Silver Moon Learning

Aug. 27, 2009

Justice's school plans for the year.

Aug. 27, 2009

Joy's school plans for the year.

I really did have these finished before Tuesday morning. I just procrastinated blogging it. Joy's school stuff looks like: Grammar: First Language Lessons 3, five days a week, at this pace she'll have 3 and 4 finished by the start of fifth grade Spelling: Spelling Wisdom book one, five days a week, one lesson a week Writing: To start with, she's doing narrations and outlines of Aesop fables. About a month from now she'll move into Classical Writing: Aesop. Reading: lots and lots of real books Logic: She's starting Mind Benders, beginning book 2, doing about 2-3 puzzles a week. Vocabulary: English From the Roots Up, just one new word a week right now, will slowly increase to 3 a week as we adjust to the new school load Memory work: Daily practice. We're using the little boxes explained on Simply Charlotte Mason. She gets a fair amount of poetry, but leans toward pieces from history. She just recited the last paragraph of Patrick Henry's famous speech, The War Inevitable, this week. Penmanship: Just cursive practice, once or twice a week. Math: 4 days a week. MCP workbook right now. She'll munch it up in no time, she's been in it since spring. There's a random textbook waiting for her, and plenty of supplements on the web. History: Daily, every other week. Story of the World volume 1 will be her spine. Oodles of library and internet resources to flesh it out. Science: Daily, every other week, opposite history. She's in a bird book right now. It's written to her, like a living book, and is absolutely loaded with biology. She notebooks through it for the most part. When she finishes it's off to insects. Art: She really likes the Rod and Staff Artpacs. They're perfect rainy day activities and get her creative juices flowing every time. I want to get her something that teaches parts to whole with the masters, she has an interest in painting that I can't guide. I hadn't planned on adding logic and root vocab to her load just yet. She's familiar with those books because of her older brother using them, and begged for them by name. That's why they're such a light load too. She'd like me to increase them. After we've gone this way for awhile we'll reevaluate increasing those two.

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Aug. 20, 2009

Oh yeah, the preschooler!

Aug. 20, 2009

The first grade plans.

I'm not too far behind on finalizing plans. I mean, I can still procrastinate until Tuesday. Here's the plan Honor will be starting out with. I fully expect it to morph constantly as he grows. Everything is written in pencil for just that reason! Daily: memory work (poetry mostly) spelling reading lesson (reading primers, dr suess, etc. to me) grammar and copywork will stagger with each other math science or history (weekly rotation) For history and science I've put him on Joy's week. Joy and Justice stagger weeks with those two subjects. They move at such different speeds that keeping them in the same lesson was driving me mad. Then we ran into problems with shared resources being needed by both on the same day. I think Honor will handle Joy's speed just fine. Joy will have similar notebooking and extra reading assignments, just on a higher level obviously. Knowing Joy, she'll love "mentoring" him (mothering him? lol) on these subjects. I'm banking on that to help improve her own narration skills, but that's a story for the post on her plans. History. Once the big two finish up the remainders of the American history stuff we have, we'll roll history around to the ancients again. That ought to take a couple/few weeks still. When the rollover hits we'll put Honor into the mix (he's absorbing tons of the American history as it is). Science: Joy is in the middle of our bird book right now, I don't want to start Honor in the middle. I've got a pile of living books stocked up for him on all sorts of animals, and one on plants too. Honor, Grace and I will do read alouds with those until Joy is in a better place to slip him in.

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Aug. 15, 2009

Now for the lesson organizer

My inspiration for this project is from this blog ~ Life in the Garden. I borrowed her main idea and put my own spin on it. First big difference is mine is fabric, I just couldn't see paper strips being durable enough to last very long. Then I put my index cards in page protector sleeves, instead of laminating each card, and hot glued a bit of velcro to the back. They're still dry erasable, but dry erase markers smudge off too easy. I wanted to be able to write directly on the card, and we change our routines/minds so frequently I didn't want to have to relaminate another set two months from now. The big two have 12 cards, the little two have 8 cards. They don't have that many lessons! Stuff like "clean a hot spot in the living room" or "play a video game for thirty minutes" will be added. It'll be fun to surprise them with rewards between the work. They each picked their own fabric, which is in their typical color choice. They're slowly color coding themselves, which comes in handy at times! So here you have our variation of someone else's workbox variation. Yes, I realize the baby won't realize what on earth it's for, but this way I won't have to reverse engineer another set two years from now. From left to right it's biggest kid to littlest kid. I'll stick Faith's name or something up on hers so she doesn't feel totally left out. This is an example from Honor's so you can see how it works. When whatever is on the card is finished, it goes in the pocket. When his strip is void of cards, he's done for the day. Here are Joy's and Honor's without any cards slipped in.

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Aug. 15, 2009

I went organization crazy.

First up, our new memory boxes. The idea was completely swiped from Simply Charlotte Mason. We do a lot of poetry. Each kid has vastly different interests and thus learns different poems. Now picture one mom trying to remember which poems to help each kid practice and which old ones to review. See where this is going? Ours are a smidgeon different from the SCM version. We have daily section for the currently working on poem, odd, even, Monday through Friday, then four groups of numbered days. When the current poem is learned well enough to recite to Dad (our gracious audience), it goes to the odd or even section. The poem that gets bumped from the odd or even section goes to a day of the week section. When those are full enough to bump one out they go to the numbered section. SCM has numbered sections for every day of the month. These were the best index card holders I could find and didn't have enough dividers for that. I think this will work fine, and be very helpful keeping it all straight! Pink is Grace's, blue is Joy's, black is Honor's, green is Justice's. I figure they'll probably be dead and need replaced by the time Faith needs one, so I didn't bother picking one up to keep her matchy.

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