Spelling and Charlotte Mason

Spelling has always been an uphill battle in this family.  First with me, who didn’t learn to spell until college, and then with Alex and Cyan, neither of whom spell well even today.  The English language just doesn’t make sense!  So that means that instead of using logic (which we are all very logical people) we have had to just rote memorize a lot of words and even I find that MUCH harder than knowing the rules and using logic. 

This last week I decided to use the Charlotte Mason form of spelling lesson.  I took words that Cyan misspelled from her own work and placed them up on a chalk board at the front of our classroom for the day.  No correction was made to her just then, so she didn’t even know why those particular words were up there.  Then, at the end of the week, I told her that we were going to learn to spell these words.  I chatted with her lightly about where she missed them and how to break down some of these words into parts so that they were easier to remember.  Then in spelling bee format, I had her recite the words while they were still at the front of the room.   “direction.  d-i-r-e-c-t-i-o-n, direction.”  This way she could look over to get confirmation of the word she was working on any time she needed it.  She never had to guess or try to figure out the words using logic (which some do not have…  Whoever decided that ‘tion’ is ‘shun’ was just plain crazy!)

This was on Friday.  She missed one word when we finally got down to ‘testing’ at the end of the day and I had her look at it and write it a few times.  Then on Tuesday I tested her again.  She got all of the 6 words correct. 

Charlotte Mason also says that using Prepared Dictation is a wonderful way to learn spelling.  For example, using a poem or a phrase from a book you have read and choosing a few of the words from that passage to study for spelling.  For us, it works better for my children to have made their own list of spelling words via things they have done like dictation, nature study observations, letters they have written, or lessons they have worked.  So I create a comprehensive list from their own studies.  Both ways work and will give the child that next level of involvement with the words they are learning… and having one more level of learning is what it is all about!

Kaya - The American Girl

For the last 9 weeks Cyan has been studying the books about Kaya with a class at our co-op.  She has read 7 chapter books and the book Welcome to Kaya’s World (above) from cover to cover and answered questions about each chapter of each book.  For a girl, who just a year ago was getting rewarded for her first chapter book I was thrilled with the accomplishment! 

For a final project (and for her week off from co-op last week) I had her do a Kaya Lapbook to add to her Co-op binder.  All of these foldouts and minibooks minus the coloring sheet on the front of the lapbook were found at Homeschool Share.

It starts out with a picture Cyan colored of Kaya and her sister playing.  Above that is a fold out booklet of Kaya’s Favorite Things.

The next page is a two page spread of different parts of Kaya’s World. 

On these pages are where Kaya’s tribe lived in America, vocabulary words in Nes Pierce language, facts about the characters from the book and life with the Nes Pierce (called the Nimiipuu, which means ‘pierced noses’ in French). 

This is the vocabulary fold out:

And facts about Kaya and her tribe:

The last page talks about the series and Cyan’s opinion of the stories.  Her favorite book, what she learned, and facts about her favorite parts were all there.  The biggest part of this page for Cyan was the PLOT booklet.  She got a quick course in what a plot was and what parts were the conflict, rising action, climax, and resolution. 

For this portion of the book Cyan chose “Changes for Kaya” as the book and we had a great time talking about the story. I had no idea she was retaining so much information from the things she had read! It was super exciting for me as a mom to see this all take place without much effort from me at all. Cyan LOVES her co-op classes and I have to say, this one has truly impressed me.  After the lapbook we placed all of Cyan’s co-op work from the chapters there.  Then we placed two more card stock pages…  because Cyan said she had to do a lapbook for Josephina and Kirsten too!

They move on to Josephina next week.

The letter Ff & Gg

Box #1: Decorate for Autumn with Mama! 

Box #2: The Waldorf Alphabet Book and the Leapfrog Fridge Letters.

Box #3: Get Ready for the Code and Montessori sandpaper letters.

Box #4: a Ff is for Fish coloring page from LOTW.

