Lets Talk School...

  Well, since this is a home school blog, I guess I better talk a little about what we are doing right now in our home education.  I am only going to share what we are currently using and working with, otherwise I will be up all night typing!


Evan and his pottery bowl

   I am going to start with my youngest son, Evan.  He is 7 years old, LOVES anything to do with tractors, likes math and science and hates everything else about school.  
  His experience at the public school was very limited to 2 great years of playschool, and 4 months of kindergarten.  To him, school is nothing but an interruption to his day.  He is still learning how to read, which is the one subjects that daily brings him to tears.  He has the ability, but just doesn't have the confidence yet.  It is a slow journey for us.  Daily there is improvement, but it is taking it's sweet time.  Having said that, I am very proud of him for struggling along with something he hates to do.  I know in my heart that when it clicks for him, he will devour books by the basketful!  He loves looking at books now, but just has no desire to read them.  To help him on his way, I am using 'Teach Your Child To Read in 100 Easy Lessons' by Siegfried Engelman.  We are on lesson 66, and he is doing well.  Then there is reading from some very simple readers.  He does small spelling tests with words that we have already covered in the lessons, and we try to spell all 10 words every day.  I should say here that we don't really do spelling 'tests'.  I have a list of 10 words that he spells out for me every day, I just mix up the order.  I hated spelling when I went to school.  You know the way it was.  Look at the words and have a pre-test on Monday, then study the words all week, and the big test on Friday.  I always hated that method, so we just don't do it.  We are also workingon Five In A Row- Volume 1,but onl once in a while when the mood strikes.
  For math we use 'Right Start Mathematics' by Jaon A. Cotter, Ph.D.  This is an asian aproach to learning math with the focus on mental math.  All my kids are using this program and we all really like it.  It was, however, a bit challenging at first for the older kids who had to switch their thinking from what they learned at school.  We do one lesson each day and it comes with a ton of math card games the the whole family can do.  It also has a great geometry section and money skills.
  Science this year we are using 'A Reason for Science'.  We like this science very much.  It comes with a kit that has everything you need for every experiment in the workbooks.  It is a christian baised program that has related scripture readings for each unit.  You can easily expand on these as much or as little as you like.  Each lesson is ment to expand to a full week, but we can easily do the entire lesson in 1-2 hours, depending on how much we talk about the lesson and how long he experiments take.  Evan and his sister are both working in level B right now.  This works well for us since the lessons are geared toward 'reasearch team' learning.  Each level in this seires covers 4 main areas.  Life Science, Earth Science,Energy & Matter, and Forces.
  'The Story of the World, Volume 1: Ancient Times' by Susan Wise Bauer is the history curriculum we are following.  It comes with a book filled with stories and then an activity book that expands on what your reading.  There are naration exercise for the kids, coloring pages, and some really cool hands on stuff like making a mummie from a chicken!  (we didn't do that one though, too weird for me)
  Evan also has a few workbooks the he is doing.  These include: Explode the Code: 1 1/2, Printing Power by Handwritting Without Tears, Plaid Phonics-level A, and Complete Math Smart-grade 1.