Can I just say that it is SO much fun going to a museum with children who have learned some history? We arrived with an agenda: mummies and dinosaurs. But on our way to the Egypt section, we had to pass through the ancient Roman section, and oh, my! There were busts of some of the Roman emperors we had encountered in history. The girls had to have their picture taken with Emperor Septimus Severus because they love his name. (And they haven’t been introduced to Harry Potter yet. Just think of the fun that’s in store for them!)

In the Egypt section we had to take a picture of Mommy with a mummy, in honour of our day.

The girls dressed up as Egyptians.

And then there were the dinosaurs, of course. A photo shoot with T-Rex was an absolute must.

All in all, fabulous Mother’s Day!

Two weeks ago we decided to start our girls on a month-long moon observation adventure. This was prompted by an activity in RS4K Pre-Level 1 Astronomy, which we decided to tweak and extend. Jumping off from the RS4K lab notes, I created a moon observation worksheet for our young astronomers. We started our observations on the first clear night after that. It just so happened that our start date was a week before the year’s supermoon, and we all thought it was SO COOL that the girls were able to record that huge moon in their notebooks!

Of course, the moon isn’t always conveniently available for observation just before bedtime. Last night it was still below the horizon at 10 pm, when our girls are (or should be) sound asleep.

But fortunately when the moon rises late it also sets late, so early this morning we took the girls their science binders while they were still stretching awake in bed. The moon was still visible in the west, and we thought they could squeeze in a little astronomy before breakfast. (Depending on your perspective, the opportunity for learning at any time of day is either one of homeschooling’s great advantages or one of its most serious annoyances. As the ones doing the waking up today, we chose to see it as an advantage.)

Tasha and Charlotte quite happily tumbled out of bed and looked up at the moon. Then Tasha asked, “Okay, Dad, if I’m going to do this, will you at least play Morning Moon?.”

I think it was one of Hubby’s proudest moments: his daughters enjoying both astronomy AND The Tragically Hip.

Now in Level 3, our tile board is a lot busier (and messier) these days.

And we use the tile board regularly, but not as frequently as we did at first. For Tasha, it gets pulled out about once a week. (Charlotte, who is in Level 1, uses it several times weekly.)

Level 3 spelling lessons look more like this:

Each lesson (or step) has ten words and at least as many sentences for me to dictate to Tasha. I spend about two days on dictation for each step, simply because Tasha’s hands still get tired with a lot of writing. That means we’ve slowed down considerably, and are now doing about one step each week.

A typical week looks like this:

Monday: Review all of our spelling key cards and some of the later phonograms. Introduce the week’s lesson, which includes a word analysis (Tasha’s favourite part!).

Tuesday: If needed, finish the teaching part of the week’s lesson. Dictate 5 words and 3-4 sentences.

Wednesday: Dictate another 5 words and 3-4 sentences.

Thursday: Writing Station! This is a new feature in Level 3, and Tasha LOVES it. I dictate 5 words to her and then ask her to create sentences using those words. To make it challenging, I ask her to try to do it in 3 or fewer sentences. This is probably the highlight of our language arts for the week.

AAS continues to be a good spelling program for us. Although she naturally spells well, Tasha still loves to learn why we spell words the way we do. It has made her more confident when she writes her own stories and notes.

One unexpected bonus with AAS was how it could be adapted as a phonics program for Charlotte as she was learning to read. Jolly Phonics had introduced her to single-letter phonograms well, but for some reason the two-letter phonograms were just too much for her. (And I would have let it go, except that she demanded that I teach her to read.) So I started All About Spelling with her, picked up the related readers, and for some reason the phonograms clicked with her then.

Although AAS is highly effective, it is neither cheap nor effortless to implement. While I have no preparation to do ahead of time for a lesson, I must be there for the whole lesson. It just isn’t meant for students to use independently.

Nevertheless, I’d recommend it unreservedly to anyone looking for an elementary level spelling program.

