Top 3 Posts of 2012

Here is an update on the 3 most visited posts of our 2012 year!

Number 3:  Homeschool Help: Saint Report Form

The Saint Report Form that I made has been a great help this year.  It gives the girls a starting point to investigate any particular saint.  Sometimes they do not have all the answers and then they get to do some further research to find out!  Usually I go to google images and print out a small image of the saint for them to add to their report.  Go to the post to download the saint report form to use in your homeschool!

Number 2:  Life of Fred Worksheets

We are slowly moving our way through the elementary series of Life of Fred.  Rose has zoomed through on her own and needs more of the books, but Daisy and Magnolia and I have not really made time for them this fall, so we need to get back to them.
The worksheets I created are just a "fun" way to give the kids some journaling pages to do their work on when it is "their turn"!  Go to the post to download the saint report form to use in your homeschool!

Recently I came across a great site that thoroughly walked through where to start your child with Life of Fred.  I do not know if it is endorsed by the author, but it includes the new intermediate books and I felt that it was a very thorough analysis.  You can visit the site here:  www.lifeoffredmath.com

Number 1:  Our Homeschool Room 2011-2012

We have way too many books.  I am trying to create a library for my 3 kids to keep them organized. Most of the time, my kids can not find things even when they are looking right at them.

Apparently I am not alone.  Homeschool moms want to be organized.  We need to be organized.  But how do we do it???

Expedit shelves by IKEA are hot.  Hot, as in popular, not hot.  They are versatile, they hold a lot of stuff and they keep things organized.  NOW if only I did not have so many things to organize....

Here are the old photos!

I tend to get bored easily and move my furniture at least every 6 months.  Here are some pics of the latest arrangement, (ignore all the clutter on the school table, otherwise the picture will never get taken.)  :)

Presenting:  Our Homeschool Room 2012-2013

Wall one:  Shelf 1: Moms bookshelf of teachers books, resources, books I am trying to hide from eager readers, etc.

Shelf 2: Rose's books by subject in cubbies and art supplies and books.

Wall 2:  Magnolia's books and toys and things to keep her occupied.  (This is not working and needs to be overhauled).

Wall 3:  Shelf 1:  Reference books, Timeline, File box with blank worksheets (like the life of fred journal pages, religion journal pages, blank maps, saint report forms, book report forms)  AND Daisy's books by subject.

Shelf 2: Our Cathechesis Corner with religion books and our family altar.  (Apparently the nutcracker represents the little drummer boy in our school room nativity).  Theoretically this altar changes with the liturgical season.....(the Christmas season was only over yesterday ;)  )

Wall 4:  Magnolia's desk and the student computer.

So there you have it,  the most popular posts of our year!  Thanks for visiting and please, leave a comment !  I love to read them and they make my day brighter!!!  If you have a blog, be sure to leave your address so I can visit you too!

All About Reading–Pre-Reading Level

 

I am finally getting around to my review of All About Reading’s Pre-Reading level, so here it is! 

This past year, Magnolia and I decided to go back to the Pre-Reading level to start our formal reading and phonics lessons even though she knew most of her letters and letter sounds.  I wanted an easy, low stress introduction to phonics for her and she was having trouble grasping the concept of rhyme.  I looked at the All About Reading website where they offered some good advice on figuring out where to start!  So we gave it a whirl.

Application:  The program was easy and truly ready to go straight out of the box.  I read the script, read out loud the stories assigned, detached and prepared the activity sheets for the lessons and put all the phonogram cards in a file box.   The only thing I needed to gather was some markers and paints occasionally.  Everything else was pretty easy to just find on the fly.

Lessons:  Each lesson consisted of an alphabet review, a new letter introduction or phonogram sound, a read aloud story or poem, and a game or activity to reinforce the lesson.   We moved pretty quickly through the letters as she already knew the letter names and spent about one day per each of the letter sound section. 

FUN:  Magnolia loved doing her “letter work” and would often get me up early to go down to the school room to have her own quiet “letter work” time.  She almost always wanted to do more than one a lesson a day.  Here is a picture of Magnolia completing one of her letter craft sheets and showing off the gallery of work from that week.

 

Here is a photo of Magnolia reviewing the alphabet.  This was a truly great part of the program.  The way Marie teaches the alphabet song is stresses each letter of the song, so that lmnop doesn’t become its own letter.

Here is a picture of Magnolia looking through one of the fun read aloud books.

Here Magnolia is playing the game “Get in the Wagon”, which was a great tool for teaching rhyming sounds!

My conclusion is that it was a great way to start.  We are looking forward to All About Reading Level 1 this year!

For more info on All About Reading go to http://www.allaboutlearningpress.com/

Curriculum 2011-2012 A Year End Review

We have wrapped up another year and I would like to take a moment today to review how this past year's curriculum fared.  (Apparently I never published this post last spring, so I will just go ahead and do it today, as it provides a good record for me.)

Having all my copies already made for the 1st Term worked really well, but term 2 and 3 got left in the dust, so this year I will try to plan a planning time for those terms.
This year, we had a 4th grader, 3rd grader and Preschooler at home and used a history based classical cycle studying the Middle Ages and Renaissance.  Adding in Catholic Charlotte Mason resources from Mater Amabilis and Maria Rioux's curricula was a good move and Rose enjoyed all the extra reading.  Daisy did not read as much as I had hoped, but I believe she finally just met her "breakthrough" book when she read "Wonderstruck" by BrianSelznick last week.  Since then she has been much more interested in reading!  YAY!

