As a homeschooler...

...I just had to share this part of an email that my Momb sent to me. (No, that's not a typo. She's my mom, and I like to call her Momb...I don't know why!)

"Let's face it - English is a crazy language. There is no egg in eggplant, nor ham in hamburger; neither apple nor pine in pineapple. English muffins weren't invented in England or French fries in France. Sweetmeats are candies while sweetbreads, which aren't sweet, are meat.

We take English for granted. But if we explore its paradoxes, we find that quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square and a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig. And why is it that writers write but fingers don't fing, grocers don't groce and hammers don't ham?

If the plural of tooth is teeth, why isn't the plural of booth, beeth? One goose, 2 geese. So one moose, 2 meese? One index, 2 indices? Doesn't it seem crazy that you can make amends but not one amend? If you have a bunch of odds and ends and get rid of all but one of them, what do you call it? If teachers taught, why didn't preachers praught?

If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat? In what language do people recite at a play and play at a recital? Ship by truck and send cargo by ship? Have noses that run and feet that smell? How can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same, while a wise man and a wise guy are opposites?

You have to marvel at the unique lunacy of a language in which your house can burn up as it burns down, in which you fill in a form by filling it out and in which, an alarm goes off by going on. English was invented by people, not computers, and it reflects the creativity of the human race, which, of course, is not a race at all. That is why, when the stars are out, they are visible, but when the lights are out, they are invisible.

PS. - Why doesn't 'Buick' rhyme with 'quick' "

Anyway, I KNEW there was somthing hard about teaching Reilly to read! I just couldn't put my finger on it until now!

WOW! - A tiny boast

Back in April, out homeschooling co-op offered IOWA testing for those who wanted to participate. Although our state doesn't require any standardized testing at any grade level, I decided to have Reilly take them just so I could get an "indifferent" opinion of how she's doing. Long story short, I was amazed when I got the test results! In the reading area (comprehension, usage, etc.), she's at a 5th grade level and in most other areas tested she was at a third grade level. (We just finished second grade) The only thing that she was "low" in was math, and I expected that to be the case because MUS doesn't do math like the school system does it. Even with that, it was at an "early" second grade level.

Anyway, I've always said that I think that homeschoolers feel too much pressure to have kids who are advanced academically, as opposed to just average, so I'd have been perfectly happy with everything just showing at a second grade level. But it's nice to see that whatever random method we're using for school is working, and working well!!

AARRGH!!!

Sometimes I swear that I'm going to pull my hair out by the ROOTS!!!!

I think that oftentimes, Reilly sets out to simply be as stubborn as she possibly can. To look at things in the most obtuse manner available. We had a very simple exericise the other day: look at the picture and put an X next to the sentence that best describes the picture. The picture was of a child in a bed with a mom standing over with her hand on the child's forehead. The sentence choices were
1.) Jenny had a cough so she went to bed
2.) Dan is a tough little boy.
3.) Dad sanded the wood because it was rough.
4.) She had enough candy for one day.

Reilly chose "Dan is a tough little boy." When I asked her why she chose that sentence, her reasoning was because, despite the fact that it was obviously a picture of a child in BED (which would lead some to the sentence with the word "bed" in it) the child in the picture didn't look like a girl and why would someone go to bed just because they had a cough? I mean, she doesn't go to bed when she has a cough. What?
I have such trouble teaching in moments like that because it's all I can do to not just look at her and say, "Are you KIDDING ME?!? LOOK AT THE STINKIN' BED, for crying out loud!" It is so unbelievably frustrating! I know that being detail oriented is a good thing, but how on earth can I teach when someone is so detail oriented that it gets in the way of LOGIC?!

And I deal with things like this on a daily basis, where I just want to scream because I'm faced with a child who is SO literal that she has a hard time getting things done because they don't make sense to her.

AAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

Yeah...no title. Because I'm THAT interesting.

