Catching My Breath

We’re nearing the end of week 3, and I can state with cautious optimism that we seem to be settling into a routine that has some reasonable chance of working. Both kids have had some challenges in finding their feet this year, but that’s typical. I just wish I could remember that from year to year, instead of having it always catch me by surprise.

So, I thought today I’d stop and breathe and take stock of where we are.

History and Literature are going well. Both kids enjoyed the Arthurian selections, and my son is enthusiastically gobbling up some Scandinavian myths that I substituted at the last minute for the Time Warp Trio Viking book.

The assorted languages are, on the whole, proceeding well. My daughter is outright enjoying the new Latin series: So You Really Want to Learn Latin (Published in England by Galore Park). My son is working more and more independently and consistently in Primer B of Latin for Children. He’s also enjoying The Learnables Spanish and has begun to sprinkle his new vocabulary into daily conversations.

My daughter’s German II course is turning out to be a bit more demanding than she had anticipated. I think much of the problem comes from trying to make the transition from Rosetta Stone’s “immersion” approach to the more traditional, grammar-based, textbook approach. She had done all of Rosetta Stone’s Level 1 (which is supposed to be equivalent to two years of high school foreign language) and was supplementing with an additional workbook for grammar, but she’s feeling very frustrated by encountering so much unfamiliar vocabulary in the new text. For the moment, we’ve quit trying to reach specific weekly goals for the amount of work done and are focusing on having her get into the groove of spending at least a certain amount of time each day making some progress. I’m also getting a crash course in German—with which I have almost no familiarity—as I try to help her with the lessons and exercises. I do feel like she’s turning the corner, though, and gaining some confidence. I’ve floated the idea of slowing down to as little as half speed and taking a full year to get through the half-unit course, but I suspect she’ll begin to pick up the pace within a few weeks.

Composition and grammar are flowing right along. My daughter is very much enjoying Wordsmith and seems to be keeping up nicely with the do-it-yourself approach and the assignments. My son is, as always, trying to get away with doing as little actual writing as possible in his assorted language arts workbooks, but is making big improvements in his history outlines and science summaries. He seems to be very proud of his attempts at cursive and even asks to do some of his regular work that way.

My daughter is taking Statistics by distance education as her math for this year. She’s already had Algebra I and II and Geometry and really wanted a “break” before tackling Precalculus next year. She’s gotten a bit of a slow start, but seems to be adjusting now to the format of the course and getting more enthusiastic about the subject. I think it’s still too early to tell whether this one will be a hit or a miss.My son’s math course, as I’ve already mentioned, got off to a rocky start. Things do seem to be improving after our week of concentrated hand-holding. I’m still more involved than I would like in supervising to make sure he’s paying attention to and following the directions, but it is clear that the actual math is well within his reach. He recently did well enough on one of his assignments that the instructor asked permission to use it as a sample to show other students.

Science is also turning out to be more of a challenge for my daughter than I would have expected. She’s taking Chemistry through our state’s virtual high school, which we both thought she’d love. However, she’s struggling. And I can’t quite tell whether it’s because she’s genuinely not prepared, whether she’s just not putting in the required amount of effort or whether the course isn’t especially well designed. I have noticed already that there have been a few questions on the assessments and exams that seem to require students to recall information that is pretty detailed. She’s finding the work very frustrating, and I’m not sure where we’ll go from here.My son is doing fine with his science reading, and both of them are enjoying our weekly chemistry labs.

He is also enjoying his geography work. As a sort of appetizer, he’s working through the “Global Geography” section of The Complete Book of Maps & Geography. He’ll then move on to a World Geography workbook from Carson Dellosa. And we’re tying geography to our history studies by doing an activity or two each week from Knowledge Quest’s blackline historical map set.

Another bright spot in our days has been my daughter’s virtual AP Microeconomics course. This is something she chose to do for fun, and she’s finding the coursework very interesting. She did hit a snag with the first exam, but that’s a characteristic problem for her, and I’m confident she’ll get better.

