tonyandkirsten.org

I can hardly believe it’s been a almost month since I have written a homeschooling update post. Oh wait, yes I can!  During that month we watched the Olympics almost every night for two weeks.  And we did our taxes.  And it got warmer out and it felt like we were doing less school.  I knew I would fall off the weekly or even bi-weekly bandwagon at some point!   Now that I am about to start my quarterly editing work, I thought I better hop back on this bandwagon of writing update posts, lest it become a quarterly update of our homeschooling activities.

Here’s what we’ve been up to in Madeline’s Kindergarten studies:

Bible: We’ve been alternating been the 252 basics lessons and reading from “Leading Little Ones to God.”   This is proving to work out well.  Some of this has been unintentional, as we do tend to lose those little take home sheets from church every now and then.   But other days as I have read through the take home lesson from church, I felt like it didn’t really fit Madeline’s needs very well (such as one lesson that started off, “think about that teacher at school no one likes” or something like that).  And on those days we just read out of the “Leading Little Ones…” book.

Social Studies/Geography: We spent about three weeks studying China. It was fun reading fiction and non-fiction books together and watching a couple of videos.  We worked on a lapbook but didn’t finish it.  The siren call of first warm melty snow and then puddles for splashing made the idea of spending extra time inside coloring, cutting and pasting to be less appealing I think! I may have also chosen lapbook pieces that were too complicated and required too much of me and not enough of her.  I would really like to finish it up, just to say we did it.  We’ll see if that happpens…if it’s going to happen, it will probably mean me staying up some night to do most of it, just leaving a bit of gluing or coloring for Madeline to finish.

We moved to the continent of Europe this week, beginning our study with a lightweight study of Great Britain — essentially just reading a couple of books together.  We’ll study Ireland this next week in conjunction with St. Patrick’s Day!

Phonics/Reading/Handwriting: Madeline continued working on her Explode the Code workbook pages almost daily — this provides for her handwriting practice as well as working on phonics skills.  We also checked out sets #2 and #3 of the BOB Books from the library.  While doing BOB books set #1 proved frustrating to Madeline in the past, she is at the right stage in her skill development right now, and they are perfect! She is learning new phonics skills all over the place, and has said that working on the BOB books is her favorite part of doing school right now.

Math: We are continuing our quick progress in Right Start Math level A.  After making it up to lesson 27 earlier this week, I decided to skip us ahead to lesson 35 so we could continue studying addition — something Madeline is very excited about.  She is actually skipping WAY ahead on her own and trying to figure out how to add two digit numbers and about how the hundreds and thousands places work.  She asked if we could skip ahead to studying addition of numbers in the teens, but I am keeping her working on addition “the right start way”  with the lessons the book presents so we don’t miss out on the cool way this program teaches math.    The lessons we skipped covered geometry and money topics…we’ll go back and cover those after we either finish the addition lessons or when Madeline needs a break from that topics.

Science: Despite my best intentions, we still aren’t doing quite as much science as  I would like.  We did have a blast doing a “solid, liquid, gas” scavenger hunt around the house, and we started the lesson on Air.  We also took advantage of the nicer weather (and Madeline’s curiosity about things she was observing outside) to talk some about seeds and the coming of spring.

Today, these were the faces of homeschooling in the Gold House:

There should also be a picture of a Kindergartener with a frustrated look on her face, but I figured she might be even more unhappy with me if I took a picture of her in that state.

I usually try and stay positive in my homeschooling week-in-review posts.  Sure, I note what didn’t go so well, but it doesn’t necessarily capture the fact that we have some bad days.  Sometimes more than one of them in the same week.

This is going to be a short school week for us as it is — we took the day off on Monday since Tony had a work holiday for President’s Day and my mom also stopped by for a couple of hours.  And we had our co-op on Wednesday.  That left Tuesday, Thursday and Friday for school.

Tuesday started off okay with Bible reading and reading about Abraham Lincoln (a belated choice of reading material for President’s Day).  Then Madeline really struggled with her attitude while we were working on phonics.  I thought maybe the problem was the materials I was using — we were trying out a book from the library to see if it might work well in tandem with Explode the Code.  We never got any other school work done after that.