Box #5: 1 - 10 Dot to Dot

Box #6: Gg is for Gumball cutting practice from LOTW.

Box #7: Gg is for Garden.  I put books in there for a child’s garden and we sat and looked through all the amazing professional gardens out there! 

This was the favorite:

Box #8: Gg is for Gumball worksheet.  This I made with some inspiration from somewhere on the web (if I find it again I will link it.)  I made this sheet with shapes from Word and then left the space under the gumball machines blank so I could fill in how many gumballs that he was supposed to put in each machine.

He loved counting out the gumballs and stamping them onto the paper with a pencil eraser and a multicolored stamping pad.  It was the favorite activity of the day!

Box #9: Gg scavenger hunt…  Find 7 things that start with Gg!  (It was really hard.  I ended up helping him because he kept finding things that started with Jj…  Poor kiddo!)

Box #10: Wedgits.  My kids love playing with this open ended toy!

Creative Writing and Poetry Class ~ Similes

Today we did a big review of what the kids had learned in the previous three lessons. I was thrilled with how much they have remembered and are able to use in real writing applications!

The second half of the class was dedicated to Similes. Comparison sentences using 'like' or 'as'. Our enrichment project was to take a rainbow, and for each color, create a simile. We had what colors looked like, felt like, smelled like, sounded like, and even tasted like. The sentences were awesome! "Purple tastes like a ripe plum bursting in my mouth on a warm summer day." These kids have a heck of an imagination. Even the youngegest in the class really enjoyed this activity and were able to bring some really great sentences to the table.

Creative Writing and Poetry Class

(My class. Two of the kids are missing in this picture, but I thought it was super cute!)

We had poetry class #3 today. It was amazing! I am so thrilled to be sharing this program with my homeschool kid friends!

So far, what we have learned has been back-boned by the ideas of Small World's Wordsmithery, with a nice healthy dose of my own ideas.

Wordsmithery; if you haven't already, please check it out (link here). The lessons she writes are easy to understand and complete all on their own. Anything you bring is a bonus that will bring more understanding of the material, but if you do nothing extra, you can consider Wordsmithery a group of lessons that your children will reference back to every time they write until they are in college.

First lesson:

(poems Keep a Poem in Your Pocket by Beatrice Schenk de Regniers and Jabberwocky by Lewis Carol)

What is creative writing? Fiction and nonfiction. What writing is made of (words). The kids favorite words. Making up your own nonsense words. The poem "The Jabberwocky" by Lewis Carol (which has a lot of nonsense words).

This class spawned some interesting discussions. When we were making up and defining our own words, for example, one little girl made up the word 'beautifulicious' and defined it in her own way. It was wonderful to see their creative minds come alive with the freedom of being able to use language so openly.

Second lesson:

(poem September by John Updike)

Parts of speech review. Nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs. Define these terms. Then use them to make sentences.

This was a little harder. Most of these kids could say what nouns and verbs were... but adverbs and adjectives are a little harder to pin down. Especially due to the changing nature of the words themselves. If you change the ending of many of the words, it changes the entire meaning of the word and thus which part of language it is. For example; take the sentences the quick fox and the fox ran quickly. In the quick fox the word 'quick' is a adjective used to describe the noun (fox), but in the fox ran quickly the word 'quickly' is an adverb, used to describe the verb 'ran'. This concept caught the kids out a few times... and that is on top of just the new ideas of parts of speech being so important in the first place. It was an AMAZING lesson, that was tons of fun... but the kids spent more time getting to know the definitions of the parts of speech, than the actual words that those definitions represented and I allowed them to run with that portion of the lesson because they seemed to be getting SO much out of it.

