It's official: I have begun searching for next year's curriculum. This will be our third year homeschooling and with each year, there will be new challenges. I want to begin first by thinking about our first two years.
In my first two years of homeschooling my kids, I will have completed teaching both of them how to read. This in and of itself is a monumental task. It's funny how little I think about that or dwell on how completely awesome that is. I can really testify to the fact that teaching your children to read is about as rewarding as it gets. In the first two years, we will have used the library a lot, reading our way through countries all over the world and many other subjects too. We have learned the joys of using Internet resources and television. I have become an expert in learning styles, time management, and loving my kids through a variety of frustrating situations. We have joined a homeschool group where we feel we fit in well and is a great source of social interaction. We suffered through one big move in which we downsized our home by more than half, made some sacrifices, and learned what is truly important in life. We also experienced a period of grief when my father passed away and we learned many life lessons together.
Our first two years homeschooling were absolutely the best thing I have ever done for my kids. Homeschooling itself allowed us to relocate with relative ease and gave us the flexibility we needed when faced with a family crisis. In tough times, homeschooling is actually the easier option. I couldn't imagine having my kids in school and trying to cope with either of those situations. Sitting down and thinking about the various challenges we have faced, both great and small, I realize just how wonderful homeschooling has been for our family. Whatever I choose for next year, I know that I'm making a wonderful decision for my family to educate them well.
Showing posts with label Curriculum. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Curriculum. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Book Review: Singapore Math Primary 1A
My Background:
Let me begin this review by stating that math was not my favorite subject growing up. In fact, I hated it in elementary school. If math had been a breakable object, I would have smashed it to bits. If it had been a person, well, you get the drift. I struggled with math from about 3rd grade on. In my senior year of high school, I was in AP Biology, AP English, AP French, AP Government, AP Economics and Algebra II. All my other friends were in Calculus and had taken Algebra II their sophomore year. I obviously wasn't stupid; but I was math-handicapped. Fast-forward to college. I decided to be a captain of industry and changed my major to Marketing for a while and was required to take Trig and Calculus. Not only was it a requirement, but I had to make decent grades too. Thanks to a fabulous teacher (who didn't have my old transcripts in front of him) and a new-found confidence and determination, I discovered that I wasn't bad at math at all. I made a B in Trig and an A in Calculus.
As a homeschooling mom, I have learned a lot from my own personal experience. Whatever your experience was with school growing up, there have to be lessons you took away from it. Both types of teachers shaped how I teach. My university professor's teaching style showed me that even the most complex of subjects can be broken down and taught effectively. My third grade teachers' evil grin and method of sending me to the Principal's office when I couldn't stand up and recite my times-tables showed me a good example of how to create a mental block. I learned from both experiences.
My Experience With the Book:
At the beginning of the year, my first grader was to stay the course from last year: a spiraling method of math learning that she responded very well to in Kindergarten. By early October, I knew things weren't going well and I ordered a new curriculum that was a complete departure from what she had previously been doing. Enter: Singapore Math.
You have heard about Singapore Math before but may not know what it is and what it does. First and foremost, it was designed by The Ministry of Education of Singapore. I never thought I'd be using a curriculum from an Asian government in our studies, however, the statistics were impressive. Children in Singapore perform exceedingly well in math when compared to the rest of the world. I don't think other subjects could be taught in this way; but for math it works well and our own educational establishment could take a few tips from our Asian counterparts.
Unlike spiraling methods, you hardly ever repeat a lesson. There are some short flash-card drills to help in mastering some math facts (like simple addition and subtraction problems) but overall there is very little repetition. This seems a bit scary if you're used to the constant spiraling reviews in systems like Abeka. However, after completing Singapore Math 1A, I can tell you that it works.
The focus of the curriculum is mastery of the material. After my own experience, I understood the importance of truly grasping the operation behind the problems. Every method of learning that the units employ is to aide the child in mastering that step. I have to admit, some of the methods seemed foreign even to me, a grown up, who's been adding and subtracting for a while now! However, they make so much sense that I'm mad I didn't learn math this way as well. When you learn math in this way, it is easy to tell if your child is grasping the material. Your child will either get all the problems right or all the problems wrong. If the problems are wrong, we erase the answers and try the approach again. Once, it was simply a case of tired brain cells. We put the book down, came back three days later, and it was a piece of cake. That is the beauty of homeshooling.