Fast forward to today.  I decided we would return to Explode the Code.  So, after Bible reading and a book about China (which Madeline acted much more bored about than usual) we pulled out the ETC workbooks, which Madeline has for the most part enjoyed the last two weeks.  Not so much today.  I think it took us over an hour to get through some material that should have taken about 15 minutes.  It wasn’t even a new concept — just reinforcing words we’ve already been working on.  But attitude is everything and hers was just not helpful today.  Luckily, she pulled through it and we did move on to working on Math for the first time this week.

Meanwhile, Kai did a bunch of screaming, as you can see in his picture above.  He did take a nap in the middle of our school time this morning (thank God for that!), but was still crabby whether in my arms or playing on the floor when he woke up again.  Erik, on the other hand, was making things difficult in his own way.  He wasn’t too interested in Tot School or participating with Madeline and I today.  For the most part he just played.  But he is supposed to be working on using the potty without needing “company”.  He says he needs help, but really the “helper” just sits and talks with him.  I did talk him into going to the potty a couple times without me needing to sit next to him the whole time.  But getting him to put his pants back on was another story.   As much as I didn’t want to take my focus off Madeline while she was having such a hard time, I had to spend time training Erik in what completing the process of using the potty means — a.k.a putting one’s clothes back on afterwords.

We finally made it through our morning of school.  The kids played sweetly together while I made lunch and then after lunch, including a nice tea party and playing house (for some reason Erik’s “house” was in the bathroom, and they were having a slumber party):

~Erik is 34 Months Old~

We’ve had some fun Tot School times the past couple of weeks! I think we’re finding a balance that works for us of Erik sometimes joining in to the best of his ability with what Madeline is doing, sometimes doing his own “tot school work” alongside Madeline and other times just playing and doing his own thing during our school time.  And every now and then while Madeline is taking a break or doing work independently, I can work one-on-one with Erik.  While I would love to do more of this, it just doesn’t seem like it’s in the cards right now.

Math is still Erik’s favorite subject to “join in” with.  And why not? Math manipulatives are so much fun, and he loves exploring numbers and counting:

Art is another favorite activity we have not done as much of lately, and Erik requested coloring (and then cutting) and painting this past week:

Erik and I did get a chance for just the two of us to play Cariboo this week:

We had our “Game Day” on Friday, and Erik participated whole-heartedly…even in games he didn’t fully know how to play, like sight word bingo.

It’s hard to believe, but it won’t be long before I am thinking up “tot school” activities for Kai.  Even now, I am realizing that the reason he has been whining more frequently during school time is that he gets bored! I am working on setting aside a few toys that I will only get out for him during school time.  He really likes manipulating the pieces of these jumbo-sized puzzles:

To see what other families are doing for Tot School, visit the weekly tot school link-up at 1+1+1=1!

We had a really fun week doing school this past week…here’s what we’ve been up to:

Bible: Last week I mentioned that I missed some of the other Bible materials we read last semester since we have been focusing on the take home lessons from 252 basics this semester.  Well, I “got my wish” this week.  I stayed home from church with the boys a week ago Sunday since Erik was sick…and the 252 basics take home lessons never made it into my hands.  So, we read a couple chapters from “Leading Little Ones to God”  and we did some lessons out of “My See, Point, and Learn Bible book“.  This book is more on Erik’s level, but Madeline enjoys it too…so it is fun to do with them together.

Math: We worked on lessons 13-16 in RightStart Math this week.  Besides practicing abacus skills, the main new concept we practiced was even and odd numbers.  While i had briefly mentioned this concept before, it was really fairly new to Madeline. We used math tiles and “dot cards” to help visualize whether each number between one and ten was even or odd:

Madeline also really enjoyed the games in this week’s lesson, including dot card memory, a “comes after” game that was similar to “war”, and dot card bingo.

