School Time

Ok... so we are all in school except daddy. Mommy has homework mainly on Tuesdays and Thursdays when I work from home (which still needs to be done today, but I'm not thinking about that) and the boys are doing their lessons one at a time because they tend to distract each other. So instead of school time taking 2 hours. It runs me about 5 hours to complete all three of them. I'm sure I need to be more disciplined with them and make them concentrate on their own subjects at the same time, but it isn't all that easy. We use various tools to accomplish their educational goals. Our main tools are Hooked on Phonics, Kumon books and Mommy's self made blend of curriculum based in Accelerated Christian Education (ACE) principles.

Just in case you wanted to know... School time is laid back around these parts. They get up around 9:00 AM, eat, watch a couple of shows and school time starts around 10 or 11 depending on how much e-mail I'm answering . I try to switch up who goes first usually. Quinny is the shortest session so sometimes its nice to get his stuff out of the way, but he is still my late sleeper, so sometimes he still groggy from sleep. Since Ry is the oldest and has more subjects to cover he usually goes first because it takes about 3 hours for him alone. However 50% of this is work he does on his own. Josiah is usually 2nd. His school time is mostly phonics and counting, proper order of things, discussion on stories. He's a thinker and wants to know cause and effect more than the others it seems. So he likes to put all the pieces together in a story till he understands it.

Little Ry is doing well with word recognition. He is working on confidence in his knowledge when he is away from his books, but he's getting there. It makes me happy when he cognitively understands the meaning of a word and how it interacts with other words, applications and uses. He really is a bright little boy. One of the words he seems to struggle with is "The". Though he knows the word, he can't pronounce it like me. I think it is a carry over concern from when his 4 front teeth were gone and it was really difficult for him to sound it out. So now he just says "Da" but he doesn't like to say that because to him "Da" begins with a "d" and obviously this word begins with a "T". And with his little perfectionist attitude, he doesn't like to give up. With math he is building on his addition. Subtraction is obvious when using objects, but as soon as the problem is set before him in print, he draws a blank. I'm hoping to move past this next week. We've been doing symbol recognition this week to reinforce what a "-" really means.

Science is a different thing for me. Understanding the world around us is a daily discussion topic. I initially started on obvious things like directions, space and movement. Animals, days of the week, weather and seasons etc... are things we talk about daily. I'm leaning towards using ACE science books for him since they are strategic in nature. We also got a membership at the children's museum in Bellevue because they have a great science program and a homeschooling session for science too.

What are their equivalent grade levels??? Quinny is 3 so he started his official school time last month after his birthday. Josiah is 5, and is working through kindergarten subjects. He sort of started this back in October. He is ahead of where he should be because he listened to do what Ry was doing last year, so he picked it up early. Technically he should be entering Kindergarten next October. I don't mind him being early though. Ry is working on 1st grade lessons. He has had to do some brush up on word blends and penmanship seems to be our constant little battle. I'm determined to get him out of the stereotype of "writing like a boy." I firmly believe everyone has the ability to write neatly.

All in all it is hard and challenging to home school three active little boys. None-the-less, I get great joy seeing them "get it" in various areas of learning. It's like I have a personal front row seat to their discovery of the world.

Till later.... Nic