A lot, it turns out.

• “So did the dinosaurs live before Adam and Eve or at the same time?”
• “God promises to make the world new. Will the dinosaurs come back then?”
• “What could God look at before the universe started?”

The latter question I ventured to answer with a short, succinct, “Nothing.”

Tasha tried. She squeezed her eyes and thought hard about Nothing. “Mom, what colour is nothing?”

“Well, without light or matter, there wouldn’t be a colour to see. So nothing wouldn’t have a colour.”

She glared at me and returned to her thinking state, eyes even more fiercely shut and her lips in a grim line. This was hard work. Finally she let out a scream. “Mom, I can’t imagine nothing without a colour!” We agreed we could use black as a stand-in colour for nothing, and she seemed satisfied. (Phew!)

Meanwhile, Charlotte had been busy with her own musings. “So, Mom, there was nothing before the universe started?”

“Mmmm-hmmmm.”

“No sun?”

“No.”

“No birds? No dogs? No trees?”

“No.”

“No houses? No tables?” (She was becoming excited about this concept.)

“Nope.”

“No … no eyebrows?!!?”

I wonder if the absence of eyebrows and the origin of the universe have ever been contemplated in tandem before?

I did learn from my mistake, though! (Pats self on the back.) Approaching Grade 1, I thought hard about her best learning environment (short, daily lessons instead of longer, infrequent ones), and our goals for her writing (clear, correct writing instead of creative writing). I was surprised and relieved to discover that, while we value and appreciate creative writing, the “creative” part is not something I need to spend time on during school.

So with those revelations in mind, I did some research, and discovered Writing With Ease. Created by Susan Wise Bauer (of The Well-Educated Mind), this grammar level (Grades 1-4) program is designed to gently, but thoroughly, teach children to write clearly using four short lessons each week. Students study and copy examples of excellent writing, and practice putting passages into their own words.

WWE Schedule

In Grade 1, a week of writing lessons looks like this:

Day 1: Tasha copies a sentence from a story or poem. We talk about sentence capitalization and punctuation.

Day 2: Tasha listens to me read a passage from a book (usually the same story as used the day prior). Then she summarizes (narrates) the passage while I transcribe. We read her narration together.

Day 3: As in Day 1, Tasha copies a sentence or part of a poem, noting sentence mechanics.

Day 4: Tasha listens to a passage and then narrates it while I write down her words. She then copies at least one full sentence from her narration.

It takes 5 to 15 minutes on any given day.

WWE Books

Complete Writer: Writing With Ease is a core text that outlines the philosophy behind the program, and then explains how to go about selecting copywork and passages for each level. The instructions are detailed enough that, if you want to choose your own literature sources, you can confidently do so for all four grades using this book alone.

However, if you’re like me and more likely to do a program that has everything laid out, you may want to look at getting the Writing With Ease Workbooks. There is a workbook for each level that has copywork and dictation passages pre-selected, along with brief instructional notes and questions.  Workbooks are available both as hard copies and as PDFs.

The workbook has made it so simple to implement Writing With Ease. As a bonus, the selections from a wide range of children’s literature have exposed us to novels we otherwise might not have encountered. After reading several paragraphs from a story, Tasha has frequently announced that we MUST try to find that one at the library. Right now we’re reading Pollyanna together, having copied and narrated from it a few weeks ago.

My only beef with the workbook is that the line spacing is far too large for the latter part of Grade 1. It’s not possible for Tasha to fit in a lot of the copywork sentences given as examples. I know that I could just use plain lined paper and write the sentence at the top myself, but (a) that’s extra work and (b) my girls like the pictures on the workbook pages.

A sample of a lesson where Tasha first narrated the passage, and then copied part of her own narration. She likes the artwork on these workbook pages.