Reading/Phonics: We continued using Explode the Code (ETC) books 1.5 and 2 this week.  I am still really happy with my choice on these books.  Since starting the explode the code books we covered double letter word endings (words that end in combos like -dd, -ss, and so on) and we’ve started covering some two letter beginning blends.  I’ve also been trying to find simple “easy reader” books from the library for Madeline to read.  She still needs some help here and there, but I can definitely see improvement in her abilities.  Here she is hard at work on one of her ETC pages:

Geography: We completed our study of India this week.  We did all of our planned reading (I linked to the titles in last week’s wrap up post) on Monday, then worked on our lapbook on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.  Madeline and I decided to do a double lapbook to cover the continent of Asia — with one folder each for China and India.   We got the India section of the lapbook about 95% finished.  We just need to add some pictures of the animals we learned about from India (elephants, tigers, monkeys, etc) and a picture for the title flap.  I didn’t take pictures yet — I’ll post pictures of the whole thing once we do the China section.

Science: We finally started “Building Foundations of Scientific Understanding” (BFSU)!  I seriously considered skipping lesson A/B-1, since the topic of organizing and classifying sounded so basic.  But, upon further reflection, I thought that it would be a good subject to discuss and be able to refer back to in the future.  Both Madeline and Erik really enjoyed an “observation skills” activity that demonstrated how it was easier to remember the contents of a tray filled with objects when the contents were sorted into various categories, versus when they were scattered on the tray randomly.

We also started discussing lesson A-2, which is on the states of matter (solid, liquid and gas).  This is a review for Madeline to some extent because we covered this topic last fall.   We’ll do a little bit more with lesson A-2 this coming week and possibly start lesson A-3 (on the topic of Air) as well.  Once we get past lesson A-3 I think we will try out the weekly schedule rotation I wrote about in my post introducing BFSU.

“Game Day”: Since we had neither a field trip or our co-op this week, I planned a “game day” for us on Friday.  We worked on educational games like those in our math curriculum and some sight word games, and we played a couple of board games from our game cabinet.  I also gave Madeline and Erik each a chance to make up their own game.  Erik’s game was called crown soccer and involved playing soccer in the playroom and living room with a tiny soft soccer ball:

And Madeline’s game involved some homemade paper dolls playing soccer:

“Game Day” was super fun and I think it’s something we will do again in the future!

I wrote a couple posts earlier about two curriculum changes we’re making for science and phonics.  Here’s what Madeline and I have been up to in general for the past couple of weeks during her Kindergarten studies.

Bible: We’re continuing to work on the memory verses from church and read through the take-home devotionals from the 252 Basics.  Since there are four of those per week and we usually only do 4 days of school per week, this hasn’t left a lot of time for other Bible readings, like “Leading Little Ones to God” (which I have missed the last two weeks when we haven’t read it).  I’m still pondering what to do about this.  The 252 Basics devotionals are short, but Madeline usually seems ready to move on to other subjects after we have finished one.

Math: We’re now through (I think) the first 12 lessons of Right Start Math level A. Madeline is improving at using the Abacus and being able to quickly enter or identify any number from 1-10.  Most of the other material in the lessons is still review for her, so we are able to get through one (or sometimes even a bit more than one) lesson per day.  She is really looking forward to getting past the review section and getting on to something other than just the Abacus being new and challenging.  But since using the abacus and visualizing quantities is so important to this curriculum, I don’t want to skip any lessons.  She’ll just have to be patient a bit longer. 

Phonics/Reading: As I mentioned in my other entry, Madeline finished Level 1 of Alphabet Island.  Yeah! We’ll be moving on to using Explode the Code books 1 1/2 and 2…and you can read more about that in my recent entry on the subject.

Geography: We started studying the continent of Asia, and specifically the country of India the last two weeks.  I had hoped to spend no more than two weeks per country that we plan to study. But due to only having seven days of school in the past two weeks with Madeline visiting Grandma during week #17 and restarting our co-op this past week (and some other distractions on days we did do school), we didn’t get as much done as I was hoping to. So, we’ll continue to work on India this week as well.  So far for our India study we have read the chapters in Hero Tales about Amy Carmichael (a missionary to India), a folktale and a couple of non-fiction books about what India is like today.  This week we will read another folktale (from this book), a picture book story, and a “Magic Treehouse” book that takes place in India.  We’ll also make a couple of lapbook pieces for a lapbook about the whole continent of Asia.

