Terrific Tuesdays

Tuesdays, the day I talk about something that turned out terrific.

Sonlight has a huge yearly reading list for the fourth grade.  We’ve read ‘Moccasin Trail‘, ‘Plain Girl’, ‘Sing Down the Moon’, and  ‘By the Great Horn Spoon’ so far.  ‘Freedom Train – The Story of Harriet Tubman’ is in progress.  From the Oak Meadow curriculum we’ve read ‘Stuart Little’.

‘By the Great Horn Spoon’ has become our greatest hit so far.  Mr. Brilliant loves it, has read it twice.  Before we read the book I told Mr. Brilliant about his great-great-great grandfather, the sea-captain, who sailed ’round the Horn a number of times, often going through the Straights of Magellan, and took gold miners from Boston to San Francisco during the gold rush.  This gave Mr. Brilliant a personal connection with the book.  I purchased ‘Using ‘By the Great Horn Spoon’ in the Classroom’, as I wanted to go into more depth than the Sonlight curriculum does.  This combination has worked out great.  I’ve even tied in some of our studies of South America to this book.

From Mr. Brilliant and I, ‘By the Great Horn Spoon’ is highly recommended.  Speaking to other homeschooling parents, if you are covering the westward expansion of the US, the Gold Rush, California history, or South American geography, or if you are looking for a book that including examples of friendly letters, ‘By the Great Horn Spoon’ fits the bill.  I’d also recommend this title to the reluctant reader, the action moves fast enough yet the writing flows easy for a child reading at grade level.

To briefly cover the other books, ‘Moccasin Trial’ was a slow start but my son did get into it and did finish reading it with relish.  We read ‘Plain Girl’ out of sequence, during a visit to the Amish country.  I could tell Mr. Brilliant liked it, but he was embarrassed to admit it.  Both my kids read ‘Sing Down the Moon’ and both found it interesting but depressing.  Mr. Brilliant swallowed both ‘Freedom Train’ and ‘Stuart Little’ crossing the Atlantic.  He read them so fast that I’m having him re-read ‘Freedom Train’ again (I’m reading it aloud to him).  Mr. B had read ‘Stuart Little’ before, and I’d read it to him a few times when he was a wee thing, we both felt he didn’t need to read it again before we started on the projects.

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.

How do you select a math program?

It’s like testing pasta, you throw it against the wall and see what sticks.  Seriously.

When I was homeschooling a fifth grade child, and before that child, a third grade and then a 6th grade child, I was able to make use of the State of California’s program, which in the very late 80’s and early 90’s was safe, sane and easy as pie.  You were provided with the books and lesson plans being used in your local public school and a public school teacher was assigned to oversee you and your child’s progress.  If something wasn’t working they had access to a vast selection of resources, up to and including patching kids in with graduate students at UC Berkeley.

When I was teaching a 9th and 10th grade student in the District of Columbia I hired a tutor and told student and instructor to work at their own pace, but to be sure they “got it”.  If a concept wasn’t understood, they were to, together, find another instructor/book/seminar/website, until the student was able to demonstrate she had a firm grasp on the concept.  (We were lucky enough to have a family members teaching advanced mathematics at Stanford/UCB/UCLA and Lawrence Livermore Labs).  We weren’t just looking for a good score on the SAT.  We wanted clear comprehension.

Teaching my daughter in Kindergarten was simple.  She required concrete examples so we used a combination of Singapore Math workbooks and manipulative of all manner.  My daughter was so excited by Singapore Math that she worked ahead, by her own choice, through the Kindergarten, 1st grade and well into the 2nd grade curriculum.  Couldn’t have asked for better.  She did on her own than her brother did with daily instruction at school (using a variation of Horizion, a program I have respect for).

Now we must choose a mathematics course for my son.  Oak Meadow is complete, but light and it already bores my son.  Additionally, if I rely upon that program alone he won’t be ready for 5th grade math by next fall.  We are exploring Singapore, Saxon, Horizon, Math-Tacular, Time-4-Learning.  We will likely go with Singapore, due to the success I have had with it before, although we have a few Horizon books on hand and are testing the waters there.

For the next few weeks I’m allowing my son to play on math web sites, just noodling around and having fun.  The other math work he’s going is multiplication timed sheets and finally working on practical household applications.  (“Son, double this recipe for me, please.”  “Son, figure out how much tax I’m going to owe when I buy these books here… or here.”  “Son, how much tip do I leave the pizza guy.”)

4th and 5th grade math is still easy days.  Today I purchased ‘Pre-Algebra for Dumbies’ because when my daughter comes to me with questions this coming school year, I need to be able to at least point her in the right direction.

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…