Homeschool

Tirzah Mae has now finished up her first official year of school as compulsory education in the State of Kansas begins at age 6 (and she was six as of September 2021.) For the most part, we continued on with what we’d been doing for her kindergarten year, except that now she wasn’t the only student working (which somewhat dampened the cries of “not fair”, albeit not as much as I would have liked.)

As previously mentioned, we do the majority of our “subject work” together as a family, with only the “skill subjects” of reading, writing, and arithmetic done individually.

Phonics and Reading: American Language Series K (part 2)

I learned to read using this program, then called Little Patriots Read. My mom had me do it all in my kindergarten year, but I chose to slow it way down with Tirzah Mae. The ALS-K order of phoneme introduction is single letters (CVC), consonant digraphs and blends, mother E words, r-controlled vowels, vowel digraphs, and then diphthongs. We completed all the short vowel work in kindergarten and did the rest (mother E words on) here in 1st grade. I also opted to do only the phonics and readers without the spelling, writing, and vocabulary workbook.

I spent way too much energy the first semester trying to make sure we were reading the stories that matched the phonics lesson (really using skills that had been taught several days or weeks prior) and asking the provided “comprehension questions.” Midspring, I finally came to my senses and just had her read and narrate whatever stories came next.

Handwriting

I started the year giving some instruction on the placement of letters on three-lined paper (you know, with the dots in the middle) since we’d focused on letter formation without the use of lined paper in kindergarten.

Then it was copywork, copywork, copywork. She copied the autobiography she’d (spontaneously) written in kindergarten (with mama’s edits for legibility.) She copied the ten commandments. She copied some catechism questions and answers. And she copied lots of happy birthday greetings for cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents.

Mathematics: Math Mammoth 1

I won an electronic copy of the entire sequence of leveled Math Mammoth worktexts back before I’d started schooling any of the kids. I was impressed by what I saw – a well-organized mastery-approach curriculum that I am able to print for about $25 per year at The Homeschool Printing Company. I had intended to switch to Math Mammoth once the kids finished the Shiller Math kit 1 (somewhere around 3-4th grade), but Tirzah Mae’s “wanna do a workbook” from last year made me bite the bullet and get her started on it this year. I did have her use some of the unit cubes from the Shiller Kit to help her conceptualize things a little better (rearranging is easier with 3D objects vs drawings on a page!) – but found that the 1st Grade workbooks are pretty good at making math concrete.

So What’s Next?

Now that Tirzah Mae has finished all six of her ALS-K readers, she is also the proud owner of her own library card (I remember well when I finally completed Sounds of Joy and could get my own card!)

1st Grade was mostly a continuation of kindergarten for Tirzah Mae – but next year we’ll be using all new curriculum. She’ll be learning cursive with Logic of English’s (LOE) Rhythm of Handwriting, doing phonics/grammar/spelling/vocabulary/etc. using LOE’s Essentials, and doing writing using projects/ideas from Brave Writer’s The Writer’s Jungle. She’ll be reading to me, to her younger siblings, and on her own for reading fluency practice. For math, she’ll be continuing on with Math Mammoth AND doing some Shiller Math kit 1 (because she saw the Shiller stuff at the Great Homeschool Convention and regretted giving it up.) She and Louis will also work together through the Core Knowledge book What Your 1st Grader Needs to Know.

We officially called wraps on the 2021-2022 school year in the middle of June – we’ll be back at it next week, Lord willing. But even once we were officially “done”, we continued morning time – it’s something of an anchor for our days.

For us, morning time has been a matter of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” I started doing morning time as soon as I finished breakfast but while the kids were still dawdling over it sometime in the 2019-2020 school year and it has continued to work well for us.

Morning Worship

We start morning time with the Scriptures. I open with “Let’s hear what God’s Word says” and then read a passage, closing with “This is the Word of the LORD”, to which we all reply “Thanks be to God.” This is our church’s customary formula for Scripture readings and we want our children to be comfortable with the format.

I added Scripture memory to our rotation in January – I had been intending to do so but had a hard time arriving at a perfect system. Finally, I decided that, despite not having a perfect system we were going to just jump in. We practice the children’s current memory verses from Sunday school daily and then practice 2 “back verses” from the preschool repertoire at church and 2 back verses from the ones that go along with Tirzah Mae and Louis’s Sunday school class.

Also in January, we started working on the New City Catechism as a family during our evening worship, so I review a couple of back questions and answers and we listen to and sing along with the song for the current question.

