Jul. 2, 2009 - Kindergarten and a Half

Category • Preschool and Kindergarten

DD#2 and I have been planning her school year for this coming year, which will begin for her no later than August (just after she turns 6).  Although she would be old enough to officially begin formal school this year, so that we could start AO Year 1, I think she will benefit from a more gentle and relaxed year of working on skills before starting in on the more difficult work of Year 1.

To that end, we've planned out a year's schedule with books that are not on the AO list.  I expect this schedule to be adjusted as we go along and see what works and what doesn't.  We may end up beginning Year 1 in January, or we may wait until our new school year begins next summer.  Officially she is going to be in first grade this year, but the material we're using I'm calling Year 0.5.

Here is our booklist for this year, keeping in mind that this list reflects where we are and the materials we have around, not necessarily the best list that could possibly be made in preparation for Year 1, and also that we read many other books that aren't scheduled.  I did not intend to create a formal list that others should follow, but I hope our schedule will help you in creating your own if you find the need.

• Bible (and Bible memory)
• Poetry
• Reading/Phonics
• Math
• Instrument practice (lap harp)
• Handwriting (there are YouTube videos where the author demonstrates each letter)
• French
• Soup Should Be Seen, Not Heard
• Stories of American Life and Adventure
• Flower Fairies / Burgess Flower Book
• Animal Stories (I have not yet read all of these, so can't speak for them yet.)
• Strawberry Girl
• The Great Bullocky Race
• Sarah Whitcher's Story
• Sarah, Plain and Tall
• Johnny Texas
• Little Lord Fauntleroy

To all of this we will add planning and cooking a weekly supper, learning household cleaning tasks, regular nature study, and possibly drawing lessons if I can manage to get them together (using Mona Brookes' Drawing with Children).

• 1 Comments • Post A Comment! • 10:05 PM

Jun. 15, 2009 - Ray's Arithmetic Teacher Guide

Category • Math

I have planned to use Ray's Arithmetic for our math curriculum since I first thought about homeschooling, more than 5 years ago.  Since we started actually using it two years ago, though, I've been struggling to figure out how it was intended to be used.  The books don't have instructions for the teacher, and the teacher guide that comes with the reprints, by Ruth Beechick, did not satisfy me.  I have several posts on this blog where I've analyzed Charlotte Mason's arithmetic recommendations and explained how I've adjusted Rays to fit those, but I still didn't think I was using the material as effectively as I'd like.  (Fortunately, my oldest has natural math ability so she hasn't been bothered too much by all this.)

On the Ray's Arithmetic Yahoo group I learned some time ago about the Eclectic Manual of Methods, which is a teacher guide for a variety of materials including the McGuffey Readers and Rays Arithmetic.  I found working from a pdf copy of the book to be off-putting so I never really approached it.  In fact, I didn't even look closely enough to realize that the arithmetic section of that manual was quite short .  (It begins on page 105 of the pdf copy.)  I did try to find a hardcopy, but they are few and far between.  (The only one I can find right now is located in Germany and would cost me over $20 including shipping.)

I finally sat down with the text copy and the pdf copy of the manual and created a Word document with just the arithmetic section.  I've included all of it except one long table of exercises that I just couldn't bring myself to type in--that part you'll have to go to the pdf copy to see. 

I haven't yet read through this in detail and tried to compare it with CM's recommendations, but from my cursory review while editing I would say that it generally does follow the same outline that CM recommended in Volume 1.  I'm sure I'll post more about this as I dig into it further--I'll be using at least years 1 and 3 of this guide very soon.

• 1 Comments • Post A Comment! • 9:51 PM

Jun. 12, 2009 - Advice to New Moms (or Dads) With a Crying Baby

Category • General Parenting and Home Life

Babies are each unique creatures and we can never know all that is going on with them. I'm no baby expert, but I've had four and none of mine were the easy, happy, eat-for-ten-minutes-and-sleep-for-three-hours kind of baby. I had one preemie with nursing issues, one high-needs, and two colicky (and the colic lasted for months).

Lots of things can go on with a baby unbeknownst to Mom, and the baby cries and Mom doesn't know why. It is never wrong to comfort a crying baby, but it is also ok to put a crying baby down in a safe place when you need a few minutes to yourself.  Slings are a great way to soothe babies and still permit yourself some freedom. (I particularly like the Maya Wrap, myself.)