The Results

Writing With Ease is not a fancy program, but its simplicity has made it the best possible fit for me and Tasha. I have enjoyed its ease of use and its focus on the basics of good writing. She has enjoyed the regular weekly rhythm and never seems to be frustrated by it. And by repeated exposure, she has learned how to construct a complete sentence. Writing a complete sentence is, to my mind, a good achievement for Grade 1.

And as for creative writing? She does that in her free time. Right now she likes to create comic stories with lots of speech bubble dialogues … all written, for the most part, in complete and correct sentences.

And then there’s science.

With science, I’m amazed at all of the wonderful things we COULD learn if only we could get to them. This has been a bit of a shock for me, because I love science. I earned a degree in Chemistry, for goodness’ sake! (I mutter that to myself frequently, especially when I’m facing a pile of science that hasn’t yet been done.)

I can’t put my finger on the trouble exactly. I have tried three separate programs, science kits, and make-my-own science. We’ve had moments of brilliant science fun, but not consistently enough to feel like we’ve done it justice.

Well-Trained Mind

We started the year out using recommendations from the Well-Trained Mind. For my students’ level, this meant studying animals. I was excited; they were excited. We picked a couple of animals each week, read about them, and then summarized what we had learned. I coupled this with Draw, Write, Now and it made for some fun days.

But … after a dozen animal studies, both the girls and I were getting bored with the format. They had this funny idea that science should involve more experiments and demonstrations. Fair enough; we changed course a bit.

Real Science-4-Kids

I chose Real Science-4-Kids next because it has the most readable text of any science book I had found, and because it includes all branches of science even at the very young levels.

We worked our way through Pre-Level 1 Chemistry and experiments, but I found myself getting frustrated as we went along. The quality of the text is very good; however, it’s printed in Comic Sans font, which makes me cringe. (I am convinced that Comic Sans should be outlawed as a printing option for publishers.) The accompanying experiments are … okay. There is one experiment for each chapter, and if I don’t have access to the “common household materials,” I either have to skip it or do some extra shopping. You can guess which option I choose. (Incidentally, I believe that the term “common household materials” should be banned from all advertisements for science books, because it seems I don’t have a common household.)

In the end, RS4K is a comparatively expensive program that doesn’t give a lot of flexibility when it comes to experiments. No alternatives, no ideas for extending the learning, nothing extra. I decided we needed something with a little extra.

Building Foundations of Scientific Understanding

Building Foundations of Scientific Understanding is outstanding. It is designed to connect the various science disciplines and offers great flexibility. Lessons begin with demonstrations and include them throughout. Additional, readable resource books are recommended for each topic. Written responses are kept to a minimum (unless one includes the “create a book about this topic” instruction at the end of every section, which I didn’t). And it’s probably the most inexpensive science program out there, especially if one orders the PDF version.

I believe that this is probably how science should be taught. We had fun with our BFSU lessons.

The hitch is (and of course, there is one) that BFSU requires a lot of work on my part. First, just determining what topic to study next demands a great deal of thought. There is a flow chart to help us with that, but it’s still a daunting chore for someone who has about 5 minutes a day to give to this sort of activity. Second, the lessons are demonstration-intensive: excellent for learning, but again relying on those “common household items” and requiring more than 5 minutes of preparation per lesson to set up. Third, there isn’t a spine text to read through, which I missed,

This was when I started to get creative.

BFSU with RS4K and a Science Kit

I decided to use the order of topics and demonstrations from BFSU, but read aloud from the RS4K text and purchase a related science kit that would include those items that exist in households other than my own.

We did this for astronomy, and we had some success at first. The BFSU demonstrations helped us understand gravity and the earth’s motion around the sun. RS4K provided steady, high-quality reading on the topics. And the first experiment in the kit (making a telescope) was enormously fun and successful. The second kit activity? An utter disaster, and it was the reason we had purchased the kit in the first place!