In the end, we made a table on the board in different colors, then I asked the kids to pick a color and a letter and I would add that letter to a column ("noun, the letter k!" and I would put a K in the Noun column). After we had all our letters in the columns, I had them choose words for each of those letters, and then we put them together in silly sentences: "The crazy lion ran carefully." and "The horse carefully skipped the gross noodles at dinner." and so on. You could imagine that this could go on for quite some time. ;)

Third lesson:

(poem Blood-Curdling Story by Shel Silverstein)

This was today. And what an amazing lesson it was! We were still reviewing parts of speech, but we also moved on to create more interesting sentences with the addition of synonyms, antonyms, and more interesting adjectives. I decided to take iPhone pictures of the board because the words the kids were coming up with were just brilliant!

First, I made up a simple sentence. "The girl read a book." and then I asked the children to help me make the sentence more interesting by adding adjectives and adverbs to the sentence. We ended up with two totally different sentences (above). We chose one, and continued to work with it, using synonyms of the nouns and verbs we had chosen (below):

I continued the color coding (although it is hard to tell here, but there are 5 different colors on the board) to help them identify the parts of speech visually. This really helped when I would pop little review questions on them from the last lesson. And they thought it was great fun to watch me use every pen on the white board. lol!

Finally, we took a simple sentence from a Wordsmithery example and we expanded on that. After this, I wrote down 5 examples on the board of simple sentences, and had each child pick one and expand on it on their own in their journals.

We talked a little bit about a thesaurus and how you can find synonyms and antonyms for your favorite words there, but considering I didn't have one in hand, that is something that has to be reviewed again next week.

I can't say enough great things about this class. Really. The backbone is strong, the children are enthusiastic and curious, not to mention excited about writing. It is just such a perfect way to start my week each week!

Planning a poetry class

I have been thinking about this all summer long. My kids and I had SO much fun with Small World's Wordsmithery lessons last year, that I took that inspiration and turned it into a class for our home school group! I am crazy excited about the way the classes are writing up.

If you haven't done the Wordsmithery class over at Small World, check it out! The lessons are clear and easy to teach, and each of the sessions have 4 mini writing sessions that you do through out the week that take a total of 15 minutes each, but turn out SUCH great results!

Anyhow... more on my class. As much of it is inspired by Wordsmithery, the lessons are set up in pretty much the same order. However, since I will only get the kids once a week (and can't expect a ton of homework to be accomplished) I am compacting the lessons into two hour segments. The first part will be the 'lesson' part where the kids get to hear about the rules of the day and the types of words we will be dealing with. The second is the 'project' portion of the class, where the kids get to do some of their own writing and a neat project that goes along with each type of word (very much like this Wordsmithery lesson).

I am CRAZY excited about it, and can't wait to share with you guys what we do for each day and some of the writings of this talented group of kiddos I have the honor to teach.

Robin Hood!!!

This week was Robin Hood, King Richard the Lionheart, and Prince John and the signing of the Magna Carta.

What a FUN Lesson this was!! The kids LOVED the story, (of course) and I learned a whole lot, too! I didn't realize what an antagonist that King Richard was! The 'real' reason he disappeared coming home from the Crusades was he had insulted the Duke of Austria SO badly that when traveling through Austria, the Duke captured him and locked him up! For years! lol... And the whole time, he was in a sort of pissing match with France (who was an ally in the Crusades until Richard showed up and made the King of France mad too) and ended up dying in a boarder dispute with an arrow through his throat. He was known in history for being a great King and warrior... but a BAD diplomat. All the movies portray him so generously that I have never even suspected that he could have irritated other world rulers so badly!

The story of the Magna Carta comes after King Richard gets killed. Prince (then King) John Lackland (Richard's brother, not cousin) gains the throne and starts being a tyrant. He is taking land and obscene amounts of taxes from the nobles, who of course, make life horrible for the surf's and peasants under them. Most of the taxes were taken for wars with France, not to over throw Richard (because he was already gone at this point). So the nobles got together and made a document of laws that they believe EVERYONE (including the King) should have to follow. This was the first time in documented history that a dictator was held accountable to their own laws, and it set up a system of government that is still VERY alive today. (Canada and the US still follow the basic ideas of the Magna Carta.)