There are lots of things you just cannot know with a baby. You cannot truly know what the baby is feeling physically or emotionally. If you are nursing, you cannot really know how much the baby is getting to eat with each feeding (unless you are weighing the baby with a good scale before and after each feeding - lol). You cannot know how much your particular baby needs to eat, and it can be difficult to determine *what* your baby needs to eat (or shouldn't eat). (If you're nursing, foods you eat can cause colic in your baby, and it isn't always the foods you'd expect--dairy and soy are big culprits, and soy is in just about everything. If you're bottle-feeding, it can be well nigh impossible to find a formula that doesn't cause discomfort for your baby if yours has a sensitive stomach.)

Do your best to try to find out what is causing the distress, but understand that you may never figure it out. Your job then is to comfort as best you can.  Pray, pray, pray, and seek out wise advice but don't be bound by conventional wisdom or the strong opinions of others.

With babies #2 and #3, I had to eliminate dairy from my diet. It was challenging but I did it because they needed it. With baby #3, I probably should have eliminated more than dairy but I was too tired at that point to think it through that far so we just toughed out the colic until he outgrew it.  With baby #4, a wise mom gave me some diet advice and I ended up giving up almost all my normal food and eating a severely restricted diet for many months--but it was absolutely worth it because I had a happy, healthy baby as long as I ate properly. If I didn't eat properly, I had a baby who screamed for hours at a time.

Whatever you have to do, you *can* do because God provides the strength for the challenges he puts in front of us. That doesn't make it easy, but at least we have that hope. When these challenges are behind us, we'll have new ones in front of us, but God helping us we'll make it past those too.

• 0 Comments • Post A Comment! • 3:07 PM

May. 9, 2009 - Is the Sky Falling?

Category • General Homeschooling

Conservative Christians and homeschoolers who follow politics at all are becoming more and more agitated about various bills under consideration and various policies being implemented at all levels of government here in America, but especially at the federal level.  Scary emails are forwarded letting us know that this or that change marks the end of our freedoms.

I refuse to be alarmed by these bills and policies.  They are but symptoms of a larger problem, and that larger problem has been around and growing for a long time, but is still ignored by almost everyone.  Until that problem is addressed, we may alleviate a particular symptom for a time but the cancer still grows below the surface.

Somehow, over the last couple of decades, our political class has slowly but surely become completely corrupt.  Votes are for sale, openly and in almost every case.  This applies to both political parties, by the way.  This corruption is the root of the ills that assail us, and unless it is dealt with, all these other issues don't matter.  The corruption is the result of greed, and most often takes the form of policies designed to repress or oppress those who can't defend themselves.  In general, we don't hear much about those policies unless they touch on a hot-button issue that's useful to some large organization for fundraising purposes.  (How many people are aware of or active in redressing the abuses in our prison system?  How many know what eminent domain means or are working to prevent its abuse?)

Homeschoolers have by and large failed to really try to understand and follow politics but instead have used the crutch of relying on "action alerts" from their favorite issue organizations.  As a result, we are not "wise as serpents" at all and are completely unprepared to tackle the huge issues facing us politically.  Continuing to focus on symptoms, which any single piece of legislation is, might delay the final reckoning but will not prevent it.

This applies to the evangelical Christian community in America also.  We aren't salt and light.  We aren't out there doing the hard work in the trenches that our forebears did when confronted with terrible societal decay.  We just wait for an issue and then agitate.  Alas, as a result we've maintained some appearance of morality externally but society has rotted within and now there's no perfume sufficient to hide the smell of decay. 

• 0 Comments • Post A Comment! • 11:03 PM

Mar. 26, 2009 - Can You Spare a Dime?

Category • Helping Others

If you are wondering how to respond to panhandlers, check out this article at Dollar Stretcher with suggestions for making "Friendship Bags".  The bags are filled with practical items.  Keep some bags in the car and hand them out when someone asks you for a handout.

• 1 Comments • Post A Comment! • 2:27 PM

Mar. 15, 2009 - Hope for Colic

Category • General Parenting and Home Life

This post should not be construed as providing medical advice or any advice whatsoever.  My only intention is to share my own experiences so that others might find some hope in their own situation.

I have had two colicky babies and two others with sensitive stomachs that caused severe spitting up.  Different people define colic differently, but more or less it's a situation where a young baby cries incessantly for several hours a day, day after day after day.  Most babies outgrow colic within the first few months.  In fact, some definitions limit colic to situations where the crying stops after three months. 