We're kind of winding down things here at Morning Star, actually. Reilly is still (yes, I know...still!) trucking along with Red Book and I'm so proud of her. Yesterday, I realized that she would need to do an average of three "lessons" a day instead of two in order to completely finish the curriculum by the end of the year...otherwise, we were going to have to go into the first week of June. So, I showed her the calendar and told her what was up, and she readily agreed that she wanted to finish by the end of May and didn't have a problem with doing that many lessons each day. Now, it remains to be seen whether or not that will stick, but the nice thing is that as long as she averages three lessons a day, there will probably be at least a few days that she can do just two, or even one lesson. Regardless, she is really doing great at working on her own which makes me very happy. The added bonus is that she's starting school earlier than we used to, which means that we're not getting done at 2:00. Today she started at about 8:45 - we got a bit of a late start this morning because we were all cuddled up together, watching Carrie Underwood on YouTube! - and she got done just before 11:00!!

Today, I "officially" introduced Reilly to addition with carrying and had her do some worksheets from a 2nd grade workbook that we got from Sam's at the beginning of the year. I really felt like I was beating a dead horse with all the flashcards and things we've been doing to practice math facts and I think we were both getting a little tired of it. She knocked it right out of the park and completely understood what she was doing. Yay! I've not decided yet if I'm going to start Beta in this last month of school, or just introduce her to different things out of the 2nd grade Sam's workbook. Oh, we did some basic money counting, too. I tried to introduce this concept at the beginning of last year, I think, and it's amazing to see how much more she understands it now. Last year, it was impossible for her to switch from counting by 10's to counting by 5's and 1's and today, while it took her some thinking power, she was able to do it.

Poor Deco! He's just getting lost in the shuffle lately! He is so good about going in his room and playing that I tend to just let him do that so I can concentrate on Reilly. He knows all the letters and letter sounds, all his shapes and colors, all of his numbers by sight, so I'm a bit at a loss as to what else to teach him that's preschool! The only thing that he's lacking is writing skills, but he knows how to do a fair amount of his letters and I've just been putting that off as a kindergarten thing to do next year. Oh well, I don't guess he'll be any worse for the wear!

He loves playing with the magnetic letters and a cookie sheet and yesterday, Reilly told him he should make some of the words that are in the book he was looking at...so he made "people" with the magnetic letters! I said, "That's the word people!" and he said, "OH! Like the people of Ninevah!" (It was a Jonah book!) Funny guy!

School Stuff

I don't know why I feel like I need to title each post, even though the posts are about...school...seeing as this is my homeschooling blog!
Nothing really fantastic is going on right now. (Other than the fact that I'm apparantly choking on a pretzel!) How's that for an update? Ha ha, just kidding.
Sorry, this has become less of a post and more of a stream of consciousness....

Anyway, Reilly is doing really well with being more independent in doing her schoolwork. I decided the other day that we were going to change our morning schedule a bit. Previously, we would have breakfast, The Kids would do their Morning Routine (dress, make bed, brush teeth and hair) and then they would play while I showered and got ready for the day. The problem I was facing was twofold. First, we were constantly starting school at 10:00, which just puts us being IN school later, and second, despite giving a "we're starting school in 5 minutes" warning, Reilly would almost ALWAYS complain that she had just started whatever it was that she was doing, and then she'd be in a bad mood and school would start with an argument. Blegh! Not a good way to start the day.
So I decided that, given the fact that she's able to do her work much more independently now, we would go straight from the Morning Routine into schoolwork. She can get started on Red Book or something like that while I'm getting ready. It's been going pretty well so far, although I'll admit that we've only done it for two days.

I'm a little frustrated with math. Not the program, because I still think that MathUSee is awesome, but just with the fact that we're not progressing faster. I mean, she certainly has a better grasp on addition and subtraction facts than I did at her age, but I'm really, really TIRED of doing addition and subtraction facts!! I'm tired of reviewing them, I'm tired of trying to come up with new and exciting ways to practice them, I'm tired of having to re-explain for the five bajillionth time how to subtract 8 (or 9) from a bigger number. I'm ready to move ON, already!

OK. I'm going to stop now. This is just turning into a complaining post!

Today...

...we had a good, if short-ish day. I had to go to a store meeting this morning, which means we were all up and out of the house by 6:15. Once we got home, at about 8:30, it was a little bit hard for me to get up the gumption to start school. It's kind of cloudy and misty here today, and I would much rather have stayed in my jammies. But that wouldn't have gone over well at the store meeting.

But, we ended up doing school.