At the end of the lesson, the kids got to make their own Magna Carta! The rules they listed were SO cute I wish I could write all of them here. They ranged from "Sir Caleb does not have to read before watching movies" and "Sir Elias gets 7 minutes of video game time every day" to "Princess Madeline gets to wrestle with daddy every day before bed" and "Madam Hannah gets to have dessert with every dinner". They were PRECIOUS! The kids all stood up and read them aloud to the class and when they were done we all banged on tables and shouted "Hear hear!!" and "Whoohooo!" as the kids beamed! It was pretty amazing.

Here is Cyan's Magna Carta:

Isn't that the sweetest thing? Yes, I signed it this morning. Although I added the stipulation that she was allowed to get ice cream on all those days, until her own money ran out. ;) She decided that one day a week was plenty, so now it is only on Sunday's.

Long, but really, a must watch for homeschoolers.

I love pictures like this...

My daughter, reading to my son. :)

Under the Sea

We have been working on an under the sea unit study for about 5 months now off and on. The sea is a fascinating place! A friend of mine had a wonderful idea of making a 'research notebook' for the kids to record their adventures in. Each time we read a book about the sea, go to an aquarium, have a fun boat trip, or go to the shore (like the 7 beaches we discovered on our beach tour) we write a little bit about it. Alex is assigned two paragraphs, and Cyan two sentences. They can be about anything... anything of interest about the sea.

Today their assignment was to read a book, and then write about that. We got 33 (yes, 33) books about the sea, tide pools, sea shells, sea creatures, etc at the library yesterday and the kids have been pouring through them.

I think my very favorite thing about it is listening to Cyan read. She is getting SO good! I love her sounding out words like "fortune" and "creatures" and "Whelk" (a type of shell).

This is also helping Alex with his summarizing skills. He is one of those kids who would rather read you the entire book instead of tell you the main points, and so being limited to two paragraphs has really made him think about summing up the important info.

Unit studies have always worked best with my kids. As my friend says "Val, you don't do things half way"... I always throw myself full into whatever I am researching, learning, or passionate about. I have found lately that my kids are the same. They LOVE to bring me new facts about the anything they are passionate about. And if I am smart enough to USE that... they suck up 'education' like a sponge.

I have always thought of a child's brain like a room filled with empty boxes. Once you introduce a subject... even with nothing but a word on an audio book... that word starts to fill up a box in their brains. I believe that the public school system gives a lot of single words, but not a lot of full boxes. If that makes any sense at all. Topics are segregated into subjects... without the overlap that my kids thrive on. I would rather do one 'unit study' than 4 or 5 'subjects' per day. The information just seems to stick better. And isn't that the real goal of education?

Charlotte's Web - The Play

Picture from the play website.

Last night we went to the play of Charlotte's Web. It was a cozy little theatre with only about 60 seats in the audience. We were in the second row, face to face with Wilbur, Charlotte, Fern and all the other characters.

I have to admit that taking toddlers to a play is not my idea of fun. But I thought that this play would be exciting enough, and also low key enough content that Logan just might enjoy it. And he did! He sat, completely enthralled for the entire 1.5 hours of the play (with intermission cookie, of course). He didn't even talk, except when Wilbur stated that Charlotte drank blood... to that he said "Ewww... YUCK!" very loudly... and made everyone around us laugh. Including Wilbur.

The other kids loved it as well. We talked about our favorite parts on our way home:

Cyan: "Charlotte. For sure, Charlotte. She was so beautiful and after the play I talked to her and told her she had a pretty dress and she told me that her teacher made it for her and let me touch her arms."

Alex: "I have two, well actually no, I have three. The first one where Templeton had the rotten egg. The second one was where he got the egg sack down, and the third was the last web."