Science: Okay, so I slacked and we didn’t get science done.    I had planned to not do science during week #17 since we only did three days of school that week.  Then I held off preparing for science this past week until late in the week, and then by Friday we had other distractions and we just did the basics, skipping the science lesson.  We’ll remedy that this week and start having a block for science planned in earlier in the week!

For fun: Madeline (and Erik) really enjoyed making valentines almost every day this week!:

After quite a bit of research and thought (and Tony almost deciding to write his own science curriculum), we found a curriculum we thought would meet our needs: “Building Foundations of Scientific Understanding: A Science Curriculum for K-2″ by Bernard Nebel (BFSU).  You can also read more about the book on Dr. Nebel’s website.

We really wanted to find a curriculum that didn’t just package a bunch of facts with fun little experiments that may or may not teach much of anything.   Instead, we hope to guide our kids to discover “why we know what we know” when it comes to scientific principles.

Dr. Nebel’s curriculum is not set up in a traditional manner with daily or weekly lessons to be followed in a specific order each year.  Instead, 4 strands of scientific learning (The Nature of Matter, Life Science, Physical Science, and Earth/Space Science) are to be pursued simultaneously with some degree of freedom as to the exact order of the lessons left up to the parent/teacher.  There are seven to twelve lessons in each strand, and these “lessons” can easily be stretched into a week or two (or maybe even more) of learning as extra library books and experiments are added in.  Since much scientific knowledge builds upon earlier foundations, there is a suggested order within each thread of which lessons should come before the others.

If it sounds confusing…it’s probably because it is a bit confusing, and very different than most curriculum products.  A flow chart is provided of some suggested order to this buffet of learning and some research reveals that other users of the text have made up lists of the order in which they  plan to pursue the lessons.

I plan to take one of the suggested orderings I found on the web, and modify it a bit to give us a road-map of where we plan to go…while being willing to change that up as seems appropriate of course!

If we want the book to last for a couple years (and not rush through the concepts presented), it seems like one lesson every two weeks is about the right pace.  About once a month in between the lessons from BFSU,  I hope to add in another piece of science learning:  studying the history of science.   If Tony were to write his own elementary science curriculum (and who knows, maybe he still will someday), learning about the history of science would be integrated into it.  This is more than just learning a few facts about what scientists lived when and what they studied–it is learning about some of the foundational experiments in the history of science and what was learned through these experiments.   It’s another aspect of “learning why we know what we know.”   I’m not sure how much Madeline will retain or understand of this type of study at her current age, but we’ll give it a try.   As a tool to facilitate this, I purchased Janis VanCleave’s “Scientists Through the Ages”:

If these lessons turn out to be worthwhile, they should last us for about two years at the rate of doing them once a month.

I’m planning on attempting to set aside one longer block of time for science each week (though some reading of supplementary materials like library books would probably still happen on other days).  Our four-week cycle would look something like this:

Week 1: Lesson from BFSU

Week 2: Lesson from Scientists through the Ages (and continue to read supplementary books on Week 1 BFSU topic)

Week 3: Lesson from BFSU

Week 4: Another science or “health class” type of topic (I’m thinking things like nature study, studies of various animals and habitats, and maybe someday what ever one is supposed to teach elementary age kids for “health” — I haven’t quite figured that out yet!)…along, again, with supplementary reading on the previous week’s BFSU topic.

I wanted to start with our first BFSU topic this past week, and it didn’t quite happen.  We’ll do it this coming week for sure!

~Erik is 34 months old~

We’ve had three full weeks of school now since our three-and-a-half week Christmas break, but we are still looking to find our groove when it comes to Tot School…but we did have some fun times together this past month!

Before Christmas break, I was experimenting with either having some dedicated time for Tot School before starting school with Madeline for the day, or having some Tot School time after lunch.  We tried the “before Kindergarten” route a couple more times in the last few weeks, and I don’t think this routine will work for us.  There is a great deal of temptation to skip it all together and in the end it seems to reduce the overall time that Madeline is able to stay focused on her school work.