Daniel and I have long agreed that we think memorizing extended passages of Scripture is ideal for retention, understanding, and application, so for our last interval, I added a longer Scripture passage for us to memorize. We practiced Psalm 1 right after our Scripture reading – and there’s little more delightful than hearing Shiloh leading the others in “are like chaff, which the wind drives away.” This seemed to work well and I hope to memorize one short passage per interval in our next school year.

This year, we read the Psalms and Proverbs, memorized Psalm 1, and memorized the first 22 questions of the New City Catechism.

Poetry and Nonsense

Our next section is on the silly side. We start with a nursery rhyme, then read a poem, then a few jokes, and end with some trivia.

We’ve read all of the nursery rhyme collections our library owns, so I’m just cycling through the three I own and enjoy: Kate Greenaway Nursery Rhyme Classics, Tomie DePaola’s Mother Goose,, and The Glorious Mother Goose. We got through all three this year.

For our poetry, I check out a book of poems from the library (Dewey Decimal system 811, Children’s Nonfiction). When we finish, I check out another. If I happen to not have another queued up when we finish one book, I grab a collection we own and read the next poem in that collection until we’ve got another library book to peruse.

Poetry Read:

• R is for Rhyme: A Poetry Alphabet by Judy Young
• Lots of Spots by Lois Ehlert
• You and Me: Poems of Friendship by Sally Mavor
• Dinosaur Dances by Jane Yolen
• Animal Fare by Jane Yolen
• Sleigh Bells and Snowflakes compiled by Linda Bronson
• The Stable Rat and other Christmas Poems by Julia Cunningham
• The Glorious Christmas Songbook by Cooper Edens and Benjamin Darling
• At Christmastime by Valerie Worth
• Bird Watch by Jane Yolen
• Water Music by Jane Yolen
• Dear Mother, Dear Daughter by Jane Yolen and Heidi Stemple
• Birds of a Feather by Jane Yolen
• A Child’s Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson

Reading jokes at morning time began when Daniel was traveling at the end of 2020 and would send the kids voice messages with knock knock jokes. The kids enjoyed them and I realized that puns are a pretty great learning opportunity too (hearing Louis giggle at a joke as he says “It should be ‘joke’ instead of ‘yolk'” is pretty great.) Just like with the poems, I check a book out of the library, we read it, and then I check another out. If I happen to plan poorly and run out of jokes, we just go without.

Joke Books Read:

• My First Knock-Knock Jokes by Jimmy Niro
• Bell Buzzers: A Book of Knock-Knock Jokes by Michael Dahl
• Nutty Neighbors: A Book of Knock-Knock by Michael Dahl
• Doctor, Doctor: A Book of Doctor Jokes by Michael Dahl
• Family Funnies: A Book of Family Jokes by Michael Dahl
• School Buzz: Classy and Funny Jokes about School by Michael Dahl
• Teacher Says: A Book of Teacher Jokes by Michael Dahl
• The Classroom Zone: Jokes, Riddles, Tongue Twisters & “Daffynitions” by Gary Chmielewski
• Let’s Eat in the Funny Zone: Jokes, Riddles, Tongue Twisters & “Daffynitions” by Gary Chmielewski
• The Medical Zone: Jokes, Riddles, Tongue Twisters & “Daffynitions” by Gary Chmielewski
• The Science Zone: Jokes, Riddles, Tongue Twisters & “Daffynitions” by Gary Chmielewski
• Ribbit Riddles by Katy Hall and Lisa Eisenberg
• ABC Animal Riddles by Susan Joyce
• Otter Nonsense by Norton Juster

Finally, we enjoy some trivia. I’m not sure when or how we started, but we began reading a “did you know” book at the end of morning time and discovered that we really enjoyed learning random little things. We’ve mostly been writing through the National Geographic Kids series “Little Kids First Big Book of…”

Trivia Read

• National Geographic Kids Little Kids First Big Book of Why 2 by Jill Esbaum
• National Geographic Kids Little Kids First Big Book of Why by Amy Shields
• National Geographic Kids Little Kids First Big Book of Science by Kathleen Weiner Zoehfeld

So What’s Next?

When we start up again, I plan to continue on as we have been with only a couple of adjustments. We’re going to add some extra memory work between our catechism review and nursery rhymes (we practiced my phone number and our address during our last interval and I think we’ll start with the books of the Bible for the next school year.) I also feel like morning time sometimes ends with a whimper when attention starts to wane on our trivia – I’d like to finish off more decisively with a hymn. Then there’s a clear “we’re done” to mark the transition from the table and to chores.

As our first year of “official” school, 2020-2021 was an interesting one.