Each book in our language arts program lasts for 20 lessons...or is it 25?...I can remember. Anyway, the books are several chapters long and each chapter lasts for 5 days of lessons. At the end of each book, the kids do a project, the last of which was a diorama that Reilly made about the farm. Well, today we finished "In, Out, and About Catfish Pond" and I decided to break away from the project ideas that were given in the book because 1.) I didn't want another diorama sitting around and 2.) Reilly didn't want to write a sentence about each character and those were the gist of the ideas given in the book.
So, I told Reilly that she could make a movie poster as though the book had been made into a movie and she jumped all over that idea, although she decided that it would be a poster for a play instead of a movie. She cut out the pictures and colored them, put a little blurb under each of them on the poster (example: "Try on Beaver's new shoes...and meet the cast!" "Will Duck tell Turtle's secret?) and she made "coupons" at the bottom of the poster - one for a free popcorn and box of candy, one for a free kid's meal. She had such a good time putting it all together! If I get my act together sometime soon, I'll try to take a picture of it for the blog.

OH! And we always start out school with prayer, each of us taking turns giving our day to God. This morning, Deco says "Lord, some people trust in cherries...and even bananas or apples or even horses, but we trust in the name of God!" Somehow I think he misunderstood his Sunday school teacher just a smidge, but he's got the right idea!! (For those who may not know, there's a verse that says something along the lines of how some may trust in horses, and some in chariots, but we trust in the name of the Lord our God.)

I'm a Horrible Homeschool Blogger!

I don't know why I've found it so hard to post lately! Maybe it's because I continue to feel like we're not doing anything worth blogging about. No big projects, no exciting unit studies, nothing. It's just sort of...school. BUT, in a continuing effort to keep all three of you updated, I'm going to try to do better.
So here goes.
In a handy list format.

• Reilly is chugging along in Learning Language Arts Through Literature (aka Red Book). I realized that we were only on Lesson 15 (or was it 13?) of 36 lessons, so we've really picked up the pace so that we can finish by the end of the year. The lessons are divided up into five days for each lesson, so she's now doing two days each day and we're up to Lesson 18. She's also working much more independently, simply because I finally said, "OK, you can read the instructions. So read them, and do what they say, and then we'll talk when it says, 'Discuss with your teacher', OK?" It's working pretty well! The last section of the book is really intended to get them ready for the third grade book, which is much more independent.
• Math is not going as quickly as I thought it would. We just seem to be stalled with subtraction and I'm fighting not panicking because I really thought we'd at least be in the second book by now. I keep trying to tell myself that moving along is pointless if she doesn't know basic addition and subtraction, but we've not really done any money lessons or time or fractions...it freaks me out a little.
• On the math vein, I started doing addition flash cards every day, just to keep those fresh in her mind. I made flash cards on 3x5 cards so that we'd have all the problems, not just half of them like our other cards had. (For example, the ones I made had 5+3 and 3+5 so she'd get even more used to seeing the commutative property at work.) Well, I wrote on the cards with Sharpie, problem on the front, answer on the back, and we were just going like gangbusters. One day last week, she did all of the flash cards in seven minutes! We were ecstatic!! We called Troy, we made a huge deal about it, he took her out for ice cream that night. It was huge!

This week, I realized that she could actually see the written answer through the card. That was how she knew them so well. I was so mad at her! I understand that it's human nature to want to take the easy way out, but I was so disappointed that she hadn't done what she knew was the right thing and told me that she could see the answers. Oh well, she's just seven...I guess this doesn't necessarily mean that she's going to develop into a pathological liar or anything. Plus, after seeing how angry I was, I don't think she'll pull anything like that anytime soon!

• Declan is doing fabulous with the amount of school he's able to do when I'm not dealing with his sister. He can read (well, sound out) almost any CVC word that you put in front of him, which is fun. We do a lot of stuff with magnetic letters and our cookie sheet. I need to work on lower case letters with him, though. He can easily recongize 10 or so, so that's good, and he can write his name in all caps. I want to work a bit more on handwriting with him, but it's sometimes so hard to extract myself from Reilly needing my help!

All in all, things are going well. Reilly was actually sick today, so we didn't have school. She's finished all but the cover of her book for the Reading Rainbow Young Authors and Illustrators contest. I think I'm going to scan it before we mail it, so I'll see if it posts well.

Thanks for continuing to read my drivel!!