I found my biggest challenges this year were:

• dealing with a math breakdown midway through the year
• finding time to do MCT Grammar, Poetry and Vocabulary
• our Math facts were not known well enough
• Rose reading all of the history books before they were assigned
• getting into the school room at a reasonable time

GROUP LESSONS
Most of our subjects we did do together, at least for Rose (4th) and Daisy (3rd).
We started with PRAYER and a reading from the Saints for Young Reader for Every Day.  We also added the Angelus during Lent.  
We started using Calculadder math quizzes, but then used the copywork math facts sheets I created to work on the facts from another angle.  We have gone back to using Calculadder a few times a week this summer.

We also started our cursive writing from Handwriting without Tears.  It took us until Christmas to finish the first book.   We continued with the 2nd 
cursive book from HWT the second half of the year.  At this point both Rose and Daisy are pretty proficient with cursive.

Next comes Math.  We started the year with Saxon  Math 3 (Daisy)  and  Saxon 5/4 (Rose).     By October I knew things were not working and looked at as many options as I could.  We settled on using Teaching Textbooks 3 and 4.  Since we started at the beginning we were pretty behind most of the year, but it gave them a confidence boost in Math that I think they needed.  I am not sure what my verdict was though.  It was very easy for Daisy to forget what she had learned, but Rose seemed to do fine with it. ...
Magnolia used Math Lessons for a Living Education from Queen Homeschool and loved it!  We worked at her interest level, striking when the iron was hot and putting it aside when she was tired of it.  We made a good progress through some of the book and will continue with it this summer as interest peaks. 

So after our mid morning snack (that never really happens because we took so long to get into the school room)  we moved onto All About Spelling.     This worked really well.  We started on level one, and moved fast.  Sometimes doing multiple lessons a day.  We finished by Christmas and moved onto Level 2 in the new year.  
I loved everything about it.  The girls love it enough as long as we can get through the tiles part.  Daisy really needs the tile practice, while Rose does not.  So we will be doing it more separately in the future.  We will be sticking with All About Spelling for next year!

Our pre-lunch routine varies everyday, but here are the run downs:
Daily Geography -  quick 30 second question every day on something geography related.  This really did not happen after the first month.  Our geography was limited to History, which I think was sufficient for now.
Latin - Prima Latina (disclaimer I am a classics major, so Latin is in my background, but I will be using the course DVD's just to give my kids a break from me :)  Another bust, my kids hated the accent of the instructor and it became another argument, so we will try again next year.
Religion - We again used Faith and Life 3/4   respectively for our "religion spine."  We started the Holy Rosary Project in CHC's 3rd grade curriculum.  We also used many fo the living books recommended for religion by Mater Amabilis.  These included:
Life of Our Lord for Children , First Christians by Marigold Hunt , The Way of the Cross A Story of Padre Pio ,  Way to Bethlehem, Life of Mary  , My Path to Heaven ,

English/Grammar- We started using Primary Language Lessons  and Intermediate Language Lessons  by Hillside for basic stand alone work but found it duplicated the work we were doing with MCT.  We gave Michael Clay Thompson a try worked in the Island series  of books together this year at a slow pace!  It went well and gave us some quality time together but was easy to skip when people got tired.  I love how it focuses on basics but provides a complete picture of English grammar from the beginning.

Reading is an easy subject in our house because everyone loves to do it!  We will read something different every day.  On Mondays and Tuesdays we used our Catholic National Readers at the appropriate level.  These are chock full of short stories rich with Catholic tradition, morality, virtues and values.  On Wednesdays they have free reading time in a book of their choice.  On Thursdays we read from Catholic Stories for Boys and Girls (and More) , Rare Catholic Stories  and Little Apostle on Crutches and Fr. Brown Reader.  On Fridays we are reading from an assigned book from the Mater Amabilis and Maria Rioux reading lists
Our favorites were:
Both Girls: St. Francis, A Sword in the Tree, Baby Island, Joan of Arc.
Daisy: 100 Dresses, Family Under the Bridge, Children of Noisy Village.
Rose: Beorn the Proud, Swallows and Amazons, Son of Charlemagne, Pagoo 
 and The Whipping Boy.

Magnolia's reading program started with All About Reading at the Pre-Reading level.  We loved our low-key time with Ziggy the Zebra and she made great strides in learning to read!
History is cycle 2 Middle Ages and Renaissance.  Our spine is Story of the World vol. 2  with Old World and America  tied in (a post will follow soon with how to match them up).  I am using Paige's history plans from http://www.elementalscience.com/.  We initially planned on trying Connect with History, but it seemed a little dry for me and the kids, so we went back to Story of the World, which they really enjoy and adding in Catholic supplementary books and Old World and America.

Science:  This year we used Paige's plans for Astronomy and Earth Science from Elemental Science.  This is a first for us, but I love how Paige breaks everything down into a simple and easy plan.  We did not make it to the Cincinnati Observatory Kids astronomy group, but did see Hubble at the Museum Center.  OH well!  Science needs a rework for next year.

Art: We are using Option 3 of Harmony Art Plans Grade 2 Middle Ages and Renaissance  along with Artistic Pursuits Grades 1-3 Books 1 and 2.  I loved these plans, but unfortunately had a tough time working them in.  I will try again next year to simplify and get it done!

Family Read Alouds took place at night before bed.  This year we will enjoyed:
Pollyanna, Arabian Nights, St. George and the Dragon, Knights of the Round Table, Adam of the Road, Castle Diary, The Door in the Wall, Robin Hood.

Physical Education:  Rose loved volleyball this year and ended up not finishing Ultimate Frisbee in the Fall, mostly due to being over committed with  Girls on the Run, which was also very successful.
Daisy spent 9  hours in the gym training for gymnastics at level 4 every week.
Magnolia also enjoyed gymnastics and pre-ballet and participated in her first dance recital.

The girls also somehow find time for American Heritage Girls and our church youth group!

So there it is!  A year in a nutshell.