After lunch still holds potential, but usually both mom and kids are ready for some casual playtime and relaxation after lunch, there are chores to be done, Madeline wants free-choice read aloud time (as opposed to read-aloud time during our school routine, when I pick the books), and nap time comes around quickly.

So, I am back to attempting a dual-focus most days, at least for the time being.  I am finding that Erik is more and more interested in doing school “just like Madeline.”  That means including him in whatever way possible in what she is doing, or finding an activity that is equivalent in some way.

So, if Madeline is working on her phonics or handwriting, Erik likes having a something to write on too, whether it is a worksheet he just ends up scribbling on, or a pre-writing activity.  Madeline really enjoyed the Kumon “My First Book of Tracing” when she was about the same age, so I went ahead and got one for Erik. He really enjoys it, and it has been a good opportunity for me to help him learn to develop a proper writing utensil grip.   My only regret is not pulling out the handful of sports-related pages, laminating them, and then having him use the washable dry erase marker on those.  As it should be unsurprising to anyone who knows him, he has already covered over his lines several times on those pages!

Erik enjoys sitting in as we read our books for science and social studies as well (at least until he wanders off to play again), and asked for coloring and cutting to do while Madeline was doing her Antarctica lapbook. This portion of our school day is also when I’ve been encouraging Erik to do his other “old favorites” among our Tot School activities — preschool activity bags, puzzles, magnet scenes, board games, and so on.  One thing that is really perplexing is that he now refuses to use the Lauri stacking pegs/foam…this after we just got a large box of additional such pieces for Christmas! Here’s Erik enjoying a lakeshore learning “race car” math set, where he tries to sort the cars by wheel color:

Math is really the subject in which Erik has gotten the most involved with what Madeline and I are doing.  He is fascinated by the Right Start math program we just began with Madeline.  The first few lessons are on a really basic level, so he is able to follow along to some extent with what we are doing.  He asks to do math with us, and sits happily for at least half the amount of time that Madeline will spend at doing math.  The teaching method of the program relies quite a bit on the teacher asking the student(s) many questions as the concepts are presented, so I’ve been trying to ask the easy questions to Erik and the harder questions to Madeline.

During week #15 we did a unit on measuring, and this brought Erik’s favorite activity of the past few weeks: practicing pouring and transferring with rice:

I’ve wanted to do this for a long time, but never got around to it.  It easily kept him busy for 45 minutes straight! I think we’ll have to do it again sometime soon.

To see what other families are doing for Tot School, visit the weekly round up 1+1+1=1!

After our three-and-a-half week break for Christmas, we resumed our regular school schedule the week of January 11th.  I think the break was good for both teacher and student, and now we’re both excited to be doing school again.

Here’s what we’ve been  up to the past two weeks:

Bible: Our church started a new children’s curriculum called “252 Basics“.  The kids get take-home materials each week with 4 additional short lessons to do at home, so we did those and worked on her memory verse.  We also read a couple  chapters out of “leading little ones to God.”

Reading/Phonics/Writing: We resumed our Alphabet Island lessons, working on some of the “U” word families and starting the short “O” families.  Madeline’s handwriting practice was primarily working in her Alphabet Island workbook.  I was very pleased that Madeline retained (and even possibly improved) in her reading skills over our break!

At the end of this past week I looked to see how many lessons we have left in Book 1 of Alphabet Island, and we only have nine left! So, we’ll definitely be starting Book 2a this semester.  I am pondering taking a short break in between books to focus more on sight words for a few weeks, since I don’t think we have been giving them the attention they deserve as Madeline has been eager to study all the short vowel word families.

Math: As I mentioned in my post about our Kindergarten plans for our new “semester”, we decided to switch to RightStart as our new math program.  While waiting for it to arrive, we did a short unit on measuring.  During week #15 we used a small workbook on measuring with non-standard units that I picked up for a buck last year.  Since I don’t have a balance scale, we just did the pages on measuring length and perimeter. Madeline did a great job with this and really enjoyed it.

At the beginning of week #16 we worked on volume measurements, as in the type that are used for cooking:

This was super fun and great practice for Madeline (who wants to be working more independently in the kitchen).  Then on Tuesday we worked a little bit on measuring with “standard” units, a.k.a. inches on a ruler.