Logan: "I 'ike the firewuks." (Fireworks: Which were lights projected on to the wall, but he thought that was super cool.)

After the play, when they were doing the "meet and greet" someone came up to Alex and told him he did a great job. He stood there stuttering as she went on to ask him if being up there was hard and he must have a lot of energy to keep bouncing around like that. Finally, Alex spilled out that he wasn't the kid who played Avery, Fern's 12 year old brother, but even Alex admitted to that being a long 2 minutes of fame.

When the big kids were meeting the characters, Logan hung back a bit... not really knowing what to do. He was kind of daunted by Charlotte and Wilbur, but when we got to Fern's Mom (far right, above in blue dress) he said "I 'ike dat show. Is good." She nearly melted in the cuteness. ;)

First day of 'school'

It sounds SO funny to say that considering we never stopped and we have had classes at least three times a week for two months! But... we started Math U See today... so that means that we 'started school'... LOL!

We started out with a review of the math rods. I pulled out her princess addition and subtraction flash cards and I (or Alex) would pull a card and she would make them with the rods, and then tell us the answer. The problems were not the important part... she has been adding and subtracting double digits for a while now... but it was the use of the rods that I wanted to reinforce.

She did just great! We quickly moved on to the first lesson in her new math book and found out that even that was review! She already knew her place value... but it was good to get some reinforcement for that as well.

I moved her on to reading, and went to check on Alex... who was doing great! He was doing a lesson from his math that was a unit review as well... and without my help he was able to look up where he was in the text book, figure out which problems. I can't tell you how much of an improvement over when he was in public school. He couldn't do anything (and I mean ANYTHING) by himself. Now he is looking up words from his math book in a dictionary, and then finding the correct lesson and doing the problems all by himself. If I pulled him out for the self motivation alone, it would have been worth it. He is a really amazing kid.

And turning into a beautiful young man as well.

I just love my children... so very much.

We also started the most wonderful science curriculum EVER today. I will tell you about that tomorrow. ;)

This makes me so very sad!

Reading Rainbow shutting down after 26 years.

There are a lot of political things that I could spout right now after reading this very sad article... but the biggest thing that I enjoyed about the show is that it showed the love of reading, and the love of learning... and if you keep that alive, you will never have uneducated children. You just won't. You kill the joy of learning and you have the 'problems' we are facing today with our public school systems. I figure my ENTIRE goal in homeschooling is to teach my children to read, and teach them to love learning. Those two things cover every other issue they may have with their 'education' later in life.

And luckily, I have a library that has oh so many episodes of Reading Rainbow on DVD already. :)

Sometimes, people... it just clicks.

Cyan has been saying that she "can't read" for months. She has been so convinced that she can't read, that she won't read even to me or Don lately. She has her brother read to her all the time because 'she can't read'... and of course, being the teen-aged brother that he is, he obliges her, enjoying the tiny bit of superiority he feels having a 'can't read' little sister (well, sometimes he is actually being helpful, as well).

This morning she was sitting next to a couple of her friends in her history class, and they were asking all the same spelling questions that she was asking. My friend said that she kept looking back and forth between her two kids (whom are both pretty fluent readers) and her work and seeing that not only did theirs look similar to hers, but they were asking all the same questions she, "the not reader", was asking. "What does this word start with? Oh wait. I know that one. Nevermind. What about this one? Oh yeah, an "M". Got it. Thanks." My friend said it was so funny to her, because it was obvious that Cyan wasn't far behind, but that she had just convinced herself that she couldn't do it.

So this afternoon, Cyan came in with a book and said "MAMA! I can READ this!" and proceeded to read the entire story of The Gingerbread Boy.

From 2009_7_21

This video is her 'not reading' the last page of the 12 page long story, and I should have kept recording, because after she was finished, she looked at me with the cutest 'see, I told you I could do it' expression as if she has been reading to us like this for years... it was priceless. Can't read... my aunt fanny!