2014 summer reading, narration, and copy-work

I have used year-round home-schooling for several years.  There are some awesome reasons for doing it-one of them being continuous learning.  Summer education can be light, but very useful.

This summer I am having the boys continue with math, but dropping all other formal curriculum.  They will still be doing language arts and learning an assortment of themes, but it will be accomplished differently.  

They have joined the summer reading program at our local public library, and are reading books from a reading list that I created.  I require them to read 45 minutes per day, and  I am also having each one of them complete a form I prepared, summarizing what they have read. 

Just a few goodies from the summer reading program.  There was also a beanbag ball; it's around here somewhere.  They love doing this.  It gives the boys and me a lot of opportunities for some free/cheap dates together.

Justin and Jonathan are reading the same books and completing the same forms.  

Justin's summary: 

Tortured for Christ by Richard Wurmbrand

Jonathan's summary: 

The Door in the Wall by Marguerite De Angeli

Ryan is completing a different book list and form.  He narrates what he has read to me, and then I create a cursive writing practice sheet using his narration. 

Ryan's narration below -handwriting part not completed yet- from Treasures of the Snow by Patricia St. John: 

 I  used this site to create the cursive writing practice sheet:

  http://www.worksheetworks.com/english/writing/handwriting/handwriting-cursive-copy-old.html )

Here are Justin and Jonathan's first batch of library books from my list.  I was so thankful that the library carried these titles:

Mad Libs for Language Arts summer 2014

 Mad Libs are also a great way to practice parts of speech. We do these every once in awhile to break up the mundane.

Dictation:Charlotte Mason style

 quoted from Sheila Carroll
www.LivingBooksCurriculum.com

Are you a cracker-jack speller? Or, does the subject of spelling cause you to groan? Most people struggle with spelling.  Likely it is because they were not taught to picture the word before spelling it. 

Charlotte Mason had one of the best ideas I have come across of teaching children to spell by seeing the words before they spell them.  Miss Mason felt that the secret of spelling lay in the habit of visualizing words from memory.   She called this process the royal road to spelling.  If a child were a poor speller, she taught, it was usually a sign of too little reading of high quality literature, or skimming the text without the habit of seeing the words. 

Children can be trained to see the words they are reading. One way this is done is through dictation, usually from a work of great literature the children are reading. The method of dictating a passage to improve spelling involves seeing the word correctly spelled in the mind's eye and then ensuring that the word is written successfully the first time. The reason for the emphasis of having it correct the first time is that the opposite is also true. A misspelled word is seen incorrectly and is difficult to correct.  

Steps of a Dictation Lesson for Spelling Mastery

• The child is given a paragraph to read and study closely
• Then prepares by himself, by looking at any word he is not sure of, and then seeing it with his eyes shut. 
• Before he begins the dictation, the teaching parent asks what words he thinks will need his attention. Most students know but, if not, the teacher can point out a word or two.
• He lets you know when he is ready.
• The teaching parent asks for any words the child is not sure. She puts these a sheet of paper, having the child look until he has the picture in his mind. She then rubs out or places a piece of paper over the word or words.
• Then, the teaching parent reads the selection for dictation, phrase by phrase, repeating only once.
• If there is an incorrectly spelled word the teaching parent places a small sheet of paper over the word, so the child will not visualize an incorrect word. Then, the child goes through the process of visualizing with this one word until he can write it correctly. Most children have little difficulty spelling correctly using this method.  

Note: The preparation for the dictation should take about 10 minutes and the dictation about five.)

Justin researching

Justin doing research for his upcoming report about rocks (one of his favorite topics). 

Routine - Update

Yes, we are back to day shift around here. Yippee! I am happy to have an early morning routine instead of later.


Here is an update on some of the things we are studying:

Have I mentioned how thankful I am to have this blog? It is so nice to be able to document our home education activities with pictures... and with this type of ease! This looks so much nicer than my mundane handwritten journals!