Right start arrived mid-week and we were able to work through about five of the lessons.  The early lessons are very basic material, so most of it was review for Madeline — she just needs to get familiar with the terminology, tools and other things unique to this program.  A neat by-product of starting with these very basic lessons is that Erik has been eager to sit in with us and “do math with mommy and Madeline.”  I’m sure it will be over his head soon, but for right now learning how to recognize groups of three or four objects, count out two beads on the abacus, or make a triangle with “tally sticks” is right up his ally.

Social Studies/Science: We’re studying the continents this semester, and we began with a two week study on Antarctica.  This worked out very conveniently since a study of Antarctica is as much as science study as anything else, and at the beginning of week #15 I still hadn’t decided on a science curriculum for this semester. (I did end up picking something — it will either get it’s own blog post or I will write about it next week).

For the literature portion of our study we read “Mr. Popper’s Penguins.” This book was thoroughly enjoyed by all, including me.  It’s very funny! We also read a stack of non-fiction books about Antarctica.  Most of our reading was done during the first week of the study, then we worked on our lapbook project during the second week of the study (see my previous post for more on that).

The next stop in our world tour of the continents will be Asia.  We’ll focus for 2-3 weeks each on two different countries — first India, and then China.

Lapbooking is something I’ve been curious to try out for a while, and I finally decided we would take the plunge and try it out with our Antarctica unit.  I’m not sure I can say it any more clearly myself, so here is a quote from the Cathy Duffy Reviews site explaining what a Lapbook is:

“Lap Books offer creative ways for children to record information they are learning and create attractive presentations of that information, as well as use the information to study. A Lap Book is essentially a creatively folded manila file folder with lots of smaller creatively cut and folded pieces of paper that are attached in different ways. This loose definition reflects the realm of creative options that might be used to create lap books.”

Madeline really enjoys crafty projects and I have to admit that I enjoy it too…so lapbooking seemed like it might be a good fit for us.

There are many free resources out there to download various pieces for making your own lapbooks.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a whole one about Antarctica that encompassed exactly what I was looking for.  I definitely didn’t want to start from scratch on my very first go-around with lapbooking, so I used printables from three different sources:

The Penguin lapbook at Lapbooking Lessons (free registration required to download)

A Penguin Lapbook by Angela Frampton

Various mini-books found on the Polar Animals lapbook page at HomeschoolShare

We also selected from creative-commons licensed photos on flickr to include, and use a map of Antarctica cut out from an old atlas I got for free recently.

And, here’s how it turned out:

We accomplished the entire project this week.  It turned out to be quite an undertaking to do the mini book on Penguins within the larger book on Antarctica. But, all told, we probably spent no more than 4 or 5 hours on the project, including my research and printing time.

Madeline really enjoyed helping with some of the cutting, nearly all of the pasting, some coloring and doing some of the writing.  She also dictated a fictional story to me (a mini-book that pulls out of the yellow pocket in the penguin folder) and helped me decide what to write in several of the flaps where some decision-making was required on our part.

This project was a great way to review what we learned about penguins and Antarctica from all the library books we read over the past two weeks, as well as learning new facts.  Madeline seemed to be retaining quite a bit of information as we discussed what was in each mini-book of our lapbook.

Madeline enjoyed this experience enough that she would like to do lapbooks for the other countries/continents we study this semester.  I would like to think we could do at least one for each continent! Hopefully by making these lapbooks, Madeline will have something to refer back to later and review or remind herself of what we have learned.

I think I can reduce my prep-time for future lapbooks having now done it once, and I can be better organized by being able to work on some of the mini-books as we read our library books (rather than starting the lapbook after reading most of the books, and having to pour back over the books to find answers to some questions we had). Maybe some of the places we study will even have “ready to use” free lapbooks already available…which would definitely decrease my prep time by not having to sort out and keep track of possible printables from a variety of sources.

If you want to learn more about lapbooking, a great place to start is this Squidoo lens on the subject.

We’re only perhaps about 40-45% done with our school year, but the Christmas break makes it feel like the half-way point.   We finally got “back to school” this week after taking about three and a half weeks off for Christmas.