Next Up: Dinosaurs

I’ve decided to take a break from science curricula and dive into a topic that my girls love: dinosaurs. Unfortunately this means that I am going to be creating a unit from scratch using the books we have on hand or in our library, which means I’ll be spending much more than 5 minutes a day preparing for this.

However, maybe that’s what we need for a few weeks: time and effort from Mom. Maybe part of the problem with science has been that I’m spoiled by programs in other areas, which are mostly open-and-go. (Bless them.)

We’ll see. In the meantime, I have a dinosaur unit to plan. Which means, of course, that I’m diving into pre-history and into that most contentious of homeschooling topics: evolution. It almost makes me want to go back to animal studies.

Having had my coffee that morning, I picked up on the think in that statement and raised an eyebrow. She kindly explained: “I can only think I love you, because you know, this could all be a dream. So I can’t know; I can just think. And I think I love you.”

It’s not exactly Mother’s Day card material but, understood in context, it warmed my heart.

I wonder if she is ready for Descartes?

I’ve realized that homeschooling takes a lot of time. (Surprise!) Sourcing local food and cooking from scratch also consumes huge chunks of time every week. And life with little people just doesn’t leave many free minutes.

I have so often mentally composed a post, and then only been able to sit down to write well after my bedtime. Exhaustion doesn’t create a great frame of mind for writing, but it does for sleeping. Sleep wins every time.

I’ve been missing writing, though. I miss how it forces me to think about my days. I miss the fun of seeing ideas become words and then grow into sentences. And I miss the interaction that blogging offers.

So — no promises, even to myself, but I am going to try to show up here more often.

They tumble downstairs in their pjs and hunker down in front of the computer, asking to watch the news. Hubby and I have enjoyed and encouraged this, but … we’ve found ourselves becoming on edge with each newscast, unsure if the topics or images will be too disturbing for young children. Hubby has had to regularly skip stories (sometimes more than one in a newscast) containing disturbing content: videos of gunfire; dead bodies; graphic car accidents involving toddlers.

Today we discovered CNN Student News, and we think this may be the solution to our Saturday morning dilemma. We watched a 10-minute, commercial-free segment and were impressed. The newscasting and journalism were professionally done. The segment included a top international story, some youth-interest American stories, and a just-for-fun story at the end. None of the stories were selected for their scandal value.

The international story was particularly impressive, providing reaction from international leaders and an understandable backstory.

The storytelling was excellent, and it was accomplished without the disturbing content we’ve noticed in mainstream news. The video clips, for example, didn’t highlight gunfire in action or dead bodies. (Gunfire was later portrayed using still photos.) Opinion interviews in this newscast were conducted with articulate teens.

When I checked out the rest of the site, I saw that there were related maps available for me to download and, should I be so inclined, discussion questions. Did I mention that this is all completely ad-free?

I’m delighted to have found this. However, I am a bit sad that Canada doesn’t produce something comparable for our students. Or that our mainstream news can’t provide us with information without inundating us with graphic images that no one needs to see.

A few years ago, my husband and I picked up the Take-Along Guide Caterpillars, Bugs & Butterflies. (As an aside, this is a wonderful book for children and adults who want to learn about common insects.) One of the included projects, titled “Capture a ‘Bear’ for the Winter,” directs young naturalists in capturing a wooly bear caterpillar and keeping it over the winter. We’ve all been intrigued with the idea that we might be able to watch a caterpillar hibernate, spin a cocoon, and then emerge as a moth.

We had been waiting until October to start the project, as starting any earlier would result in us trying to keep alive a caterpillar that was nowhere near to hibernating. (In other words, certain death for the caterpillar, which isn’t the intended lesson in all of this.) Last week, the first week of October, we encountered a wooly bear in the wild and finally felt that we could attempt the project with some hope of success. Charlotte carefully carried him home for us, and we’ve set up what we hope will be a successful winter home.

The theory is that he will eat grass for a few days, go to sleep for the winter, and then wake up in the spring to eat and spin a cocoon. We’ll see ..