The best help for colic that I found came from another mom, but the best official help I found came from Dr. Sears.  He has lots of great resources on a page called "Coping with Colic."   He calls colic "the hurting baby" so that it is less easy to dismiss.

Just because colic generally goes away on its own does not mean it should be ignored.  Colic is a symptom, not a condition.  There are some high-need babies who cry unless they are held, and Dr. Sears distinguishes them from colicky infants, but I would argue that some babies who stop crying when held are still in pain; they just cope better when held.  I had one like that, and another who cried no matter what.

 I encourage you to read all of the information on the Dr. Sears colic page.  He has many suggestions for what may be causing the crying and what may help alleviate the discomfort.  I will tell you what worked for me, and perhaps it may shed some light on your own situation.

What I have found through my own experience, and sharing it with other moms, is that many, many babies do not tolerate dairy, soy, and sometimes a host of other foods.  If you are bottle feeding, this may mean that you will have to switch for awhile to Nutramigin, a special formula that contains neither dairy nor soy.  It's expensive, but you owe it to your baby to try it to see if it resolves the problem.  If your baby's stomach is extremely sensitive, even this may not resolve the problem completely, but ask your doctor to see if it's worth trying.  If you're nursing, the solution is easier and less expensive but much more inconvenient (but it's also more possible to completely resolve the problem since you can customize what you're feeding your baby).

Nursing moms who suspect dairy, soy or other foods might be causing colic must eliminate those foods (while still of course maintaining a healthy diet).  One of my spitters got almost completely better when I eliminated dairy from my own diet.  My first colicky child improved when I eliminated dairy, but I think I probably needed to go further than I did.  My second colicky child had terrible colic, along with sometimes copious spitting up and sometimes lots of gassiness.  Eliminating dairy did not help, and I didn't know of anything else to eliminate.  I saw the food list at the Dr. Sears site, listing possible colic-causing foods, but the list seemed daunting so I passed it by.  (I did find one site that claimed that nothing I ate could possibly be passed to the baby in any form that would cause a problem.  Please don't believe anything like that that you may read!  I am amazed at the nonsense about breastfeeding that is claimed by people who believe they are being scientific.)

Enter another mom, who gave me a spreadsheet she made with her own kids identifying forbidden and allowed foods.  I was desperate, so I followed her list and then modified as seemed necessary.  In the end, I ate rice, meat, pasta, lettuce, black olives, all-natural lunch meat, cheerios, homemade tortillas, raw almonds, rice milk, and that was about it.  No seasonings but salt.  No sauces but olive oil.   I stuck to this diet for months, and it worked wonders.  When I ate something I shouldn't have, the baby got sick and screamed.  When I was good, he was happy.  Figuring out what caused him problems took time and patience because there's a delay between mom eating a food and the baby reacting to it, and there's no way to be sure how long that delay is.  In a few cases, I eliminated foods I may not have needed to because it just wasn't worth it to try them.  Each time I ate a problem food, days of screaming was the result.

Different foods were problems for different reasons with us.  Any citrus, vinegar, or other acidic food caused severe stomach pain.  Any food high in fat or sugar caused gas, and this included carrots or fruit.  Yeast or foods made with yeast caused problems because yeast is often treated with an acid to preserve it (at least I think that's why it was a problem).  Dairy and soy made him throw up.

My second colicky baby did eventually outgrow his food sensitivities, mostly.  But it took a long time.  When he started baby food, we couldn't use most jarred fruits because of the acid used to preserve them.  Even at 15 months he couldn't tolerate hot dogs, citrus, and similar foods.  However, now he handles pretty much everything except maybe the hot dogs and similar foods with lots of chemicals in them.

So don't despair if you are facing colic!  There is a reason for it, and you may be able to find it and resolve it.

• 0 Comments • Post A Comment! • 8:57 PM

Feb. 17, 2009 - Ray's Arithmetic Status Update

Category • Math

We are still using Ray's Arithmetic as our math text, having just finished Term 2 of Ambleside's Year 2 with my newly 8 yodd.  We have completed addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, and I am extremely pleased with dd's understanding of the math processes involved.  She still needs drill to have fluency with the math facts, but we will continue to drill using Peggy Kaye's Games for Math and our math wrap-ups as well as practicing with real-life situations whenever possible. 

