Letters from Pemberley

Today is our last day of school!  I did a brief homeschool retrospective over at E2S, but I wanted to go into more detail here so that I can remember my end-of-the year thoughts in future years!

Bible: Tommy and I have daily homework for CBS.  This year, we studied Mark, Job, and Philippians.  I haven’t found any other Bible curriculum that I like as well as the CBS Primary/Junior materials, and I’ll keep my kids in CBS as long as we can!  We also are working through memorizing the Gospel of Mark, and we accomplished about a chapter and a half this year.  We learn a new verse per day each Mon-Wed, take Thursday off for CBS, and review on Friday.  This worked well and will be our plan for next year, as well.

Math: We use Saxon math.  There are many good curricula out there, but Saxon works for us.  Tommy did grade 3, and we’ll continue with 5/4 next year.  However, he has started dragging with his homework and complaining that he hates math, so I recently added Beast Academy to our line-up.  It’s a total math curriculum with a very different approach.  The lessons are taught through comics, and the practice problems are more like brain teasers and problem solving.  We’re still in level 3A, but T LOVES it and willingly does pages every day.  Next year, we’ll keep up with Saxon four days a week to make sure he has his facts down cold, but we’ll be adding in Beast Academy one day a week to keep things fun.  E finished the Saxon K book mid-year and started into the 1st grade book over the winter, but we hit a wall when we started up with basic addition and subtraction.  After becoming increasingly angry over several weeks, I decided to step away and back up to concentrate on number theory.  We played with duplos, puff balls, Lego Friends, and Math-U-See rods.  We’ve only recently started back with textbook math, and she’s doing much better after a 6 month break.  Since she’ll be in 1st grade next year, I don’t think she’s really behind, anyway.  Tommy is a grade ahead in math, but Elizabeth is working at grade level, and the beauty of homeschooling is that we can do that!

Language Arts: I am a big fan of Peace Hill Press materials.  We use First Language Lessons for oral grammar.  Tommy has memorized the definitions of all the parts of speech, several poems, and a long list of the most common prepositions.  Just listening in while he practices, the girls have most of those things memorized, too.  I like that it is all scripted, easy, and quick.  We use Writing With Ease for writing (composition).  I firmly believe in Susan Wise Bauer’s breakdown of the steps of the writing process.  It makes sense to me, and I’ve seen it build confidence in Tommy.  I like using the scripted program for now.  After two years, I do feel confident enough that I could find my own sentences and passages if I wanted to, but I don’t have the time with the little ones.  I’ll keep using the pre-selected passages and worksheet pages for now, and maybe one day I’ll have the time to just wing it for the younger kids.  We added in spelling this year, and a friend gave me her copy of All About Spelling Level 1.  Another friend bought a huge metal tray for me to make my own magnetic board, and I went online to figure out how to make my own magnetic letter tiles.  After all that, Tommy whizzed through level 1 in a couple weeks and level 2 in a month or so.  It’s just too easy for him, and he felt like all the hands-on tile work was a waste of time when he already knew how to spell the words.  And it’s a lot of moving pieces, a lot to store, and expensive if you have to keep buying $40 packs for each new level.  I didn’t want to buy another level, so we stopped doing spelling and will wait for the charter school to buy the next level of curriculum for him next year.  But I suspect he’s just a natural speller, so I’m not sure how long we’ll even bother doing spelling.  I do think when Lizzie finishes phonics, All About Spelling will be a good way to solidify phonics rules as she learns to spell.  But I wonder if a cheapo $10 spelling text would have worked just as well.  I decided to introduce Tommy to cursive this year, so I bought the Veritas Press Classically Cursive curriculum.  They sell three or four books, so I bought two, thinking that would get us through the year.  I quickly realized that one would have been plenty.  Once he learned all his letters, I started making him write everything else in cursive, so he has plenty of practice.  I don’t think he’ll need another formal handwriting book–I just need to be on him and make sure he writes neatly.  The second book won’t go to waste, fortunately, because one of the girls can use it, but since they actually allow for photo copying within families, I could have reused the first book for the girls.  Oh well.  It’s a fine program, I just slightly overbought.

History: I’ve been looking forward to using Veritas Press history since before Tommy was born, and this year did not disappoint.  We loved it!  I’d originally scheduled a card per week, then realized that the Bible event weeks were so easy that I could have done four cards in a week.  So I did a bit of supplementing with Story of the World and the SOTW activity guides, and it was a pretty good balance.  The kids love the timeline, the memory song, the activities (I did less and less as the year progressed), and our big map over the kitchen table.  I just bought the CD with PDFs of all the files, and that was a good call.  I print off what I need and don’t bother with what I don’t.  I didn’t make Tommy fill out all the worksheets this year since he doesn’t have the stamina to write that much, but both kids easily answered my questions orally.  Tommy got a 100% on his end-of-year exam, and I think there was a lot of retention.  Since the program is not scripted, I did have to devote some time over the summer to planning out the schedule and making a list of what books we needed to get from the library when, but I love that sort of thing, so it was no big deal.  Living books are the best way to learn history, and I plan on us using Veritas history (with SOTW supplements) for the forseeable future.  I am glad I took Anna’s advice and didn’t bother with the Veritas Bible cards, too–way too much overlap.

Latin: I bought Song School Latin sight-unseen, on the recommendation of various people online.  After finishing it up this week, Tommy’s and my conclusion is that it was basically a waste of time.  He learned a very little vocab, but no conjugations or declensions.  The worksheets were fine, but never challenging.  And I lost the CD at some point this year, so we can’t even listen to the songs in the car to review.  I’d hoped that the songs and ditties would be helping them memorize some of the more complicated stuff that you have to spend time learning when you start to really study Latin, but it was too easy.  We did get Getting Started With Latin out from the library and started working through that together orally, and it was great.  It definitely solidified concepts like parts of speech that he was learning simultaneously in English, and it was relatively painless.

Science: We loved watching the Way Things Work physics videos, but I totally dropped the ball on actually doing the experiments I’d found on pinterest.  Being part of a charter school will be good accountability for me next year when we tackle astronomy!

Geography: I bought Legends and Leagues from Veritas Press, and even with the workbook, it was blah.  Tommy learned more actual geography from some Evan Moore workbook we inherited from our babysitters.

French: I tried using the Bonjour Les Amis videos from the library along with Duolingo online, but we were hampered in the latter because they kids weren’t typing well for most of the year.  I briefly tried to use my high school Dis-Moi book with Tommy, and he learned a lot for those weeks, but we quickly dropped it because it was just so much writing.  We’re going to start Dis-Moi over again in the fall, when his cursive skills will be stronger.

Typing: BBC Dance Mat Typing is free and fun.  Why does anyone pay for typing programs?

Fine Arts: The goal was to rotate a month of study of an artist with a month on a composer.  I made the rookie mistake of only planning out the first half of the year last summer, thinking I’d plan the second half of the year over Christmas break.  Silly me!  It never happened.  In the fall, however, we enjoyed listening to First Discovery and Introduction to the Classics CDs, getting biographies out from the library, and watching Mike Venezia’s famous artist videos.

Also, in general, it’s just been getting harder and harder to do schoolwork with Janie underfoot.  I’m hoping she’ll be mature enough to not destroy things while we’re doing school again in the fall.  Sigh.