We started slow, working our way up to the “main event” (which turned out to be a great start to the school year) … but then we tapered back as the year continued. We got pregnant at the beginning of the calendar year and first trimester exhaustion is a real thing :-) “Reading time” and Tirzah Mae’s core subjects remained consistent, but singing time, calendar time, and activity times were sporadic at best.

Nevertheless, I’m considering 2020-2021 to be a successful first year of “official” homeschooling. For the year, we all completed:

Literature – Poetry

• Nursery rhymes and songs from What Your Kindergartener Needs to Know
• Nursery rhymes and songs from What Your Preschooler Needs to Know
• The 20th Century Children’s Poetry Treasury edited by Jack Prelutsky
• Nursery Rhyme Classics illustrated by Kate Greenaway
• The Usborne Children’s Songbook illustrated by Stephen Cartwright
• A Zooful of Animals selected by William Cole
• Seasons by Charlotte Zolotow
• Yummy: Eating Through a Day edited by Lee Bennett Hopkins

Literature – Stories and Folk Tales

• Stories from What Your Kindergartener Needs to Know
• Stories from What Your Preschooler Needs to Know
• Aesop’s Fables illustrated by Jerry Pinkney
• The Blue Fairy Book edited by Andrew Lang (continuing into the 2021-2022 school year)

Literature – Chapter Book Read-Alouds

• Mr. Popper’s Penguins by Florence and Richard Atwater
• The Boxcar Children by Gertrude Chandler Warner
• Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle by Betsy MacDonald
• Betsy-Tacy by Maud Hart Lovelace
• The Toys Go Out by Emily Jenkins
• Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White
• The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
• My Father’s Dragon by Ruth Stiles Gannett
• Matilda by Roald Dahl
• A Cricket in Times Square by George Seldon
• The Chocolate Touch by Patrick Skene Calling
• Plus a number of audiobooks (that everyone listened to) and individual read-alouds (that I did with each child) that I didn’t record as official “school”

Social Studies

• Social studies selections from What Your Kindergartener Needs to Know
• Social studies selections from What Your Preschooler Needs to Know
• Tapestry of Grace, Year 1, Unit 1 (After one quarter, I decided I’d rather us get a broad narrative overview of history with just Story of the World without adding in supplemental readings – we’ll do Tapestry of Grace as our second go-through once more of the children are school age)
• Story of the World, volume 1: Ancient Times (continuing into 2021-2022 school year)

Science

• Science selections from What Your Kindergartener Needs to Know
• Science selections from What Your Preschooler Needs to Know
• Exploring the World of Plants by Penny Raife Durant
• From Seed to Plant by Gail Gibbons
• Seed to Plant by Kristin Baird Rattini
• Seed, Soil, Sun: Earth’s Recipe for Food by Cris Peterson
• Took a seed hunting hike – collected seeds from our yard on sticky wristbands
• Did celery experiments in plain water, sugar water, and dyed water
• Sprouted beans to see if cotelydon changes size
• Sprouted 4 different kinds of seeds to explore which sprouted first
• Sprouted avocado seeds and inspected regularly with magnifying glass
• Planted and grew radishes, lettuce, spinach, and beets from seed to harvest
• Observed and drew spring plants in the yard
• Watched about a bazillion documentaries about dinosaurs (unplanned “interruption” to my planned science programming)

Miscellaneous

• Halfway through the year, I switched to having each child have a “cooking day” with mama, where they helped with meal preparation. All have shown progress with measuring skills, knife skills, stove safety skills, and mixing and spreading. They are improving in ability to crack eggs without making a huge mess.
• All three of the “big kids” have made great strides in representational drawing and scissor skills. While we haven’t done a lot of formal projects, we continue to do the occasional process art and explore color mixing whenever we have opportunity.
• The children spent lots of time outside (and inside) running, climbing, swinging on swings, dancing, and building things.
• Tirzah Mae’s hand-stitching is becoming increasingly small and even. She is able to hand sew a straight seam.

Tirzah Mae Kindergarten

For Tirzah Mae’s kindergarten language arts, she did about half of the American Language Series K phonics and reading program (consonants, short vowel words, inital and final consonant blends, and consonant di/trigraphs.) She used homemade worksheets to learn proper letter formation for all the lowercase and uppercase letters.

For math, we continued on with Shiller Math Kit 1 until I accidentally borrowed a kindergarten math workbook from the library (thinking it was a “train the teacher” type book). Tirzah Mae immediately fell in love with the workbook and begged to do it instead of her regular math. (Sigh!) So she completed a kindergarten math workbook from Creative Teaching Press to round out her kindergarten math experience.