This year we have added a weekly lesson from Edward Zaccaro's Primary Grade Challenge Math.  This excellent, living math book introduces concepts like fractions and decimals and percents that we otherwise wouldn't reach for years, and it also adds an element of intellectual stimulation that arithmetic lacks.

One thing I would still like to do is to study the Manual of Methods that went with the original Ray's Arithemetic (which differs substantially from the Parent-Teacher Guide by Ruth Beechick that comes with the Mott Media set).

I also regret not having been faithful in implementing the measurement exercises recommended by CM.  They are not hard to do, but I just didn't make them a priority.  Picking those up again would be valuable, I believe.

• 0 Comments • Post A Comment! • 9:23 PM

Feb. 11, 2009 - Charlotte Mason Kindergarten

Category • Preschool and Kindergarten

If you are planning to do a kindergarten year with a five-year-old, I hope you'll study up first on CM's recommendations so you can plan a wonderful K year that meets your goals in a CM-friendly way.  I don't say this because I think there's some rule that says we all must follow CM's recommendations but because I have always found her recommendations to be wise and useful, and I am sure that these (related to the years before formal school begins at age 6 or later) are also wise and useful and so are worth keeping in mind.

If you want to study up, I'd recommend starting with these two links:

http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/lklivingston/593286/
This is my attempt to catalogue what CM says in Volume 1 about children under six.  The first part focuses on the List of Attainments, but read all the way through.  One important part:
"Charlotte Mason did not intend for children under the age of six to be free to play all day with no parental direction or instruction.  She gives us definite guidelines for the type of gentle instruction we should weave into our children's days."

http://www.amblesideonline.org/CM/1_5a.html
Start with the second section at this link, which covers the kindergarten, and also read the third section (which also covers the kindergarten).  Read carefully and see what she praises about the kindergarten and what she mentions as concerns.  Notice also where she says that certain aspects of the kindergarten (as a formal institution) are good but can be handled better differently at home--those are aspects you'll want to keep in mind as you make your own plan.

Think and pray about your goals for a K year.  What is its purpose?  What do you hope to accomplish?  What does your specific child need during this time (which may last for more than one year)?

It is absolutely possible to have a kindergarten year that follows Charlotte Mason's advice.  May you find just the right arrangement for your child!

• 2 Comments • Post A Comment! • 9:20 PM

Dec. 18, 2008 - Gift Giving with Kids

Category • Holidays

With Christmas right around the corner, I'm pondering the purpose of gift giving and how to teach that to my children.  It seems to me that as much as the gifts we give are intended to please the recipient, they are more importantly intended to convey our love and affection.  Surely that's the primary purpose?  Without thinking it through, that's how I've always approached the issue of having the kids give gifts to family members, and so the gifts have always been something the child has made or purchased with her own money.  Always the gift has been the child's choice, although I provide suggestions.  Sometimes they've been ugly because the taste of small children differs greatly from mine; mostly they've been useful because I encourage that. 

This year my two oldest (7 and 5) took it upon themselves to start Christmas shopping early in the fall, when I was thinking of Christmas shopping, and so with their own money they bought gifts for grandparents, aunts, and uncles.  I've been remiss this year in coming up with tangible Christmas gift projects for those they didn't buy for or for the third child, so now I have to scramble a bit, but that's my omission.  I'm thrilled that the older two thought of the gifts on their own, decided what to buy, and that they considered it important to have a gift from themselves to give, and that in their own way they even considered what the recipients would like. 

From my perspective right now, I think they've learned the gift giving lessons I would want them to learn.  Are there other lessons to be had here that I should be considering as well?

• 2 Comments • Post A Comment! • 8:49 PM

Dec. 8, 2008 - Advent Jesse Tree

Category • Holidays

I have previously posted our plan or schedule for observing Advent and then Christmas.  This year, since our kids are older, we're adding in a true Jesse Tree observance.  We use the devotions in The Advent Jesse Tree during breakfast each day, then sometime later in the day the kids use assorted craft supplies to make a symbol related to that day's story to hang on their "tree".  (The trees are construction paper creations taped to the shutters in the kitchen.)  I don't provide a lot of input into how the symbols should be constructed, although for my 3yo I do sometimes cut out a shape for him if he asks me to.  I also sometimes provide general suggestions for ways a symbol might be constructed, but mostly the project is theirs.  I'll try to post a picture later in the season, since the "trees' are turning out to be quite interesting.

UPDATE:

• 1 Comments • Post A Comment! • 11:09 PM

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