• Science: We are still reading the huge book The Bee People (which I started for our bee unit study). Yesterday, we did an experiment about matter and watched videos that teach the concept.

Everything is made of matter. When you add energy to it, it changes forms. So, of course to begin with, we did the old frying of ice experiment.

Ice - solid

Add energy/ heat

Ice/ solid turns to water/ liquid

Continue the energy/heat and it changes into a gas

• History - we are studying about the early explorers who came to America. Columbus, Hudson, Estevanico, etc...

We are re-creating our time-line:

Last year, we tried posting it on cardstock onto the walls. Sticky tack doesn't always work well on walls, and I discovered a new way of doing it using brown craft paper. The boys love to draw, so I am letting them do the artwork. They drew the explorer's ships :-). The nice thing about the craft paper is that you can roll it up and put it in the corner!

The history book we use has a lot of fun activities. In the last lesson, it explained that the explorers likely used certain types of kn0t-tying techniques for survival (as most sailors do). Justin demonstrates the square knot:

• Language Arts: (Phonics, Writing, Language, Reading, & Spelling) is coming along well. The boys enjoy typing out their spelling words on the computer, and I think by using the computer they are learning 2 things at once (how to type and how to spell!). I have enough Swagbucks to get Justin's new Writing book free! Woo hoo!

The boys are also reading library books about their favorite subjects these days in their leisure time. Justin got a few Garfield comics and a book about vikings. Jonathan is interested in knights and enjoys reading to Ryan.


I am still plodding through Ryan's reading lessons. He is coming along very well. Maybe one of these days I can sneak a video of him reading without him knowing it.

• Math is mostly workbook style. We use supplemental workbooks and we try to do the supplemental lessons that they have in the back of their books.

Jonathan is working through Twin Sisters Addition at this point and Justin is also going through some supplemental exercises in the back of his math.

Math is a good subject for both of them. They do not seem to have any trouble understanding concepts.

• As far as social activities, we still meet with friend/s on Mondays. We either meet in our home, our friend's home or the library (and the park on warm days). One week there were nine kids running through my house. Lots of fun!

Update

With the move to our new house, the holidays (and all the craziness involved), it has been a little more difficult to update my blogs.

But I thought I'd take just a minute to update.

First of all I want to say how much I treasure the opportunity to home educate my children. To me, it is worth every minute of the time it takes. I treasure the time I have with my boys.

Even on the most trying days, I feel that those are opportunities for character development and relationship building.

Michael is doing a daily Character study with the family at lunch-time every day. It has been such a joy to sit back and watch him teach and lead our family!

The boys are still learning Scripture memory from the book of Proverbs.

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Justin is working with double digit divisors and long division, fractions, simple algebra, and converting English measures. In Language Arts, he just moved from learning about comma placement to possesive nouns.

Jonathan is focusing on improving his addition skills by going through Twin Sisters Addition workbook & CD. He is doing well; I just felt that it would help him move through his ABeka math more quickly if he can master addition. There is a CD with the workbook that is great for reviewing at bedtime.
In Language Arts, he is separating syllables and recognizing special phonics sounds.

Ryan is learning to read. We take it slowly and patiently. The patience is paying off because he is really starting to blend the sounds together. I don't want to rush through this. I want him to get it without regretting speeding through it.
He is not "there" yet, but he is getting there. I am so thankful that I have the opportunity to teach Ryan to read. I would not trade these memories we are making together!
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For Science, we are learning everything from insects to Creation Science (Debunking Darwinism).

The boys read history separately to themselves and then we also do unit studies. In our unit study, we just talked about the Indian mounds (burial grounds). One interesting mound that we talked about today was the "Serpent Mound". The picture in the book we are using is much better than this one:
http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/archaeology/sites/northamerica/serpent.html


I had forgotten, but studying that reminded me of the place in Alabama called Moundville (near Tuscaloosa) that we visited on field trips when I was in school. We may just have to go there for a field trip sometime ourselves. There are surely a lot of Indian themed historical places around here as well. I am looking forward to finding them!

