This week at A+

Mr. Brilliant got off to a rough start.  Monday was his first day of school and he felt it awfully unfair of me to ask him to start school a day before his sister started school.  My son feels the injustices of his life very keenly.

This week we read (Stuart Little, a biography of Thomas Edison).  We continued work we started last term on ‘By the Great Horn Spoon’.  In Math we worked on multiplication facts and place values, with a little money work thrown in for fun.  Mr. B played a game of Risk with his dad using ‘The Lord of the Rings’ Risk set.  (My brother-in-law purchased that set about 10 years ago, we never used it, now I know why).  The game didn’t go well but my husband tells me Mr. B is learning strategy and finally ending his habit of cheating if he thinks he is losing.

We used a number of worksheets.  I’m not a big fan of worksheets but my son likes to work on his own, at his own pace.  Worksheets allow him to get back into the swing of school work without my standing over him every second.  He also likes the feeling of mastery that the worksheets allow.  He can pick up the sheets and go hide in his room, he doesn’t need me to explain.  We will phase out the worksheets as he becomes comfortable working on his own projects.  Right now he is still trying to avoid work in favor of video games.

We do copy work.  This is something many home schoolers hate.  My husband disagrees with my choice to use copy work.  My son says he hates it, but he does it willingly.  One thing Mr. B never learned at school is to do a thing well, just to have done it well.  I require him to slow down and do his best work on the copy work.  Best handwriting, proof-reading for spelling and punctuation.  The work is super easy and it gives him a feeling of success.

Hmmm…  Even though everything he worked at, at school in 2nd and 3rd grade, Mr. B never felt he was doing things well.  He was always being told he could do better.  Perhaps that is why the copy work and worksheets are both boring him yet focusing him.  Success is easily observed, improvement swiftly achieved.  I must ponder this thought awhile.

We start each school day with journal writing.  Mr. B hated that at school, he hates it at home.

We spent some time drawing mice this week.  Mr. B drawings were nearly perfect.  Rather worried about that, as he took no enjoyment out of that exercise, but sweated until he’d completed it as close to a perfect copy of what was in the book.

No outside lessons this week, will be starting those over the next three weeks.

PE, or what to do with a kid who only wants to play dodgeball

Team Sports.

I couldn’t care less.  Mr. A+ feels, strongly, that team sports are necessary to Mr. Brilliant becoming a well-rounded, useful member of society.

Mr. B enjoys swimming but doesn’t want to join swim team.  He enjoys bike riding but doesn’t want to train for the triathlon.  He loves tennis but I’m having issues getting his trainer on board with getting Mr. B in the local league.  Mr. B hates soccer, rugby, lacrosse, basketball and baseball.  He won’t join the local hip-hop club (too many girls), nor will he join the local drumming league (I might force him to do that).  Neither his father nor I want to encourage him in golf.  Our final option is training in karate at the local dojo (that’s another we may force him to do).  He *might* be allowed to train our dogs to run the agility course.  He can’t take fencing until 8th grade.

This next month Mr. Brilliant will take swimming lessons (says he doesn’t need ’em, but tough).  He’ll take tennis twice a week.  He’ll start taking Yoga once a week.  He’s required to bicycle half a mile a day and walk the dog half a mile a day.

But, there it is, team sports.  What to do, what to do?

Sciences — Just try to hold them back

I wanna go to the Children’s Museum.  I wanna go to the Natural History Museum.  I wanna go the CDC Museum.  I wanna go the American History Museum.  I wanna go to the Spy Museum.  I wanna go to the Science Museum.  All Summer long my kids pestered me, please, please, pluuusseezzzze, can we go to the fill-in-the-blank museum.  Can we stay all day?  Can we spend the night?  Can we come back tomorrow?

Why should I even bother buying a science curriculum?  My kids are out in the street filling coke bottles with Mentos.  They are up in trees looking at bird and squirrel nests.  They built a diorama of a volcano last spring.  They put together a power point demo about the Boykin Spaniel.  I could go on.

When it comes to sciences, my challenge is to draw the subject matter back to other matters at hand.  And to remind the kids that the neighbors take a dim view blowing up stuff.

Between what Sonlight and Oak Meadow have on offer, merely what is attached to their literature program, I need do nothing more than buy a few simple books explaining the scientific method and how to use it properly, then insure the kids use said method as they explore whatever aspect of science lights their fire this week.

For example, as part of his studies of the book, ‘Stuart Little’ my son must examine what it is like to be so tiny (plenty of science there), including what sort of animals he would meet being that size (which will involve an afternoon lying on the grass in the lawn documenting the creatures we happen upon).  Finally, my son will need to build a mouse-sized canoe that will really work, out of grasses, so discussions of weight, buoyancy and basket-weaving will figure in next week’s discussions.

On a more grim note, we’ve had ample opportunity to delve into discussions of the human circulatory system, as we explain what caused my husband’s brush with death and how he continues working toward his full recovery.

What we are doing here

As I’d mentioned, my son, Mr. Brilliant, is in 4th grade.  He left/was asked to leave his previous school because, although he was getting straight A’s, he was bored to tears and his teachers all agreed, he wasn’t working up to his potential.  That much was clear, while my daughter was sweating bricks for each A and B, he was getting the excellent grades without effort.  He was learning that life is a free ride and if it didn’t come easy it wasn’t worth doing.