Both kids are also enjoying their logic and rhetoric studies. Since we didn’t transition to the classical approach until my daughter started high school, she had never done “logic” in any systematic way. So, she’s doing a crash course this semester using the Oxford University Press Very Short Introduction: Logic. It’s light reading and a clear, no-nonsense and friendly style.My son continues to enjoy the Orbiting with Logic books from Prufrock Press. He’ll finish the series this year, so I’m already looking around for a good next step for next year.We’re working through The Art of Argument together, mostly orally over breakfast. Both kids are doing fine with it so far, and my son, especially, is intrigued with the idea of learning to “argue like a gentleman.”

So, all in all, the year is shaping up to be exactly as full and challenging as I had anticipated. We’ve already hit a few rough patches on the road, and I’ll admit to more than a few moments of really wondering whether a given curriculum is going to work. And, as you can see from the list above, there are a couple of things that are still a bit up in the air. However, if our experiences in previous years holds true, all of this will eventually fall into place.

Now I just have to turn my energies to hoping that happens soon!

Progress? And Back to the Nitty Gritty

Last week was rough, no doubt about it. So, I spent the weekend consulting with my husband and brainstorming and having a serious talk with my son. In a nutshell, here’s what we decided to try:

For this week, I will sit right with my son and help him try to find his feet in the online math course. I’ve been having him read the lesson materials aloud to me, work the practice problems in front of me and check his assignments with me before he submits the work. We’ve done two lessons so far this week, and he’s earned perfect scores (and booster shots of confidence) on both.

In addition, I’ve explained to him that, in general, there’s a new sheriff in town and that the kind of behavior we were seeing last week just won’t be tolerated. On Monday, I’m pretty sure he spent more time exiled to his bedroom than sitting at his desk. And, because his work for the day was not done when it was time to leave, he also had to stay home and miss his beloved drum lesson.

Since then, things have begun to improve. Yesterday was a long day, but it was productive, and he was sent to his room only once. Today, there’s been some dawdling, but no major incidents. And, by lunchtime, he was almost halfway done. So, not stellar, but a definite improvement. I’m trying to keep it in perspective.

So, let’s talk about something more cheerful.

Along with math, science seems to be one of those subjects that throws often homeschoolers for a loop. And I’ll admit we’ve had our ups and downs with both. I’m feeling pretty positive about our science plans for this year, though. Our focus for this year is on chemistry, although we won’t force ourselves to ignore any other interesting stuff that happens along.

My daughter is taking an online course through our state’s virtual high school. My son is using two DK Eyewitness books as his spine: Chemistry and Matter. He is reading and writing summaries of about four pages each week. My daughter’s online class includes both virtual labs and some hands-on activities. (They send students a kit.) However, the lab component looked a bit light for our science-enthusiast daughter. So, we invested in a nice, big chemistry set and are working our way through that with a few experiments each week. Needless to say, the chance to mix chemicals and flirt with danger has been a big hit. Both kids are telling everyone they meet about how I set things on fire during our first lab session.

And, of course, we can’t resist supplementing. So I have lots of fun videos and DVDs lined up. Both of my kids are big fans of the Standard Deviants and are looking forward to their Organic Chemistry series.

Other, non-science things that are going especially well so far include the map work and the History Scribe/History Scholar pages, both of which I was afraid might turn out to be tedious. As it has turned out, though, my daughter enjoys the map work so much that she actually asked me to “let her” do the whole set, even the ones I wasn’t planning to assign. We’re using the Middle Ages set of Blackline Maps of World History from Knowledge Quest, in case you want to check them out for yourself.

So, all in all, things are looking up this week, but I’m still collecting and considering fall-back options for my son’s math. I promise to keep you posted.

Well . . .

It seems the roller coaster metaphor was more apt than I might have hoped. It’s been a bumpy week.