After two months of struggle in the early fall before beginning Singapore Math, my 1st grader is now able to tackle problems like 18-7 or 20-10 with ease. We started Singapore Math 1A in November, right before the holidays, and are just finishing it. That means that we will be doing 1B from now through the summer; but this might be a great thing as far as retention goes.
My Recommendation:
I highly recommend Singapore Math. I am so pleased that we didn't wait to introduce it next year. I think starting on level 2 or 3 might be a real challenge. In fact, with an older student, I would go ahead and start back with level 1 and work quickly to catch up to grade level. Still, if your child is struggling in math, the extra work would be well worth it. Concepts my child is learning now will be applied in 4th grade. That means these are pretty important concepts and having a real understanding of them is key.
I also recommend purchasing the complete homeschooling pack, which includes the textbook, workbook and teacher's manual. The teacher's manual is the curriculum - you couldn't just get the workbook and get by. If you have more than one child, you only need to purchase additional workbooks later. The schedule in the front of the teacher's manual is a great guide but it moves pretty fast. You may need to evaluate your own child's abilities and slow it down a bit. Sometimes our math lessons take over an hour and they are pretty taxing. If you have the time, some of these lessons would be better tackled over 2 or 3 days.
Visit the official website to purchase Singapore Math.
How well do you like your math curriculum? What works for your family?
Let me begin this review by stating that math was not my favorite subject growing up. In fact, I hated it in elementary school. If math had been a breakable object, I would have smashed it to bits. If it had been a person, well, you get the drift. I struggled with math from about 3rd grade on. In my senior year of high school, I was in AP Biology, AP English, AP French, AP Government, AP Economics and Algebra II. All my other friends were in Calculus and had taken Algebra II their sophomore year. I obviously wasn't stupid; but I was math-handicapped. Fast-forward to college. I decided to be a captain of industry and changed my major to Marketing for a while and was required to take Trig and Calculus. Not only was it a requirement, but I had to make decent grades too. Thanks to a fabulous teacher (who didn't have my old transcripts in front of him) and a new-found confidence and determination, I discovered that I wasn't bad at math at all. I made a B in Trig and an A in Calculus.
As a homeschooling mom, I have learned a lot from my own personal experience. Whatever your experience was with school growing up, there have to be lessons you took away from it. Both types of teachers shaped how I teach. My university professor's teaching style showed me that even the most complex of subjects can be broken down and taught effectively. My third grade teachers' evil grin and method of sending me to the Principal's office when I couldn't stand up and recite my times-tables showed me a good example of how to create a mental block. I learned from both experiences.
My Experience With the Book:
At the beginning of the year, my first grader was to stay the course from last year: a spiraling method of math learning that she responded very well to in Kindergarten. By early October, I knew things weren't going well and I ordered a new curriculum that was a complete departure from what she had previously been doing. Enter: Singapore Math.
You have heard about Singapore Math before but may not know what it is and what it does. First and foremost, it was designed by The Ministry of Education of Singapore. I never thought I'd be using a curriculum from an Asian government in our studies, however, the statistics were impressive. Children in Singapore perform exceedingly well in math when compared to the rest of the world. I don't think other subjects could be taught in this way; but for math it works well and our own educational establishment could take a few tips from our Asian counterparts.
Unlike spiraling methods, you hardly ever repeat a lesson. There are some short flash-card drills to help in mastering some math facts (like simple addition and subtraction problems) but overall there is very little repetition. This seems a bit scary if you're used to the constant spiraling reviews in systems like Abeka. However, after completing Singapore Math 1A, I can tell you that it works.