We’re also changing gears at our homeschool co-op for the new semester, swapping main subjects from science to social studies.  Since my plan has been for us to study co-op subjects in more depth at home, we’ll be switching gears in both of those subjects as well.

Here’s a look at what we’ve been doing in the various subject areas, and what direction we’ll take for winter/spring 2010.

Math: We worked through about 75% of the material in Kindermath during our first 14 weeks of school.  I knew this would be a temporary program for us, lasting through the school year at most, and possibly only through the first half of the year.

After a lot of research and discussion with Tony, we decided on RightStart math.  It’s more expensive than a lot of programs, but I think it will be worth the investment (and like our phonics curriculum, most of the items are reusable…so assuming we’ve made a good choice, investments made now will pay off over time as we use the materials for at least three kids).  Since RightStart uses somewhat novel methods of teaching adding, subtracting and so on, I thought it would be best to drop Kindermath before I got too far into teaching Madeline one way of doing math, only to have to unlearn it with RightStart.  I ordered RightStart today, and so hopefully it won’t be long before we start using it!

Phonics/Reading: Alphabet Island is still proving to be a good fit for us (which I am very glad of, since that was my big curriculum investment in 2009).  It’s looking like we may finish Book 1 before the end of the year, in which case we will move on to book 2A.  Madeline is definitely making progress in her reading ability!

Handwriting: We’ve done a mish-mash of things, from name-writing practice to short copywork to a few lessons of “Draw, Write, Now” and various “real life” writing activities like writing notes and cards to send.  Between these things and the handwriting practice contained within Alphabet Island, I haven’t felt the need for any other formal handwriting programs.  I think we’ll continue along this same path in 2010.

Science: We spent our fall semester in co-op exploring science topics inspired by the days of creation in the Bible.  At home, we read along in a corresponding text book, as well as reading some library books and doing a handful of projects and experiments.   I was disappointed by the textbook component of our study.  It just wasn’t very “science-y”.   While I had at first liked the idea of linking in the study of the Biblical creation account directly with science, I think the textbook we used was too heavy on describing what the Bible talks about, and too light on teaching scientific principles.

Despite the fact that we are “back to school”, I don’t have a firm plan for our science studies for the rest of our school year.  I am intriguied by R.E.A.L. science.   Today I discovered “Building Foundations of Scientific Understanding: A Science Curriculum for K-2“.  And Tony has been talking about just writing his own elementary science lessons for us to use.  It should be an interesting adventure no matter which route we choose!

Madeline also received a microscope and a telescope for Christmas, so we may wing it a bit and try and incorporate using those two tools into our science study this semester.   Madeline loves experiments and we didn’t do nearly as many as I hoped we would in the fall, so doing more experiments would certainly be a winner with my student.

Social Studies: As we move to geography studies in our co-op, we will also move to studying geography at home. This fall we our focus was on history (mostly early US history).  We used parts of  “History For Little Pilgrims” and also read fiction and non-fiction from the library.  Using that textbook cemented in my mind the idea that using literature to teach history is a much better idea than using a dull textbook.  Madeline really enjoyed listening to me read historical fiction or biographies written by the D’Aulaire’s, while she got bored of me reading from the textbook after a very short period of time.  I think more literature-based history study is in our future!

This winter/spring, our co-op will study the seven continents, focusing on one or two countries on each continent and learning a bit about those countries as well as missionaries that traveled there.  I purchased Galloping the Globe to use as a tool to further our study of each continent at home.  We’ll plan to read books from the library, try cooking various foods from around the world, and maybe do some other hands-on projects to help Madeline learn about world geography and culture.  We may do some kind of semester-long project like making a notebook or binder with maps and other pages about the various countries we study. I think the trick for me will be to not let us get overwhelmed by too much detail and activity.  I’m sure we’ll revisit world geography and cultures various times through elementary school, so I need to remind myself to save some of my great ideas for when Madeline is a bit older. 

Bible: We’ll continue reading “Leading Little Ones to God” as well as doing the take-home lessons/activities from the new Sunday School curriculum our church started this month called “252 Basics”.

I’m excited to see what our semester holds as we continue with Madeline’s Kindergarten year!