My son has been having some trouble getting himself focused on doing good quality work. He’s (just barely) doing enough to merit checking off the assignments on his log sheet. Unless I sit right with him, though, and double check every inch and enforce some reasonable level of care and quality, he takes every opportunity to slide by with sloppy and incomplete work. It is, needless to say, very frustrating.

This year is also his first attempt at a course that makes him accountable to someone other than me. We chose to enroll him in an online math class, primarily because he and I just seem to have trouble communicating about math. This is one of the subjects in which, when it is going well, he is both enthusiastic and talented. I, on the other hand, have more math talent than I was ever given credit for during my own formal education, but lack a firm foundation and enough confidence to teach it well. We got on each other's nerves an awful lot last year. So, we decided it would be best to remove me from the equation.

This, too, has proved problematic, however, since he seems to be having a great deal of trouble adjusting to the interface. And I can’t tell for sure whether it is because the course is truly too much for him or because he’s treating it with the same casual attitude he’s bringing to all of his work. Whichever it is, in this first week, he's managed to earn the equivalent of a failing grade.

It seems to me that the only way I might improve this situation would be to supervise his work more closely, but I’m not sure that’s the right thing to do. The softy-type mommy in me wants to believe that a couple of weeks of hand-holding and helping him to develop a better routine and study habits might allow him to find his feet and be successful in the course. Another, sterner voice says I might help him become stronger by getting out of the way and giving him space to either succeed or fail (or learn to ask for--and politely accept--my help) on his own. A third, very tired voice suggests that it might all be too much trouble and I should just withdraw him from the class now and buy a few workbooks. (I'm trying to ignore the voice whispering reminders about the existence of various schools public and private.)

Needless to say, my head is a crowded and noisy place today.

On the positive side, my daughter approached this first week with enthusiasm and a newfound desire to get and stay organized. She actually typed up a plan at the beginning of the week of which assignments to do each day . . . and stuck to it. Even some of the assignments I was concerned would feel tedious to her have gotten done happily and well. Let’s hope it lasts.

At this point on a Friday afternoon, I’m just happy to be stepping off the ride for the weekend.

I’ll let you know how it goes next week.

You Know That Feeling?

When you’ve decided to ride the roller coaster and you’re all strapped in and the train has pulled away from the loading area and you are waiting for the first big hill . . . .

And you have that frantic urge to wave your arms and scream for them to let you out because you changed your mind?

That’s kind of how I’ve been feeling all day.

Did I mention that tomorrow is our first day of school?

And, yes, I know it will be fine, probably good and possibly even great. I know that we will accomplish a lot and have a good time and look back on the year with pride and joy at all the things the kids learned and all the great experiences we had. But right now, I’m sitting in that roller coaster vehicle feeling it crank up to the top of that incline and wondering how on earth I let myself be talked into this.

And so, in order to distract myself, I’ve decided to chat in this note about somewhat lighter fare: the arts.

We’re big-time arts lovers around here, with the kids having certain areas of shared interest and each having their specialties, too.

In terms of formal studies at home, my daughter will be focusing on art history of the medieval and Renaissance era. She’ll be more or less following the suggested approach of The Well-Trained Mind, using a portion of The Annotated Mona Lisa as a base and then building out from there. We have a huge book I found on a bargain table a few years ago called A History of Art that we use for picture study and to supplement the Mona Lisa readings. I’ve made a list of a few possible museum field trips and stocked the Netflix queue with videos and DVDs about the art and artists of the time that we’ll sprinkle throughout the year. And, just for fun, I have a paint-your-own Renaissance masterpiece kit, with postcard-sized reproductions of several famous works.

My son will participate in as much of this as strikes his fancy, mostly the videos and the hands-on projects.

