How I Do It - Althea

One of the many things I love about homeschooling, is the fact that we can all do it differently, tailoring our efforts to the individual needs of our own children and household.  Today you get to meet an amazing friend of mine, the mother of four (beautiful!) children - Lilly (7), Judah (6), Samuel (3), Juliana (6mo).  Here is a woman who unfailingly stands by her convictions, with grace and meekness of heart.  This is how Althea Does It.

Me:  Why did you make the choice to home school?

Althea:  My first year of college when I was deciding on a major, I considered the things I liked at the time; Biology, dance and a few other things.  Then I felt a calling on my life to teach.  I knew I was passionate about children and teaching them I also couldn't wait to be a mom.  That year I decided to home school because I could do what I had a passion for mothering and teaching.

Me:  What is your typical daily schedule?

Althea:  I don't really say I have a daily schedule, I like to say more a routine because for the first few years of homeschooling I tried to have a set schedule then fail at keeping one, try again and fail, try again and fail again.  I am also not a morning person as much as I have tried to force myself to be one, so I decided to give myself some grace in this point.  I have a routine, so that the kids know what is coming next and I don't have questions all day.

• Kids wake up and do their morning chores.

• Eat breakfast (sometimes Lilly will help her brothers get cereal, if I need more “grace” that day)
• I shoot to start school at 8:15-8:30.  Lilly and Judah start their video school and I feed myself and Juliana, this is my charge up time.  Samuel usually wants to do his “school”  which is either sit with his brother for a few minutes or I have a few books for him to work on, a dry erase book with letters, a sticker book or a coloring book.  He can also do some cutting practice if he wants. 
• The rest of the morning the older kids continue their videos, taking a break between the first 2 videos for about 15 minutes.
• About 11:30 they are usually done and have free time while I prepare lunch.
• About 12:00  Lunch
•  After lunch I have quiet reading time with Samuel and Juliana while Lilly and Judah clean up lunch and do any afternoon chores, they have free time until I am done with my littles.

• About 1:00.  This is my time to focus on the older children.  Lilly and Judah finish their videos, I grade papers and prepare for the next school day any materials they may need. We go over tests together and see and work on improvements.  I have one on one time with Judah to work on his reading and math.  On some days we do an art project.
• Finish about 3:00.

Me:  How do you organize your space?

Althea:  I do have a school room, I totally love it!  When we worked at the kitchen table I found that we were having to clean up and re-set whatever we were working on at the time for lunch or dinner. It also made for more clutter all over the house because things would migrate themselves all over.  With the school room I keep the mess contained, its easy to drop and pick up a project and I can always close the door to the mess!

There are a ton of organization tools out there from work boxes to file folders.  I tend to keep things as simple as possible.  We have a system of  a basket for their books and workbooks, a pencil case and a folder.  Their folder has on one side their work for the day and on the other their done work to be graded. 

I have to give a shout out to donnayoung.org.  They have every chart, graph, and list you need for home school administration and household organization.  I use it constantly!

Lilly, my third grader, is very easy to homeschool.  She can pretty much school anywhere in the house, although I would rather her in her own school space I have made for her in her room, again keep down that clutter!  

Judah, who has a brilliant imagination, is very fun to be around but can be difficult to keep on track.  He needs consistency.  I'm talkin he needs the same chair in the same place and school to be done at the same time everyday.  I found this out the hard way his kindergarten year.  He actually thought he was going to some sort of garden, got to love him.  I was pregnant at the time,  homeschooling a second grader, and had a toddler.  We were all over the place, doing a few things here and there and skipping many days resulting in complete amnesia of everything we had taught and many melt downs.  I finally figured out his trick:  Consistency.

Me:  What has been the biggest benefit that you've seen so far to homeschooling? The biggest drawback?

Althea:  The benefits of homeschooing have really been surprising to me.  When I first started it was all about what curriculum you were using and phonics or whole word, math u see or memorization.  It sent me in circles.  I found that in time, for me, homeschooling is not really about the academics, although there is plenty of that.  It's really about the home - building relationships, shaping hearts, magnifying strengths and working on weaknesses.  The curriculum is just a tool to bring out all of this.  