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Overall, it was a good year. Morning time has definitely been a wonderful part of our routine – the regular inclusion of nursery rhymes and folk stories helps me be confident that the preschoolers are getting what they need in the language arts department even if I’m not doing specific “preschool” work with them.

Kindergarten work with Tirzah Mae was more challenging than I expected – despite being highly motivated to write (the stories have already filled literally dozens of notebooks), Tirzah Mae would much rather be moving than sitting still – and having to “do school” with mama while the younger children were playing rankled. I also see now that I tried too hard in the past year to get through a lesson a day instead of emphasizing focused, diligent work for a shorter period of time. As a result, both Tirzah Mae and I were prone to boom and bust cycles where we’d do a lesson a day for several days and then wear out and not do anything for several days only to start again with a fresh burst of motivation later (I know, not a great way to do skill work!) Nevertheless, looking over the skills Tirzah Mae has attained in the past year, I am confident that she is right in line with where she should be at the end of kindergarten.

Experiments in early childhood needn’t be complicated.

We read about magnetism during reading time yesterday, so our activity time was a very simple exploration of magnetism.

I gathered up a magnet for each child (the magnetic “keys” for our magnetic child locks are great because they have “handles”) and a selection of everyday items I have from around the house (Q-tips, pens, bobby pins, paper clips, barrettes, earrings, steel wool, etc.)

Each child got a piece of paper that had been divided in two and labeled “Y” for yes and “N” for no (with different colors for all the pre-readers). Their challenge was to guess which items the magnet would pick up and to put those on the “Y”. If they guessed that the magnet wouldn’t pick something up, they could put it on the “N”.

I explained that their guess was a hypothesis and that now they could test their hypothesis using the magnets.

While testing their hypotheses, they moved their objects from the paper to different cups.

Once they’d divided all their objects and tested all their hypotheses, they could get down and explore the house, making hypotheses about the objects they found around the house and testing their hypotheses.

That’s it. A very simple exploration of magnetism – and one that helped the children also understand a bit about the process of science.

You can help your child become a scientific thinker this same way.

Ask, “What do you think will happen if…”

Explain that what your child just guessed is their hypothesis.

Now ask the child if they’d like to test their hypothesis. Is their hypothesis true or false? Test it several times just to make sure.

Familiarizing your early learners with the scientific process is that easy.

You can do this!

I could have called the kids in for a sensory bin for activity time this morning, but they were busy squishing mud into a muffin tin to make cupcakes.

So I let them learn.

I could have called the kids in for a STEM activity for activity time this morning, but they were building an oven to bake their cupcakes in.

So I let them learn.

I could have called the kids in for an art project for activity time this morning, but they were decorating their cupcakes with sunflower petals.

So I let them learn.

And then I posted it to bekahcubed to remind myself that, especially in early childhood, undirected play is the best way to learn.

As much as I want to do everything all at once, if there’s one thing I’ve learned about myself it’s to not overdo it by trying to overhaul everything. So while I would have loved to have started off homeschool with a bang, I chose instead to start it slowly…very, very slowly.

Tirzah Mae is kindergarten-age this year and she’s been eager to get started. I was eager too, but didn’t want to start something I couldn’t sustain, so I kept telling her we’d start once we got settled in with Shiloh.

Of course, “settled in” is a nebulous concept and things change so rapidly in the early weeks that it’s all you can do to keep up… but when Shiloh was a couple days shy of a month old we were ready to start Phase 1.

Phase 1 was the resumption of Reading Time.

We’ve been doing reading time after breakfast for about a year now (if I remember right.) The kids like to linger over their breakfast and I’m frequently impatient to get started on my to-do list. Sitting waiting for them to finish up was excruciating – until I realized that was the perfect time to do read-alouds.

In the past, Reading Time has been whatever picture books I’ve got out of the library, but now that this is officially school, I’m being a bit more systematic. I’m not super convinced that kindergarten requires a whole lot of “subjects”, but I did want to at least introduce the concept of subjects. We’ve done this using the Core Knowledge book What Your Kindergartener Needs to Know. Each morning, we read a nursery rhyme or poem and then we get into our subject. We rotate through literature (mostly folktales), history and geography, and science topics from the kindergarten book, reading one story or section per day. After our “subject work”, we move on to the next picture book in line in our goal to read every book in the library (right now we’re reading lots of Tomie dePaola and Anna Dewdney, two very delightful authors!) Finally, we close out our reading time with the next chapter in our chapter book. So far in the 2020-2021 school year, we’ve read Mr. Popper’s Penguins by Florence and Richard Atwood and The Boxcar Children by Gertrude Chandler Warner. We’ll start Betsy MacDonald’s Mrs. Piggle-wiggle tomorrow.

