Almost 12 year old getting some much needed sensory input!
If you’ve ever been to my house during school, you probably wondered what the heck we do, or how we get anything done. Our days are broken up into chunks, mostly punctuated by “You’re only on the 3rd one? It’s been almost an hour!” and “The rabbit cage doesn’t need to be cleaned. You did it yesterday,” or “Why is your brother outside again?!”
Rinse and repeat. In five minutes.
I don’t know what to name our method. I guess if you want to get homeschooly (homeschoolish? Is that a word?) you would call us eclectic. Or electronic. Or crazy. One of those might fit. But I think we need a method name for special needs homeschoolers who try to use Charlotte Mason’s methods and end up using the computer a lot. Special Electronic CMers? Or how about Digital CMSN? Sounds like an online news agency.
What we do is whatever happens to fit the current situation. Sometimes I read aloud, and sometimes I have them take turns doing it. Sometimes I enforce the writing down of answers, and sometimes I beat my head against the wallbeg and plead with them let them do it orally.
So here they are, 10 Reasons for the Madness Behind My Methods:
1. The boy. Cannot. Sit. Down.
2. Writing the answer to one question takes 5x more time than it does for them to read the entire lesson.
I am processing life as it’s coming from all sides. I’ve been kind of down, rather tuned out when it comes to blogging and my online things, and scattered in general. We are decluttering the house, going through all of my Gramma’s things trying to decide what to save, store, sell, donate, etc. along with re-organizing and doing the same with everything we had stored at the house already. So it’s been messy too.
In our homeschool this week…
We are working on implementing Charlotte Mason’s ideas a little at a time. I am tying in the results and recommendations of the boys’ testing, which will hopefully make things a lot smoother and easier for all of us. Charlotte Mason plays a big part in this puzzle, thankfully, and her methods fit perfectly!
Helpful homeschooling tips or advice to share…
Don’t yell at your kids when they are trying to do math. It’s counterproductive. And that’s all I’m going to say about that.
I am inspired by…
A wonderful lady who goes by the pseudonym of Harmony Art Mom. I have been searching out Charlotte Mason resources, and I find her. I search for nature study information, and I find her again. Art and composers? Once again, I land on her virtual real estate, and am pleasantly surprised and in awe. Really. She needs to come to my house and give me lessons on how in the world she DOES it!
Places we’re going and people we’re seeing…
We spent a lovely Mother’s Day afternoon at my husband’s Grandma’s house. His parents, aunt and uncle, and our kids and us had a barbecue and a nice visit. She’s quite frail and elderly and still lives in her own house! I always love spending time with her. We lost Grandpa a year ago at Christmas, and she’s missing him a lot. She always blesses us when we head over the mountains to see her. She’s only an hour away, which is really nice.
My favorite thing this week was…
The phone call I got from my daughter Wednesday night. She lives a couple of hours away and doesn’t have a phone. She depends on borrowing one from a neighbor, and they have to have unlimited long distance, so our calls are few and far between. I miss her tons.
What’s working/not working for us…
Working: Short lessons. I have been trying to really pay attention to the time we are taking on things. Also, since I learned from my boys’ testing that they both have to SEE things as well as hear them in order to process, remember, and understand them, I have pulled out the flash cards for math. We are working our way through addition and subtraction. Yes, they’re in 4th and 6th grades, but they have learning disabilities and delays that require a different path. D1 doesn’t have ALL of his addition facts down, but he only had 11 to work on. D2 had all but 6, and they were simple mistakes really, so I had him start on subtraction. This isn’t so easy. He’s gone through half the facts and missed enough that we will be spending some time on them. I should say that in their math they are working on multi-digit multiplication and D1 is doing long division… so they are “up there” but have some holes to fill in the automatic recall area.
What’s not working: Very short lessons for math. Since we use Teaching Textbooks, and they do their math entirely on the computer (with a pencil & paper for computations), we are somewhat locked in to how ever long it takes them to complete it. Still, on a good, focused day D1 can get done in 30 minutes and D2 in 20-30, so I don’t think we are outside of the “short lessons” realm. It’s just that other days D1 can take for.EVER. And on those days I will just cut it short and let him go. There’s no point when he’s getting up every minute or two, or spacing out in front of the screen. So we’re just… adjusting.
Questions/thoughts I have…
The homeschool teacher I am in my head is not the homeschool teacher I am in real life. I’m praying the two shall meet soon. I’m getting closer all the time.
Things I’m working on…
Spinning plates and balancing tadpole tanks while juggling balls, ala’ Cat in the Hat. I have so many things going my head would spin off if I started thinking about all of them at once. I’m just taking it a little at a time. Homeschool with Charlotte Mason. Work on the sorting and boxing of stuff. That is all.
I’m reading…
or should I say re-reading Learning In Spite of Labels by Joyce Herzog. It’s been a couple of years and I need the reminder. I finished More Charlotte Mason Education. I want to get a new Ted Dekker book but, well that would be the end of any progress on the house that I am making. Everyone would be naked and starving too. I have a problem. A Dekker problem.
I’m cooking…
Cooking? It’s been hot this week, and salads have been on the menu twice so far. I did buy some quinoa but I’m not sure what to do with it. I could use some ideas. Leave me a comment!
I’m grateful for…
Allergy medicine, and the foresight I had to start it in April. I’m not miserable like some other people I know, and have only had to add my allergy eye drops twice since the pollen started flying so I think I’m doing pretty good! The grasses aren’t really going yet though, and those are where my major issues come in. Time to step up my local honey intake to daily!