The other revelation is how homeschooling refines my character.  I am with these guys 24/7.  They are a reflection of me, good or bad, sane or insane.  If there is a character issue in one of them it is usually because they are magnifying me! Ouch!  I'm always having to search my heart, like all the time!

The biggest drawback and benefit is that these kids are with me ALL the time.  Grocery shopping, doctor appointments, out to eat whatever I always have a line of kids behind me.  I even labored at the hospital with my three oldest for four hours.  Not exactly my plan, but it worked out fine.  Its hard to be “on” all the time.  Some days it's just fine to take your time around Wal-Mart pointing at all the colors and looking at the toys, but sometimes you just want to get your spaghetti sauce and get out of there, and it's never that easy.  I try to keep mindful that things just take more time and I should always plan ahead and expect hold ups.  On the flip side I get help bringing in groceries, doing dishes, dressing the baby and toddler.  We are a team.  We work together to make the home!

The best advise I ever got was when I was overwhelmed with making sure my kids were getting everything they needed academically, I was comparing homeschool to the education they would be getting at a traditional school, you know, 5 subjects as well as music, PE and library.  A good friend told me that homeschooling is not about bringing the school to your home.  It's about the home, and you do school as part of the home.  As homeschoolers we tend to be over achievers and can be hard on ourselves.  I try to live by grace and enjoy my kids!

Folder Fun

This morning's post is by a friend of mine, Stephanie.  She writes two blogs, and has been a huge encouraging force in my own!  Stephanie was a fellow elementary / special ed major at TTU with me, and we dated and married our husbands at around the same time.  I love (and am humbled by) her amazing mercy heart.  She just made the choice to stay home and home school her kids, stepping down from teaching special ed in a public school.  Her ideas for home educational activities are amazing, and I recommend you check out her blog!  She has written a great guest post about 'folder work'.

filefolderfun.com
- awesome site for pre-made activities

File folder games are great for all abilities and ages. The are customizable to whatever you are learning about and whatever skill level your child or student is at.

So far we have:
-3 addition file folders
-lowercase/uppercase matching game
-matching colors
-sorting hot/cold
-sorting even/odd
-matching sound to letter
-prepositions
-biggest to smallest

In the works:
-put your name in order for the 2 year old
-matching numeral and number work
-matching amount to number
-matching basic words to pictures

The possibilities are endless. It doesn't take much to whip up vocabulary and spelling folders. It would also be easy to label things like the body, insets, spiders, whatever you are working on. Any type of sorting activities (vowels/consonants, 5 senses, animal kingdom) would be simple to put together.

The only downside is that they are a little time consuming to make, but they last for a while.

Some tips:
-if you can afford it, have them laminated. I used contact paper. It takes a little more time.
-velcro dots. Cutting and peeling off the backing of strip velcro is annoying. If you peel a big piece and cut, you end up with stick scissors.
-make one set of numbers and letters. You can use them for multiple games.
-I store my pieces in an envelope taped to the folder

Here is my 2 year old matching his colors:



In this game, I would tell him various prepositions and he would put the dinosaur there. To make it, I glued a flap down using a piece of card stock. Then, I put contact paper over the folder and used an exacto knife to slice through the contact paper.





Here he is ordering smallest to biggest.



And finally sorting hot and cold.



Here is my 5 year old matching upper and lowercase letters.



All done!



Here she is matching letter to the beginning sound. Note the same letters from the previous game.

From 2011-08-29

Here is my 6 year old working on his addition facts. This is a lot more fun than calling out math facts. He was very excited that he didn't have to write all of his answers down.



He told me he was mediating to find the answers. Who knows? You can see his fingers out, counting. I told him we would keep practicing each folder until he could do them quickly.



Here he is sorting even and odd numbers. This was a new concept for him, so we kept out the 100 chart. He caught on quickly.



Folder games take a little work to get started, but you can't beat the variety. It's a great way to get worksheet practice in with out having an actual worksheet.

'B' Book

One of the things I want to do with this blog is share what other people are doing with their kids.  This is a guest post by my wonderful friend Ami (visit her blog here).  Ami is mom to an ever-increasing brood, now numbering at 8, with four of those kids at home.  Whew!  She also lives a double life, as her alter-ego, our town's children's librarian.  Shhhh!  Don't tell.   