The focus of the curriculum is mastery of the material. After my own experience, I understood the importance of truly grasping the operation behind the problems. Every method of learning that the units employ is to aide the child in mastering that step. I have to admit, some of the methods seemed foreign even to me, a grown up, who's been adding and subtracting for a while now! However, they make so much sense that I'm mad I didn't learn math this way as well. When you learn math in this way, it is easy to tell if your child is grasping the material. Your child will either get all the problems right or all the problems wrong. If the problems are wrong, we erase the answers and try the approach again. Once, it was simply a case of tired brain cells. We put the book down, came back three days later, and it was a piece of cake. That is the beauty of homeshooling.
After two months of struggle in the early fall before beginning Singapore Math, my 1st grader is now able to tackle problems like 18-7 or 20-10 with ease. We started Singapore Math 1A in November, right before the holidays, and are just finishing it. That means that we will be doing 1B from now through the summer; but this might be a great thing as far as retention goes.
My Recommendation:
I highly recommend Singapore Math. I am so pleased that we didn't wait to introduce it next year. I think starting on level 2 or 3 might be a real challenge. In fact, with an older student, I would go ahead and start back with level 1 and work quickly to catch up to grade level. Still, if your child is struggling in math, the extra work would be well worth it. Concepts my child is learning now will be applied in 4th grade. That means these are pretty important concepts and having a real understanding of them is key.
I also recommend purchasing the complete homeschooling pack, which includes the textbook, workbook and teacher's manual. The teacher's manual is the curriculum - you couldn't just get the workbook and get by. If you have more than one child, you only need to purchase additional workbooks later. The schedule in the front of the teacher's manual is a great guide but it moves pretty fast. You may need to evaluate your own child's abilities and slow it down a bit. Sometimes our math lessons take over an hour and they are pretty taxing. If you have the time, some of these lessons would be better tackled over 2 or 3 days.
Visit the official website to purchase Singapore Math.
How well do you like your math curriculum? What works for your family?
Thursday, February 18, 2010
Book Review: Galloping the Globe
I searched the internet for sources for ideas. One source really stuck out for me, Galloping the Globe. For one thing, it's a single book and the cost was very low ($24.95). Also, it was written for Pre-K through 4th grade (hence, it's very flexible). I have yet to hear anyone who just loved one of these big-box cirricula for every subject (and 2 different grades). So, I took a little extra time to put everything together myself. If this is what you want to do, Galloping the Globe is great. If you're looking for something that can get you through a unit without needing the library or other textbooks, this is not for you.
How it works for me:
The book is laid out very well, with an overview of world geography at the beginning and each continent broken down into its' major countries of study. For the month of December, there is also a "Christmas Around the World unit." For each country, you get a black and white map and black and white flag, both of which can be photocopied for your kids to color and put into their binder. The larger units come with additional aides like mazes and word searches to use. You also get a paragraph introducing the country and a list of books and ideas in most subject areas: geography, history and biographies, literature, language arts, science, Bible, and a list of activities you can do. You will need an additional math cirriculum and possibly grammar as well. I also used a phonics cirriculum for my PreK student. I will caution you, I couldn't find a lot of the books on the suggested list at my local library. However, this has never bothered me. The ones I did find were great and I easily supplemented other books to cover the topics I chose to do. The flexibility of this guidebook is that you can cover the subjects you like within the unit and also outside the unit. I'm using a separate science textbook but the kids like studying the animals within each country we study. This way, they get the best of both worlds. Do your kids already get Bible from another course? Then don't use that section. We decided to create a book over the year with captioned pictures from each country we studied. This is not a part of the Galloping the Globe cirriculum but it's the biggest part of what we do with the subjects they outline. Also, you don't have to cover each and every country. I skipped a few and I'm also adding a few that they don't cover.
The list of activities was very useful. Yes, I could have brainstormed a lot of these ideas myself without the books' help. But let's face it, how much easier is it to have a list in front of you to use when you're already the busiest person on the planet?? Plus, when brilliance strikes and you think of something extra or even better than what's in the book - you're not nailed down to anything so go ahead and do it! I was so proud of a few of my own ideas but didn't feel the pressure each week to come up with new and better stuff!