I’m praying for…
My husband. He’s got an early summer cold going on and he’s miserable. And he’s a man, so he’s making all of us miserable too. LOL Please Lord, heal him fast! Okay, in all seriousness, this week I’ve been praying for Blood:Water Mission and the work that they are doing in Africa. I was happy to receive the BWM Traveling Belt this week, and I wrote a post about it on Wednesday!
A photo, video, link, or quote to share… Another video about Blood:Water Mission and how what they are doing is changing lives…
After nearly a month off from homeschooling, I can say that I’m getting excited about starting school again with the boys. E kept asking me, “Are you ever going to start school again?”
It says SPRING BREAK for two weeks. Sounds great, right? Well, we usually do take a whole month off–the month of April– and that is what we ended up doing! I planned for two weeks, but I needed the month. Oh HOW I NEEDED IT!
I took a “brain break”. Have you ever done that? Just taken a full break from homeschooling, to the point where you aren’t even thinking about it? Not looking through catalogs, surfing for ideas, or writing lesson plans… just… nothing? You should try it sometime. Like this summer. Just STOP. Give yourself a break. Put the Homeschoolin’ Mom on hold for even two weeks!
This is exactly what I did for three weeks, and now, I am almost ready. In the last week I re-read Catherine Levison’s books, A Charlotte Mason Education and More Charlotte Mason Education. They’re short and to the point. They reminded me how far I’ve veered off the course I plotted when we first brought the boys back home from public school.
I remembered what a smart lady Charlotte Mason was. I remembered how my boys thrived on her methods. I realized how… gulp… lazy I had become with respect to teaching my kids. It isn’t that we hadn’t been doing school, because we had. I was just not nearly as involved as I needed to be. There is no way to have good conversations, good outdoor nature study time, or any narrations if I’m not fully “THERE” with them. And I haven’t been.
But I’m back. And I have some changes to put in place for our last 3 months of school. (Yes, 3 months. We take December, April, and August off.)
First, I am re-instituting Charlotte Mason’s methods. Short lessons using a timer. More outdoor experiences. More conversations. Short readings and narrating back to me. Daily poetry reading again.
Second, we are pulling out our Scripture Memory System box again. We have been doing daily Bible reading, but haven’t used the memory box this year at all. It’s time.
Third, we are going to pick back up with IEW’s Student Writing Intensives. Yes, I realize this isn’t CM approved, but it works very well for them. They enjoy the video lessons and Andrew Padewa’s humor. They just need me involved fully and this is one ball I dropped after Christmas!
Fourth, we are going to begin a geography study one to two days per week using Knowledge Quest’s Global Mania program. You can get it for free by signing up for their newsletter! This is a basic world geography program to help kids get a good overview of the world, in 7 months. It includes lots (and LOTS) of games, mostly online, as well as maps for labeling and quizzing.
I’m ready! How about you? What have you changed up since Spring Break?
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This is my first Weekly Wrap-Up in three weeks! Things have just been getting away from me lately. I’m glad to “be back!”
Here I am, at the beginning of March, and my well laid out school plans have been pushed aside. I feel disappointed in myself, and yet I see that adjustments needed to be made. What I am missing right now though, is Charlotte Mason. I spent last summer reading all about her, and planned our curriculum with her methods in mind. Now I am finding myself reverting back to old habits… not necessarily good ones. Time to pull out my Charlotte Mason books once again! We break for the month of April, and I will definitely be doing some mid-course corrections.
Some mistakes thus far:
Expecting too much seatwork, and not enough hands-on work. I enjoy hands-on things with the boys, but I do not enjoy preparing for them. This is something I just need to get over and DO. Somebody kick me or something! If I can get a lapbook all printed out with all the little books cut out, then I have no problem getting the actual project done as we go through a study. If I have to piece it together day by day, it just doesn’t happen. There has been a lot of “just doesn’t happen” happening around here lately.
Unrealistically expected us to be able to get through double the reading material than was actually possible. I am a bibliophile: I confess. I love books! I love book LISTS! This is where my problems come in. If there are two dozen books on a curriculum list, my brain (being the legalistic brain that it is) thinks we must read them. All. We did end up ditching all of the mythology books on our list this year except The Children’s Iliad, and that has been a very good thing!
I slipped into old habits and quit using the timer for math and penmanship. We used to do 20 minutes of math and 10 minutes of handwriting per day, with the “no matter how much you get done” philosophy. Also Charlotte Mason’s “Slow, careful practice…” theory to which I added “…makes nice handwriting”. And it does. And I’m a dufus for forgetting that.
Grammar. We haven’t. Done. Any. Not this term! First term we did grammar 2-3 days a week. It’s not like it took us very long, either. I use Shurley English, just the grammar portion, and we do the sentences together on a white board. The boys enjoyed it and were beginning to really “get it”. When we began 2nd term we just never got back in with grammar. We will when we start back up 3rd Term! It only takes us about 10-15 minutes.
I need to get back into learning more about Charlotte Mason and her teaching techniques. Her ideas on teaching children SO resonated with me, and the way I feel children should be taught, and I was so excited when I discovered her! Her teaching style fits my special needs child so perfectly, that it seemed she wrote it all just for him. Now it’s been so long, that I have forgotten most of what I read. Time to pull out my books once again and get reading!
For the rest of our term, which is the month of March, I am going to do the two unit studies that I agreed to review. It should be fun for a change of pace, but I feel sort of guilty for my well-laid plans taking a detour. I know, it’s my school. I shouldn’t feel guilty. I should just go with it. I should take my own advice. And when we start back up again in May after our break, I plan on being refreshed and have my purposes renewed once again!