Both kids also decided that this was the year they wanted to learn to draw. (Well, to be more precise, my daughter decided it was her year, and my son decided she wasn’t going to get to do anything he wasn’t allow to do, too.) My daughter chose Drawing: A Complete Course from Walch, and my son decided on Mark Kistler’s Draw Squad. We stocked up on all the supplies we’ll need for the whole year in a single expedition to Michaels, just so that we’ll never have to skip a lesson because we don’t have things on hand. At this point, the plan is to do drawing together (using their separate books but sitting across from each other at the table) on Mondays after our science lab. I’m afraid that letting it wait until later in the week will allow it to get shoved out of the way by other things that might seem more pressing.

And then there are the outside classes and activities.

We all love theater, and we’ve been taking the kids to live performances even when they had to sit in strollers. For the last few years, we’ve started with season tickets for the Shakespeare Festival as our baseline and then just added in as much as we could manage to fit into our schedule and budget. Both kids have participated in community theater, although my daughter is more involved than her little brother just yet.

My daughter is starting her third year of singing with a choir affiliated with the Royal School of Church Music. My son is returning for another year of ballet, with a total of four classes a week this year.

Both of them started piano lessons last year, and each is adding a second instrument, My daughter had her first classical guitar lesson last week – and positively glowed for hours afterward. My son is starting lessons tomorrow with a local bagpipe and drum corp, learning to play the Scottish snare drum.

It makes for a very full calendar, but keeps them both happy. Like foreign language, this is an area in which I am sometimes a little stunned at just how much each of them learns and does.

Creak, creak, creak, creak, clunk, clunk, clunk, clunk . . . Do you hear it? We’re almost at the top of the hill. Guess I’d better hang on, ‘cause here we go!

Languages: Dead and Alive

In the last couple of posts, I’ve told you all about the literature my students will be reading this year. But, of course, reading is only half of the “English” equation.

My older student writes very well and has been writing poetry and stories pretty much as long as she could hold a pencil. And up until now, we’ve always just treated the more formal writing as an outgrowth of her history and literature study. She would read a certain number of books, then write about what she read. When she was younger, this was in a pretty traditional book report format, which has developed over the years into longer and more complex essays. She’d turn in a draft, let me read it and suggest corrections, then take another stab at polishing it.

And it worked pretty well, except that she continues to find academic writing daunting. The product is usually very good, consistently earning her A’s even in her outside-graded courses. The problem is that getting her to actually sit down and do the writing is downright painful . . . for both of us.

So, this year we’ve decided to try a writing program called Wordsmith Craftsman. We looked at the online samples and descriptions of several different essay-writing books, and this is the one she thought looked most appealing. It’s designed for the student to do independently. I’ve helped her to figure out how to schedule the work, but the actual doing of it will be up to her. My hope is that the writing process will become much more “mechanical” (in the best sense of the word) by the end of this year and that she will build some confidence in this area.

My son has decided he likes the format and approach of the workbook series from Harcourt Family Learning. So, he will be working through three of their workbooks this year: Spelling, Language Arts and Writing. He will, of course, continue to outline his history and science reading and write book reports and narrations, too. And he’s looking forward to working on his vocabulary with the second installment of Word Roots software from Critical Thinking.

That pretty much does it for English.

Both of my kids are studying Latin. My daughter used Oxford Latin for her first couple of years, but is transitioning to the wonderful So You Really Want to Learn Latin series this year. She read through the second book over the summer to get used to the style and is ready to hit the ground running with Book III next week. She’ll be supplementing with their Latin Translations book, just for fun.

Meanwhile, my son will be working through Primer B of Latin for Children this year. He had a great experience with Primer A last year and is looking forward to continuing. He will have his own translation work to do, since the publisher’s Lilellus de Historia for Primer B coincides nicely with our historical focus for this year.

In addition to English and Latin, my daughter decided to learn German, “just for fun.” She worked through most of Rosetta Stone’s German Level 1 last year (which the publisher claims is equivalent to two years of high school language study) and did some supplemental grammar. I think this gave her a good foundation, but she feels ready to move on to a more conventional, grammar-based program. Again, after looking at several alternatives, we’ve decided to enroll her in a German 2 course offered by the University of Missouri’s distance education center.