My recommendation:
The beauty of homeschooling is the flexibility you can have and I think that it gets lost inside some of the huge boxed cirriculums out there. That said, my kids are really young and the subjects aren't that complex as of yet. For us, using the library and getting our hands in what we're learning made this year really fun, positive and informative. Galloping the Globe allowed us to study the greater subject of geography in depth and gave us a sense of unity to the year. It was a great source of books and ideas for our year and I do recommend it for anyone interested in geography unit studies.
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Book Review: Draw Write Now
I purchased the complete set of Draw Write Now books by Marie Hablitzel and Kim Stitzer to add to our reference library and to use as a supplement to our year of unit studies. With a focus on geography, the Draw Write Now books add a wonderful dimension when discussing the animals and habitat of any part of our world. Although you can purchase each book separately at any bookseller, the complete series includes:
- On The Farm/Kids and Critters/Storybook Characters
- Christopher Columbus/Autumn Harvest/The Weather
- Native Americans/North America/The Pilgrims
- The Polar Regions/The Arctic/The Antarctic
- The United States/From Sea to Sea/Moving Forward
- Animals & Habitats: On Land/Ponds and Rivers/Oceans
- Animals of the World Part I: Forest Animals
- Animals of the World Part II: Grassland and Dessert Animals
Over the year and week to week, we have used between 2 and 4 books for any one unit so having the whole set has given us lots of enrichment. The basic set up of each book is easy for any child in kindergarten or older to use. The table of contents is pictorial and separated by several sections. I have used this as an introduction to looking things up in a reference book by instructing my 1st grader to find it on her own and turn to the page number.
Each illustration is broken down into simple steps that most children can copy. Sometimes we have had some struggles with the steps but you quickly learn when to step in and assist and when to just allow the child to work it out on his or her own. After drawing the picture, she adds colors and shading with colored pencils. We then pick 2 of the 4 written lines as a caption for the picture. Her pictures are drawn directly into a spiral-bound blank picture storybook which I purchased at a school supply store. If your child has much difficulty copying things step by step, or needs to start over frequently, OR if you aren't using a particular theme, you may want to use loose sheets of paper. However, it is nice for a child to have a whole book at the end of the year. So, if you go this route, I recommend having the pictures bound at the end of the term or year.
These books are not encyclopedias. You will need to find information about each animal or subject from other sources. We use the internet and our local library. The books have given us a sense of unity throughout the year and have tied what might have felt like a lot of random information into a neatly bound postcard of what we studied this year. The best part of the books is that she will have made a whole book of her own at the end of the year. She guards it closely and I'm the only one who has seen it. Unveiling day will no doubt be a really big deal! She wants to show it to everyone in the family including cousins and even some friends so this shows her level of pride she feels. This also made her take her work seriously and try her best, which is hard for some 1st graders to do. Knowing that everyone will see it someday made her really focus on what she was doing.
The books are easy to use and she has learned how to copy things step-by-step. It has improved her hand-eye coordination, her artistic abilities, and her printing. Today, she actually commented that, "the writing part is easy for me now. It used to be hard but now I'm really fast!" That shows me that the books have accomplished exactly what they were supposed to do. She has learned to draw real pictures and write real words now in first grade. In conclusion, the Draw Write Now book series is a wonderful source for any family or classroom. I wholeheartedly recommend them. After this year, I am pretty confident that my kids will continue to go to them on their own for help in drawing whatever they find themselves doodling.
Sunday, August 9, 2009
My Cirriculum
These are my final book selections for this school year:
Language Arts -
- Draw Write Now (8 book series ) by Marie Hablitzel ($62)
- Eats, Shoots & Leaves (Why, Commas Really DO Matter!) by Lynne Truss ($10)
- Primary Language Lessons by Emma Serl ($14.65)
Math -
- Abeka Math 1st grade ($40)
Science -
- Real Science 4 Kids Pre Level-1 Chemistry ($29)
- Real Science 4 Kids Pre Level-1 Biology ($29)
Social Studies -
- Galloping the Globe ($24.99)
Art -
- The Anti-Coloring Book ($10.40)
- Draw Write Now (see above)
Music -
- considering piano lessons for Abby
Foreign Language -
- an introduction to languages around the world through music
Bible Study -
- The Discoverers' Bible NIRV
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