Not lessons his father and I wished him to be learning.

So, what curriculum were we to use at home?

The easy answer was using one of the on-line K-12 programs issued by the state.  Easy, everything comes in a box, you just need a computer and an internet connection and off you go.  Or was it so easy?  I didn’t want my son parked on the computer, surfing on the net all day.  Turns out the state systems are lock-step, it is classroom instruction at home.  My son would not be able to work ahead or dive deeply into something that interested him, nor do only the basics on subjects that he’d already covered or were of little interest.  Additionally, taking time off to travel would be just as difficult as if he were in a brick and mortar campus.

The tough answer, but the better answer for Mr. Brilliant and our family, was a combination of ‘out-of-the-box’ curriculum with addition of items of my choosing.  First we purchased the Oak Meadow 4th grade curriculum.  Oak Meadow is a Waldorf based program, the work is gentle and flowing, an ideal step away from the rigid system my son had been exposed to so far.  Working with Oak Meadow for the last quarter of 3rd grade, I was able to see where my son’s strengths and weakness lay.  My husband and I came to realize that the Oak Meadow, by itself, was going to be too light and too little to keep my son engaged, although the depth of the projects would allow him to enjoy a peacefully educational progress he’s never experienced before.  Oak Meadow was also going to allow Mr. B to delve into the wonders of cross-discipline learning (The ‘Stuart Little‘ project would encompass literature, biology and arts and crafts as well as written expression).

I have added a number of items from The Well-Trained Mind program.  My son was very weak on grammar and history, two subjects WTM covers well.  He also needed to slow his pace and while copy work bores him, the passages he copies from are well written and engage him.  Finally, since I am starting at the beginning of their programs, it is maintaining his illusion that school work is easy, but the program moves forward quickly enough, that he’ll feel challenged soon (but not overly so).

Next, how to engage his interest?  How do make the process of learning ‘fun’?  Enter the Sonlight program.  Mr. B insisted that reading books was boring and he wanted to spend this next year doing unit studies, something easy enough to do with Oak Meadow.  However I found that Mr. B didn’t have the ability to remain focused long enough to work for weeks at a time on a unit study (though that is something we’ll re-exam in about six months).  Sonlight provides excellent books, primarily well written and engaging fictional stories well suited for a boy my son’s age.  They have the added a delightfully easy to follow teacher program that makes it pleasant to follow should you decided to work it closely or vary wildly.  One book could be somewhat glossed over (My son didn’t cotton to ‘Sing Down the Moon’), while another book could be featured at great length (“By the Great Horn Spoon’ was a massive hit.) and many lessons from one book were re-framed in the next, so the important points weren’t lost if you read one book merely for pleasure while delving into the other book for a few weeks.

So, that covers the core of English, Literature, Grammar and Written Expression.  Next up, Math, Science, PE, Art, Music, Spanish and so forth…

Introducing Mr. Brilliant.

Here he is.  In London.  Very, very bored.  It was hot, too, too hot, and the tour was so very, very, very boring.

We decided to take a trip to the UK this year.  It was rather unexpected but very welcome.  We spent two weeks visiting a friend in York (a city well worth visiting) and a week in London.  I was pick-pocketed on a bus on our first day in London, but it turned out that cloud had a silver lining.  First off, I got to  meet the manager of the Money Shop in Hammersmith and wow, what a nice guy.  Second, we had to cut our trip short, therefore leaving London the day before the riots began.  Our hotel was right in the thick of some of the worst rioting, so I’m very pleased to have gotten out of Dodge when we did.

Enter, kicking and screaming

Hello, welcome to my blog and my new school year.

Today my son starts 4th grade.  Well, sort of.  Last year we were asked to leave/were expelled/decided to leave/told ’em all  to go to hell from prestigious private school here in the SouthEast.  Why?  Because Mr. Smarty-Pants was getting straight A’s in all subjects.    Straight A’s but the report card came back, ‘not working to his potential’.  What the hell do you do with that?

It didn’t help that he was the youngest and smallest kid in his class.  And he’s a smart ass.  And outspoken.  He is more than willing to call any and everyone on their bullshit.  So he got picked on.  A lot.  A whole, whole lot.

Weeks of  having him burst into tears the moment he got into the car and I’m thinking, enough is enough.  Then the head of school calls me on the carpet because I told a girl in his class, ‘Yes, his daddy did so almost die and so  stop calling my son a liar.’  And there was the boy in his class who is about 18 months older and about 100 pounds heavier than my son who was roughing him up in the boy’s room on a weekly basis.  Then, the lower school principal has me come in for a parent-teacher conference where I’m told that Mr. Smarty-Pants was a danger to his classmates and would only be allowed back into class after he stayed home a week to think about his poor behavior, but if he had even one more issue with a teacher or student, he’d be expelled.

Screw that.

So, we started homeschooling.  Mr. Smarty-Pants had already finished the third grade curriculum so we started  a slow and easy fourth grade right after the Easter break.  Now, we enter the thick of it.