Homeschooling Dreams

There's a lot less time for homeschooling in first grade. I love Samuel's school, but I still hold on to that illusion that I am a homeschooler. He's in class 3 days a week, plus chess club and Awana. On Thursdays, he gets enough homework for Friday and Monday, but it's the school's homework, not mine.

I love his school. If I were a full time homeschooler, my curriculum would be very similar to their's. I still view myself as a homeschooler. I can't help it. I still faithfully read homeschool blogs and Yahoo groups. When will I give up my delusion?

I still have a booklist I put together for bedtime reading. This is fluid and other "fun" books get slipped in there. For instance, right now, we are reading the Burgess Animal Book, Story of the World, The Jungle Book (Kipling, not Disney), one of the A to Z Mystery series (Ron Roy), The Mouse and the Motorcycle (Cleary), and The Van Gogh Cafe (Cynthia Rylant - we love this). We don't read from each book every night. I let him choose which books, but not the same one two nights in a row, except for the A to Z Mystery which has very short chapters.

Also, periodically we will bring home another cool non-chapter book from the library (like a living math book or biography from Mike Venezia) or we read an old favorite in our home library. He also reads to me probably 4 nights a week.

So, I'm homeschooling, right? I'm homeschooling, but I'm not.

Fun Living Math Book

I'm not sure if this find was discovered because I saw it on someone's blog (if so, let me know and I'll give you credit and a link) or if I did some weird search on my library's web site, but this book came in for us and I LOVE it! The math is a little too much for my first grader, but I could see him being able to do some of the problems over the next few years.

The book is called Arithme-tickle by J. Patrick Lewis. There are 19 rhyming riddles that ask you to solve a problem. Here is and example using on of the short (and one of the easiest) riddles:

Dr. Nast said, :I'll give you three shots
to get rid of those hideous spots.
One shot every half hour." Goodness sake!
How long did those nasty Nast shots take?

The answer key is at the bottom of each page, but you need a mirror to read it!

When I see something cool, I like to share it, mostly because I [steal] get so many good ideas from reading other blogs. It's my "pay it forward".

First week complete

Despite the fact that we learn year-round and had already begun some books from our first grade list, this past week constituted Samuel's first week of first grade. His school does require a parent signature promising 11 hours of home instruction per week (due to the shortened school week/school year, even though they provide a full curriculum). Because we are parent-directed, child-led around here, I was a little worried about the homework/seatwork. Last year was really tough, getting him to sit still to do the work. It would often take him over an hour (split up by many breaks, but an hour total doing the work) to do work that I believed should have taken only 15 to 20 minutes. His attitude was much better this past week, though not perfect.

We've been reading several chapter books (including Story of the World, which is not really a chapter book) at bedtime in the tradition of CM-style savoring. One of those is The Mouse and the Motorcycle by Beverly Cleary, which we had listened to on CD on a vacation one and a half years ago, but he didn't remember it. Just last night, he decided to have me start reading The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling (parent-directed as this was among the choices I provided, but child-led because it was his choice).

I've also checked out some living math books which we'll look at this week. Tomorrow he starts an after-school chess club. They learn for the first half hour and then play for the second half hour. He's really excited.

New School Year

In July, I posted my final first grade curriculum plans. Hah! I should know better than to put the word "final" on anything. My outline is more of a fluid document and always has been. Well, anyway, Samuel begins Latin School (although they don't actually learn Latin until the 2nd grade) next week. Here is what we began last week in order to ease us into my plans for the home part of his education.

Christian Studies
He signed up for Awana Club. He will also be reading from "The Beginner's Bible". There is a strong Bible component at his school with most copywork and memory work relating to the Bible in the early grades. And, we attend church as a family.

Math
I still don't have a real plan for this because the living math way has been working for us. His school curriculum is Rod and Staff.

Music
We heard George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue on the radio on the way to the library so we checked out a CD and the Mike Venezia book on Gershwin. At school, he will have music twice a week for lessons in basic elements of music, including ear training, note reading and choral performance. We are debating whether to also join the elementary choir at church.

Reading
Finished up two books on his summer reading list, "Floss" by Kim Lewis, and "Wind in the Willows" adapted from Kenneth Grahame.

Literature/Poetry
We began "The Mouse and the Motorcycle" by Beverly Cleary.

History
I had not planned to do Ancient History; however, I found The Story of the World, Volume 1 on ebay for a good price (remember me mentioning fluidity in my plans?). This past week, we read the Introduction and the chapter on Nomads. I did a search for books to supplement this and hopefully some of them will come in this week. Tonight, I am reading him the story of Jericho from "The Beginner's Bible" because when the book mentioned Jericho as one of the first cities, he did not know about it.

Nature/Science
We have been going back and forth between reading books from the library about African animals and reading "Poor Mrs. Quack" by Thorton Burgess. We also made a trip to the zoo last week and the week before.

Extracurricular

Samuel will be going to his classical school three days a week this year. When the time came to pick outside activities, we had the choices of Awana, children's choir at church, tennis clinic, swimming, and chess club. I don't want to overprogram him so he never has a chance for creative play, so I told him he could only do one activity on a school day and another, if he chose, on a non-school day. I don't know if this was the right thing to do or not, but it seemed right at the time.

If it had been me, I would have chosen choir and swimming. He chose Awana and chess! Of course I don't even know how to play chess, so I guess I'll have to purchase a chess set and learn the basics so he can play/practice at home.

Changing how we do things

The answer to this question is "yes", I am too dependent on my library's computer catalog. :-)

So, I guess I will do things the old fashioned way. Tomorrow I am actually going to visit the library with a list of books and try to find them in the stacks myself!

Here is my list of readers for the next three weeks (after school starts, he'll be reading school reading assignments and/or The Beginner's Bible):
Mouse Tales by Arnold Lobel
Floss by Kim Lewis
Blueberries for Sal by Robert McCloskey
The Magic Fish by Freya Littledale
Gregory's Shadow by Don Freeman

Here is my list of literature read-alouds (for starters, I'm only going to check one or two out at a time):
The Borrowers by Mary Norton
Henry Huggins by Beverly Cleary
Homer Price by Robert McCloskey
The Magician's Nephew by C.S. Lewis

For History, I recently purchase Story of the World, Volume 1 (Ancients) on eBay. I plan to read a chapter or two a week, along with checking out other books to go along with those chapters. I won't start this until I get the book and the library online catalog is up and running.

Math and printing will primarily follow the school's curriculum; however, I will always be offering real life uses of these two skills for practice and enrichment.

Later on in the school year, I will add math history, nature study, artist and composer studies.

Am I too dependent on my library's computer?

I had planned on starting to request books from my literature and history book lists for first grade and beginning to read from them next week. Currently we are on a child-led tour of African Animals, which is science and also kind of geography. But our literature choices this summer has been pretty much child-led (and mostly twaddle) and he hasn't been interested in history at all.

Now to the point of the post title. We had severe storms and flash flooding in our town on Tuesday. The Main branch of the library lost many books, as well as electrical and the computer server. Now, not only can I not order new books, I don't know when the books (mostly readers from Samuel's summer reading list) we have checked out are due and I can't renew them because it's all on the computer.

They say that the server may be up sometime the beginning of next week. I am trying to decide whether to return all my books "just in case" or risk a fine waiting until I can check on the computer. I still want to start Literature and History next week, so I will go into my branch on Monday and look for one or two of the titles on my list.