going to keep plugging along, with the goal of having his writing abilities equal to the level required at the 7-9 level of MBtP in time for the 2012-2013 academic year.

So far, he's doing great! Yes, he sometimes does find the MBtP readings to be 'babyish' at this level, but we most often discuss the topics presented in great detail, I always have him choose the second option for activities when they are available, and I try, as often as possible, to add in 'extras' as I find them listed on the MBtP IdeaShare forum.  So far, so good...

Happily, his writing is already improving by leaps and bounds and he continues to read more difficult books on his own and in the more challenging literature unit studies I choose that we discuss verbally.  For these, I went through MBtP, as well as Michael Clay Thompson's literature program and left out any books that they included so we wouldn't end up repeating things later on.  (I hope to add bits and bobs of Michael Clay Thompson's language arts program to our curriculum in the not too distant future, but that put the kibosh to this fall's planned Wind In The Willows pond unit study!)    

Last year, it was recommended to me at school that I should not worry about his handwriting, as he could move onto a keyboard anytime.  Several teaching professionals felt that handwriting was no longer a necessary skill 'in this day and age'.  But I strongly disagree!   As a traumatic brain injury survivor, I have discussed this with rehabilitation ocupational therapists, psychologists and speech therapists, and they have all strongly supported the studies showing that the act of physically writing letters and words helps both children and adults to build and maintain cognitive function.  Benefits include, but are not limited to, reading, writing, spelling, focus, memory, and executive function.  With this in mind, I've made the choice to slow down for a year to allow him to learn to write more easily - one of the best things about homeschooling is we've got lots of time!

Our Moving Beyond The Page Order Is Here!

We finally received our Moving Beyond the Page order - no thanks to Canada Post!  I ordered just the first concept in the 7-9 level, Environment, as I was a bit worried about the amount of writing that would be required.  Included in this concept are three science/social science units:  Amazing Weather, The Land and Sound, as well as three literature units:  Tornado, Sarah Plain and Tall, and Who Was Helen Keller?.  This concept also includes a human anatomy ear model and a thermometer.

Everything looked great!  I was chomping at the bit to get started right way, but...  I'm still worried about the level of writing required.  It is like pulling teeth to get CKW to write two sentences about almost anything, and I am very reluctant to start out at the level of writing in the 7-9 level and turn him off of the entire homeschool experience. 

Sooo...  I went ahead and read through both the Secular Homeschool forum and the MBtP forum archives and have, reluctantly, decided to put this concept on the shelf for now and place an order for both the Community and Culture concepts in the 6-8 level.  We will start off with those concepts this year (not sure how well three Cinderella themed stories are going to go over!) and really concentrate on the writing aspects of the curriculum, as well as applying critical thinking skills to our discussions of the topics raised - needs vs wants, citizenship, cultures and customs, etc.  I hope this will keep CKW interested and engaged while his fine motor skills continue to mature, and that we will then be ready for the 7-9 level in the not too distant future.