Progress report

So. Lots on my mind lately and most of it's had to do with tweaking our homeschooling "plan" around here. Rather than go into long(er), convoluted tangents about the conversations that have been playing out in my head, let me just summarize where we're at...(please feel free to not read this...it's kinda boring :) ...but I know some homeschoolers, like myself, revel in reading about other people's plans, lol, and it also serves as a nice record for me)...

I'll start with math & science.

MATH: We finally started Teaching Textbooks last week. (We'd had some technical and scheduling difficulties in September, lol.) From a purely academic standpoint, it seems to be going fine and the boys definitely prefer doing their math on the computer. (And, so far, the levels we've got seem appropriate. Noah's in pre-algebra and Asher and Micah are both in math 6.)

In the "it really shouldn't have surprised anyone but it still caught me off guard" category, wow, my boys are perfectionists. Don't get me wrong. I knew this. Some would say I had it coming. ;) But, before now, in math, I didn't mark things wrong or give boys percentages...we just worked out the problems together until they were right. (This, btw, took a lot of time and is a good part of why we switched to Teaching Textbooks.) Anyhow, newsflash...certain youngest boys who miss say 4 out of 80 have the capacity to get really, really mad. Awesome. So. We've been working on our reactions...as in, it's all fine and dandy to want to do well (in fact, please do), but throwing a tantrum like a two year old because you're mad at the computer is not acceptable.

SCIENCE: Elemental Science is going pretty well. Last week, we completed a lesson about stars. To supplement, I used this book and had the boys drawing out the categories of stars on the driveway.

As you can probably tell, this was a hit. :) First, we measured out all the star categories on the driveway. (Well, *first* we actually had to make a quick trip to the Dollar Store to find sidewalk chalk since we were apparently out. Did you know that after August it becomes difficult to find sidewalk chalk in stores?)

After that, we reviewed the life cycles of different sized stars. Then, the boys decided to re-enact the death of O, B and A class stars...supernovas into either neutron stars or black holes. This was followed by the creation of white dwarfs after planetary nebula (???) for the smaller class stars like our own sun. (Don't worry. Even though I don't know what I'm talking about, the boys seemed to totally get it and took turns trying to explain it to me, lol.) 

And here's spelling:

SPELLING: We're still quite happy with All About Spelling but have changed our procedure up slightly for October...such that now all three boys each have three lists--one new one and two review lists. (Before, Micah had one list, Asher had that list plus one, and Noah had both of his brothers' lists plus a new one.) Also. I'm ditching the pretest thing because it just made boys grumpy and competitive and annoying to be around. ;) The idea, initially, had been to show how much they already knew and provide a way for them to see their progress by week's end. It didn't work that way at all. It just made them mad. See the above bit about perfectionism. Yeah.

So the new plan...having put a lot of thought into the purpose of teaching spelling in the first place...is to give them a printout of their lists at the start of the week, assign them to use those words in written sentences, dictate sentences to be written out (using words from their lists and review words) and then give them a week-end test. The key difference, though, is that I'm no longer collecting the work and correcting mistakes right away. I'm giving them the opportunity to go look up the words and make any changes they want before turning work in. I'm hoping for three outcomes...1) they'll learn the value of double checking their work before turning it in; 2) they'll actually learn the spelling of the words better; and, 3) they'll stop having fits when they get a word wrong. Thoughts? 

Continuing on with history & geography:

HISTORY: Both world and US history are going just fine and we're sticking with the original plan. All good.

GEOGRAPHY: We continue to use Expedition Earth for world geography and are still pretty happy with that. We recently finished up North America and have just two to go. For US geography, I'm tackling postal abbreviations with help from this fabulous freebie right now. We'll see how long that takes before we move on. ;)

And language arts:

GRAMMAR: Yeah, we keep changing things up here. We've decided that Michael Clay Thompson's program, though lovely, isn't working for us. Instead, I've been patching together my own stuff...focusing primarily on the basics for this year...parts of speech and sentence diagramming. Each week, I've been putting together worksheets and working through them with boys. It seems to be going okay for now.

WRITING: I decided that I wanted something a bit more structured. So. Each boy now has his own level of Winning With Writing that we've just started working through. (I've got levels 3, 4 and 5.) It's all a bit more workbook-y than I'd really like, but it's enabling me to have boys at different levels and working independently for the most part, while covering more than I was managing when I had them all working together.

READING: We're in our second month now of me assigning each boy a book and a guided book report (for example, last month focused on the main character, this month focuses on plot). It's going surprisingly well...boys are even making better use of their time to read (at karate and swim team and during lunch at LEAP). :)

So. Not a huge number of changes, eh? But. It's been a *lot* of contemplation lately. The biggest thing has been that I decided to start giving boys grades. (To date, we've not done grades...just worked things through together.)

This decision stems mostly from Noah. Now that he's technically a middle schooler, he'll be getting letter grades (rather than pass/fail) from LEAP...a first for him. Further, I'm needing some form of motivation, particularly for Noah. I need a way to encourage him to complete his independent work in a more timely fashion and with less nagging from me. (Honestly, the other two don't have this issue but I figure it won't hurt them to get them familiar with a grading system now and might help show them their progress.)

So. My grading system focuses largely on turning assignments in ON TIME and FOLLOWING DIRECTIONS. :) (I'm really working on work ethic, time management and "how to find the answers on your own" sorts of stuff lately...I feel it's more important that they have a strong foundation in those than that they know their parts of speech off the top of their heads, know what I mean?) And, I'm not grading all subjects...we're starting out with just math and language arts (but not spelling because that was just a whole can of worms, lol). I won't bore you with my table and system (yes, I got really specific...I have specific-minded boys, lol...if you're really interested, you can email me). So, we'll see how this all goes... :)