My five-year-old started Kindergarten at the local two-room schoolhouse this week. Eleven kids in his class - which covers kinder, first and second grade! Not quite home schooling, but in some ways the best of both worlds. I still miss home schooling sometimes, though – especially at this time of year, when parents are coming in to the library where I work, happily discussing there plans for the year and selecting materials for their first big projects.

Fortunately, I have a 5yo excited about school, and a precocious 18mo who is already counting and naming colors (the wrong ones, usually, but they are color words), so I can continue the fun at home without having to worry about burn-out.

Kinder at the moment is all about letter sounds, with the class spending 2-3 days on each one. That lends itself so well to a million different activities that I had to rein my thoughts in a bit. My goal was to reinforce the letter sounds as well as letter recognition, and to keep things personal and fun. We (meaning I) decided to make a ‘book’ for each letter – just printed pages put in a 3-ring folder – and then incorporate the letter into our regular activities as much as possible. Here is a bit of my son’s “B” book:

big boy reading a book

baby brother

blonde-haired, blue-eyed beast with bruises, bumps and blood (nice of her to help us out this way, wasn’t it?)

brains and beauty

Batman!

For our first book, I did a lot of coaching while we walked around the house looking for “B” items. As we go through the year, I’ll expect him to come up with all the examples himself. For right now I want to give him the general idea and make it fun, not work. He did come up with the blood for his sister, and I suggested the rest of the caption. I couldn’t resist!

Of course, it needs to become as much his work as possible, as soon as possible. He wrote the title on the cover (simply, “My B Book”), and circled all the b’s on each page. Last night, when we did the letter “C”, I also had him pick one word to copy. Eventually I will just print the pictures and have him write the words himself.

The book completed, we sat down to supper:

BBQ beef on burger buns with baked beans

That night at the fair at the fair, then, we looked for things that started with the letter "B" (bunnies, babies, boats, and our friend's black bull), had the letter "B" on them, or were brown, black, or blue.

I have to warn you, this can easily get stuck in your head. Daddy and I kept stopping suddenly to point and exclaim to each other, "Backpack! Big ball!", or to tell our teen, "Bad boys are banned!" (She was less than amused. Or should I say, she finds our babbling boorish.)

Some other simple letter activities:

• Cut out or draw a large version of the letter, and see what you can turn it into with a little artistry.  For example, the open part of the capital "A" can become the mouth of an alligator. There are lots of websites such as enchantedlearning.com with templates to steal. 
•  Make a separate shopping list of items that start with that letter, and put your little learner in charge of finding those in the store.
• Take a letter walk – as we did at the fair, look for things that might start with that letter. Bring a camera and take pictures to add to your book. Adjectives can be helpful here!
• Go through an old magazine and cut out all the “B”’s. Glue them on a paper at random, or into an outline of the letter.
• Write the letter in shaving cream foam, sand, the dust on the back of the car, wherever.
• Glue beans, macaroni, whatever, to an outline to create a tactile letter.
• Blow bubbles for the letter “b”. Make a marble maze for “m”. Try to find one surprise game or activity like this for each letter – maybe end with it, and keep them guessing as to what it will be each time (their guesses may give you inspiration if you are stuck!)
• Check out starfall.com – fantastic free web site that starts with the alphabet and moves up to reading stories, with activities included. Easy to use for those just learning to maneuver the mouse.
• Play with your food! In addition to eating things like alphabet soup or Scrabble Cheeze-Its (love those!), you can push your corn into an “L” shape, or bite your sandwich into a “C”.

Don’t try to do all of these with every letter, though, or your learner will burn out. Find one activity you do with each letter at the start (like the book), then throw in different other things each time to keep it new. Don’t feel like you have to go in order through the alphabet, either – consonants with only one sound (b, d, m, etc.) are of course easier to learn. If you are sounding words out, you won’t want to wait two months to get to the letter “t”! You also don’t have to teach every sound of a letter – short vowel sounds are fine to start with, as well as the ‘hard’ sounds of “c” and “g”.

Speaking of burnout, I’m always looking for more ideas, so I’m hoping to see some good ones in the comments. Let’s brainstorm together!