Jun. 5, 2006 - School's Out!
We finished our second year of homeschooling Friday! We joked about not being able to sing "No more pencils, no more books, no more teacher's dirty looks" because MBB is stuck with his teacher full time. I joked that he got an "A" in everything but "pencil keeping". We could never find a pencil, no matter how many I got out, and no matter what organizing schemes we tried.
It has been a good school year. We had a "block" schedule that we stuck to all year that worked very well for us. We all knew when we woke up on MWF that it was a math/language day, Tuesday was history day, and Thursday was science day. Even when real life got busy, we would do some piece of that days' subject. I didn't find myself rushing MBB through his work to get to the next subject the way I did last year. I tried not to have too many outside activities, but somehow we still ended up with too many...I was looking forward to the end of the year because I was tired of driving to gymnastics and ceramics and park day and the library and....I am glad there are so many fun things we can be a part of, but I may try to make it so only one or two days a week are "outside" days. One of my favorite days this year was last week when we didn't have ANYWHERE to go and stayed home. We worked on a science kit that we had neglected all year, painted flower pots for G'ma, and planted some flowers for the front porch.
MBB has really grown as a student this year. By the end of the school year, I didn't have to stand over him to make sure work got done. He could go in and do his math on ALEKS most of the time by himself. I would check in to make sure he understood, or to show him little "tricks", but he was mostly independent. At the beginning of the year he would argue and argue with me if he thought he had the right answer to a problem. He can't argue with ALEKS, so I loved it. It seems to work best to let him get in to the problems before I offer help. If I try to lecture first before he tries the problems, it doesn't work. He liked being able to read the history lessons online himself. I had him tell me what he learned and wrote it in his History Record Book, or he answered the canned questions at the end of the lesson out loud. One day he deliberately started adding "extra" information..."When they ran out of things to throw at invaders, the people in castles started throwing out servants..." just to see if I had read the lesson! We only tried writing them out once. It took forever and I got one word answers. For each block of history lessons he would come up with his own project related to the lessons. His ideas were much more creative than what K12 suggested! Science (We used Exlporation Education) required more supervision for the projects, but he could read the lessons and answer the questions better than I could most of the time. We both learned a lot from EE. I started to wonder if I was asleep all through high school physics....
Language was his least favorite subject. I tried to really cut down the number of worksheets. We did much of it outloud or on the whiteboard. Once State testing was over I have to confess we shelved the grammar stuff and didn't look back. He has a good grasp of the rules anyway...As I looked at Scopes and Sequences for the next few years it looks like things get repeated year after year anyway no matter what curriculum you use. How many times do we really need to learn what an adjective is?! Madlibs were much more fun. MBB reads so much on his own I let literature slide a little too by Spring. He already summarizes plots and discusses stories anyway. He compares stories to one another, or brings up fables and stories that relate to real life situations. He incorporates bits of books when he plays, so I know he understands and remembers what he reads. He has had kids play Encylcopedia Brown and the Boxcar Children with him at the park, He has invented new adventures for Paddington Bear. I think next year I may try having him come up with vocabulary words from the books he is reading, since the vocabulary workbook went by the wayside very early in the year (Hm....looks like workbooks are not for us!)
We ordered Sponge Bob Typing Tutor about halfway through the year. He has worked on his own through many of the lessons. He got on to a Lego Message Board the other day and typed his own posts. All the words were spelled correctly, the sentences were all punctuated properly...who needs worksheets? :) He is writing more on his own, and his handwriting is fairly neat. It is still much larger than I would expect, and not fast enough to keep up with his thoughts. Even when I wrote out what he said and just had him copy it, it was a slow process. MRB has started writing letters on her own, and I think MBB is now motivated to make sure his handwriting looks at least as good as hers! He got out the Handwriting Without Tears workbook on the last day of school and wanted to work on his cursive!
At any rate, this entry is mostly for me, so I won't forget all I've learned this year about teaching MBB. We plan to have a school free summer...though MBB said "I can't help learning!"
Comments
Jun. 20, 2006 - Sounds like a good year
Posted by Anonymous
Congrats to both of you.
I'm proud of you my godson/nephew
Hope to see you soon
Miss you all
Chris