The second phase in our homeschool calendar was the resumption of Singing Time near the end of June. I’ve been doing some variation on Singing Time since Tirzah Mae was two, but it seems I tweak it a bit every year. This year, I’ve got folders for “current work”, “recent review”, and “long term review”. Every day, we sing every song in the “current work” folder (one “Sunday school” song, one “ordinary” children’s song, and one memory verse). We sing whatever song and recite whatever verse is at the front of their respective “recent review” folders. And we sing whatever song and recite whatever verse is at the front of the “long term review” folders. Once a week, I add a new song or verse to the “current work” folder, moving the older song from that category back to the “recent review” folder and the oldest song in the “recent review” folder back to the “long term review”. This way, we sing a song or recite a verse daily for three weeks, then every other day for three weeks, and periodically review thereafter. All told, we sing four songs and recite three verses daily.

The third phase of our school program is Activity Time.

Activity Time rotates through six different themes: Visual Arts, Cooking, Gross Motor Activities (P.E.), Musical Arts, Sewing, and Sensory Activities. I have lists of potential activities in each of these categories, but I try to be pretty flexible with these. So when we read about how Henry won the free-for-all in The Boxcar Children, we ran footraces in the yard, taking turns yelling “Get Ready, Get Set, Go!” and then racing full-tilt from fence to fence. I had an Introduction to Instruments and Benjamin Britten’s “Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra” out of the library one day so we listened to it while playing with playdough (a double-whammy of musical arts and sensory activities). For cooking, I have a list of skills I want Tirzah Mae to develop over the course of her kindergarten year, and I have a spreadsheet set up where I note each date that we work on a skill and the date that I consider her to have mastered it. I’m also keeping a list of each recipe she’s worked on and any notes about what she did, what needs more work, etc.

Thus far, all these phases include all four of the older children (although I often have variants for the different children in activity time – Sweet P (a young 2) has significantly different cooking tasks than Tirzah Mae (5.5) does.

Phase 4, which we started last week, is where some additional differentiation sets in. The three oldest gather for Calendar Time after I’ve put Sweet P down for her nap (she’s the only one still consistently napping, although I insist that everyone still take a rest time.) For now, we sing either the days of the week or the months of the year and we count to today’s date on the calendar. I will probably add a few more things to this time as we go along (in past years, we’ve done weather and the alphabet song at least), but for now, we’re establishing the pattern of calendar time.

After calendar time, Beth-Ellen goes to her room for a rest time and I worked individually with Louis and then with Tirzah Mae on Math. For these early years, I’m using Shiller Math, a Montessori-based math program. The first kit covers preK through 3rd grade and both Tirzah Mae and Louis did some of the activities last year. Shiller Math is grab and go – it’s fully scripted and the kit has all the needed manipulatives and materials, so it’s been pretty easy to get started.

And finally, there’s today. Today, Tirzah Mae and I started phonics. While Tirzah Mae and I have worked about a third of the way through Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons, I knew that I didn’t ultimately want to teach phonics using that book. It was a great resource for working towards Tirzah Mae’s goal of learning to read while mama was enduring a difficult pregnancy, but the lack of a logical framework for understanding phonics was driving me bonkers. So today we started American Language Series K Phonics, the same phonics program I used when I learned to read 30 years ago (albeit with a different name).

And with that we have completed our last first day of homeschool (for this year).

Since there’s no time like the present, Prairie Elms preschool reconvened for the 2018-2019 school year on Monday.

I planned for two students, expecting that we’d do preschool while the little girls were napping –

but, so far, neither girl has cooperated with anything more than cursory morning naps – so four students it is!

We do action songs and fingerplays and rhythm sticks and singing lessons. We check the weather and sing the days of the week. We sing the alphabet song and count a little. We read and read and read some more. We do ice cream cone math. And when we’re all done with “school”, we scrub potatoes (sensory win!) and fold laundry (life skills and fine motor). We decorate papa’s birthday cake (Happy birthday, Beloved!) We watch the garden spider on our door. We explore the leaf mould in the herb garden. We harvest basil and dry it. We watch caterpillars and birds and rolly pollies and all sorts of things mama later discovers are pests that she should have killed :-P

And when the day is done, we snuggle on the couch with papa and do our family worship.

It’s not much different than regular life, really.

But whatever it is, we’ve declared the preschool year to have commenced!