Brer Rabbit Goes Back to Mr. Man's Garden

Rebekah has been reading Trickster Tales in her current unit of literature.  This has meant a lot of short stories about the infamous character Brer Rabbit.  One of her recent assignments was to act out the short story she read that day for the family.  So, with the help of Rose, she put together costumes, a script and charged right in.  Here is the result:

K12 Disappointments and Pleasures

Well, it’s been a long time since I wrote anything here. Life has been hectic.

But, onto school news.

K12 is definitely not the answer for my oldest daughter’s language arts. Rebekah understands the majority of her assignments and works through them steadily. Yet each day, it takes her close to three hours to complete the work! I do not recall spending three hours steadily working on any one subject while in school (the only times we spent three hours on anything was if the teacher was dealing with the lowest denominator or unruly students). And she is expected to cover all the language arts subjects (composition, grammar, usage, mechanics, spelling, vocabulary and literature) every day. I think this is ridiculous for a homeschool course! By the time she finishes math and science, she is spending 5+ hours in straight school work; this is not counting breaks, meals, etc. She has no time for being a child or extracurricular activities like sports, art, music, etc.

Part of the reason the K12 language arts lessons take so long is that the individual parts do not relate to one another at all. A streamlined program would base the spelling, vocab and composition assignments/tests on what was being studied in literature. In the K12 program, each one is completely separate and has no relation to each other. The spelling lists and vocabulary lists do not even relate.

Then there is the fact that I was misled by the local Utah K12 school on Rebekah’s language arts program. She is slightly behind in her comprehension skills (according to testing results), so it was recommended that we start her in one grade lower’s program. It was explained to us that when she finished the fourth grade program, she could immediately begin the fifth grade program and work on it through the summer. Not true. She has to finish the fourth grade program before mid-February to be allowed to start the 5th grade program before the fall of the next school year. To do this, she’d have to do double language arts lessons each day. Obviously, by the fact that each lesson is taking such an exorbitant amount of time, that’s not a feasible option.

So, Rebekah will be finishing the language arts program with K12 this year but will starting a new program next year.

Thankfully, the K12 language arts program for Rose (second grade) is not nearly as intense. But I also plan to start her in a different program next year. I don’t know when the K12 program gets so intense and don’t especially want to find out.

On the other hand, I greatly enjoy the science programs that have been provided by K12 for both children. The lessons are straight-forward and full of interesting information. There is an experiment or hands on activity for each lesson to reinforce the lesson. My kids love hands on science, so really get a kick out of this. And K12 has provided all the materials I need to complete the experiments (minus some basic household items).

We have not really had time to delve into the history program provided by K12, simply because the language arts lessons are taking up so much time. I have decided not to push it for this year, but plan to implement a history program next summer and continue it in following school years.

Math is a breeze for both of my school age children. It seemed at the beginning of the year, their math lessons were way too easy. So we decided to start simply taking the tests with the plan that if they got 100%, they could skip that chapter. If they got 80-99%, we would review the lessons that the problems they missed correlated to and retake the test. If they got below 80%, they did all lessons for the chapter. So far, Rose has skipped 45 days worth of lesson and Rebekah has skipped 25. It has been quite the eye opener for our family on just how much time is wasted in review every year in the public school system.

To help the girls develop strong math skills in the basics, we also do math fact quizzes every day. These quizzes are designed to help them memorize addition, subtraction, multiplication and division tables, among other math skills. For every 20 problems they do, they get one minute to complete them. If they can finish them all correctly in the given time, they move onto the next quiz.

K12 Groove

So, our K12 language arts programs for the girls arrived last Monday and we were able to start class on Tuesday.

Rose is in the second grade and her language arts program is very straight forward. It is also very time consuming for me, as I have to be with her for every second of her lesson. It is a similar situation with her math – simple and straightforward, but I have to sit next to her and do it all with her. In total, her lessons take one and a half to three hours each day (depending on her attitude), not counting preparation time.

Rebekah’s in the fifth grade and her lessons are much more involved, taking a lot more preparation time. Thankfully, she is able to do several of her lessons, including math, on her own with my just checking over her work and answering the occasional question. This is good for two reasons. One, it means she can be completing part of her lessons on her own while I work with Rose. Secondly, it enables her to work at a faster rate. This is especially good because she is repeating 4th grade language arts. So she has double lessons in LA everyday so that she can start 5th grade LA in February and be caught up by the end of the school year.

I spend each evening with their books, reading through the lesson plans online, gathering materials, writing out Rebekah’s assignments to do on her own, and any other prep work that needs to be completed.

Our daily schedule is pretty straight forward. We get up early and have breakfast, then get dressed and start chores. At 8:30am, whether chores are done or not, we start school. When we’re finished (usually before lunch), the girls finish their chores and then have free time.

Now that we’ve had a week to get our language arts and math schedules down, we are ordering our science curriculums and will add them on when they arrive. I hope to add on history, art, Mandarin and some sort of sports later in the year.

Progress Is Being Made

Yay! The girls got all their chores done in two hours today! Happy days! Thus we were able to go to the library. Our library is being renovated, so harder to find things right now. But the girls were able to find books for their personal reading in the morning and I got a copy of Charlotte’s Web to read aloud as a family at night. I read it to Rebekah when she was a baby, but have not read it to any of the others. And of course, my husband has never read it. The girls got me to promise that any books we read that have movies made; we will have a family movie night and watch it when we get done with the book.

I’m at a loss for what to do about a curriculum. We got very lucky and were able to get the Saxon math programs we needed for dirt cheap from other homeschoolers that were done with them. But I haven’t had any luck with anything else. I’ve found several curriculums that I would love to try, but they’re too expensive, especially with my husband not having a full-time job yet (wonderful economy). For now, I think the best course is to use the internet to provide science lessons and experiments for us to all do together, work with the Saxon math, and then read various books from the library on other topics. Some of the books I’ll have the girls do oral reports on to the family and others write reports. Our local library has kits that have lots of picture books on a particular subject. I think we might get one of those each week this summer and check out some harder books for Rebekah on the same subject. For penmanship, I am thinking of journal and creative writing. The creative writing, I’d fill a jar with various ideas or themes. Have the girls draw one and them give them a specific amount of time to write on the subject.

First Day of Homeschooling

For our first official day of homeschooling, it was a holiday. LOL

But I wasn’t planning on lessons for the first month of homeschooling, so it’s okay. For this first month, we are going to work on establishing a house cleaning routine in the morning. First, we go room by room and clean all the public rooms together. Then the girls clean their bedroom and I clean mine. I would like us to develop a good rhythm so that we can have all the basic housekeeping done by 9AM each morning. Then we’ll be ready to start our lessons for the day.

Obviously, this is going to take some practice. As such, I was not surprised that we did not finish before 9AM today. But the girls were very good about pulling their weight and I’m sure they’ll get better with practice. But the rooms that we did clean look very nice, which does this mother’s heart good. I think the girls enjoy cleaning together better than being given an assignment to do on their own. This way we can talk, sing and laugh as we go.

After cleaning, I did some cooking and then we went on a picnic for Memorial Day. For our ‘lesson’, we went to the local veteran’s memorial. I don’t think we’ve ever taken the girls to one since they became old enough to understand what they’re for. It gave their dad and me a chance to discuss with them those that have made the ultimate sacrifice for our country. They wanted to know if their Uncle Bobby, a marine, had a plaque somewhere. It’s good to see them relating what they’ve been shown to their own lives; so we explained to them that he doesn’t but that doesn’t mean his service has been worth any less.