Thank goodness for outsourcing! (More on that in a later post.)

Spanish is the modern foreign language of choice for my son. He’s dabbled in this for a couple of years with an assortment of materials off the bookstore shelf. He doesn’t seem to have retained a lot, though. So we’re making an effort this year to get serious. We’re going to give The Learnables a try, moving at approximately half the recommended speed.

I must confess that the whole area of foreign languages is one that occasionally makes me sit up and take notice. The fact is that the only one of the three foreign languages being studied in my home that I might be qualified to “teach” (at least to a beginner) is Spanish. And, although I had a few years of that language in high school and college, it’s pretty rusty these days. This is just one of the ways in which it is already clear my kids will surpass me educationally, and may already have done so. And, while I’m excited and proud that we’re able to offer them those opportunities, I do sometimes have trouble really accepting just how much they are learning and doing.

More Nitty Gritty

So, once I get the older student’s plan more or less set, I start working to mirror it for the younger one. I look for resources that cover the same general ground, but at a level appropriate for him. I don’t worry about keeping them in lock step; sometimes, my older one will be studying a topic that is clearly out of reach to her little brother, while other times there will be some topic that I just know will be of special interest to him.

And, of course, there are always a few books that I just happen to have sitting on a shelf because I found them at a used book sale and that are perfect for him this year, even though they don’t have obvious parallels with his big sister’s plan.

In “big picture” terms, though, I try to keep them together as much as possible, which means he, too, will be focusing on medieval and Renaissance history and literature this year.

As spines, he will be using:

Parragon’s Encyclopedia of World History (“Middle Ages” and “Age of Discovery” sections)
History of the World: The Middle Ages, Vincent Douglas
History of the World: Renaissance and Discovery, Vincent Douglas
Art and Civilization: Medieval Times, Giovanni Di Pasquale
History of Everyday Things: Renaissance and the New World, Giovanni Caselli

He’ll be outlining some of his reading assignments and also creating a notebook using the History Scholar page templates.

Whenever it seems appropriate, he’ll join his big sister in watching the historical documentaries and other films on her list. And I have certain selections that are just for him, including the Schlessinger Media Life in the Middle Ages series.

His assigned reading for this year includes the following:

King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, Andrew Lang
One-Hundred-and-One Celtic Read-Aloud Myths & Legends, Joan C. Verniero (We have a few books in this series, and my son reads them independently. He will not cover all 101, just a nice selection of the stories.)
Sailor Who Captured the Sea (Lovely illustrations based on the Book of Kells), Deborah Nourse Lattimore
Viking and Liking It, Jon Scieszka
Beowulf: A New Telling, Robert Nye
Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver, E. L. Konigsburg
Robin Hood of Sherwood Forest, Ann McGovern
Aladdin and Other Tales from the Arabian Nights, N. J. Dawood
Wulf the Saxon, G. A. Henty
Puffin Classics Canterbury Tales. Geraldine McCaughrean
Squire’s Tale, Gerald Morris (a comic re-working of the Gawain story)
In Freedom’s Cause, G. A. Henty
Second Mrs. Giaconda, E.L, Konigsburg
Da Wild, Da Crazy, da Vinci, Jon Scieszka
Who Was Ferdinand Magellan? S. A. Kramer
Exploration & Conquest, Betsy & Giulio Maestro
Medieval Feast, Aliki
Shakespeare Stealer, Gary Blackwood

We’ll also be reading aloud Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court during the first semester. I’m still deciding on a read-aloud selection for the Renaissance period.

As you can see, I’ve leavened the list with several comic or silly selections guaranteed to make this period fun for my young boy. He actually got very excited just digging through the shopping bag in which I was accumulating his reading material for the year. He kept pulling out books and reading the titles out loud and holding them up for me to see (as though they were his personal discoveries). Finally, he exclaimed, “Hey, a bunch of these are classics!”

It’s enough to make any homeschooling mom’s heart beat proud!