We haven't done many messy Science projects lately because of the holiday stuff. We are still meeting with Stacie and Anna weekly.
Sometimes we play board games. Other times we do easy crafts. Another week I had several children over. They ran around in the fields, got muddy, and then came inside and baked cookies. I plan on having more children over soon to do some Christmas cookies. I am also hoping to get back into regularly visiting the nursing homes. We have several from our church in the same nursing home (as well as Nana), so I am hoping that we can make that a more regular activity again.

Well that's it for now. I hope I can do better updating from now on.

The rich man, the poor man, and the thief

Language arts story by Justin


Once upon a time there was a rich man, a poor man, and a thief. The rich man had cider, the poor man had gruel, and the thief had gravy. Well one day the thief stole the cider, and the rich man blamed the poor man!
But after the poor man went to jail, the poor man escaped and lived happily ever after.

I read this out loud and then laughed. Justin was giggling and said, "Well you know he wouldn't want to steal the gruel!".
Definition of gruel: a thin porridge. (Justin dislikes oatmeal)

Justin: Language Arts samples

For Spelling & Vocabulary, Justin gets his list of words from Noah Webster's American Spelling book. He then looks each one of them up in his dictionary (with my help) and writes the definitions. Later, he will make the words into sentences and stories. You can click the pictures to see them more clearly.
For Language, I read him a list of sentences and phrases (from A Beka Language 3). He must determine the difference between them orally. Then he copies the sentences and changes the phrases into sentences.

Spelling, Grammar, Dictation, Copywork

I think I mentioned before that I heard a great audio seminar about Language Arts from a veteran home-schooling mother. Both of her children are adults and have published writing, so I was interested in hearing what she had to say. She is a huge advocate of Note-booking for all subjects. I must say, I have to agree with her that note-booking is very beneficial! The first Note-booking project was for our bee unit study. Now that I understand more about the process, we are enjoying note-booking in the area of language arts as well. Notebooks are great ways to keep a nice record of the boys' work. (We are still using ABeka curriculum as core.)

One fun area of note-booking is in story writing. My boys love to write their own stories, so after they have written their vocabulary words with definitions (Justin has to look them up in the dictionary), they write stories about their words.

I wanted to share a couple of the stories here. I must say their stories make me chuckle!

By Justin (who likes short and sweet and to the point):

Once a man thought he was sacred! But people would warn him that he was not sacred. But he would not listen because he thought he was the best. One day he thought that he had the most glory! Then one day he drove right over a cliff! He had died.

By Jonathan

(He narrated the story to me while I wrote. Then he copied my writing - this is to keep him from seeing words misspelled even if they are his own words. Charlotte Mason recommends this):

Once upon a time, there was a dog. He liked briers and brambles. His master's name was John. John named his dog "BrierThorn."
One day BrierThorn ran away. Then BrierThorn saw a cat. He ate the cat for lunch! BrierThorn saw two dogs. He got into a fight with them. BrierThorn and the dogs had a boxing match; BrierThorn won!
Next, he went to a pizza place. He stole some pizza. "Come back here!" said the baker. BrierThorn said, "You can only have the crust."
Then BrierThorn went home.

The American Spelling Book

I have been waiting all week for my printer ink to arrive. It came today! (I only paid $11 per cartridge for my ink, and it is great quality!)
I mentioned in a previous post that I was going to use McGuffey Eclectic Spelling book, but after review I prefer Noah Webster's Speller.

Pictures below of our very own The American Spelling Book (better known as Blue Backed Speller) by Noah Webster. I found it on Google books, magnified it to 16o percent, and printed it (168 pgs) on my printer. I put it in a nice three ring binder that I had lying around, and it is ready to go!

Click the pictures for a close-up picture.

I know our American language has changed over the years, but I think this will be a great foundation for my boys.