Making language decisions towards Spanish

Everyday seems to present more reasons we should do Spanish as a homeschool family. I don't think a single receptionist at our doctor's office doesn't speak Spanish. Most of the doctors speak Spanish, too.

We can buy books in Spanish cheaply and get many at our library. We can listen to the radio in Spanish. We could theoretically watch TV and movies in Spanish. We can volunteer in Spanish.

It isn't a language with a high chic factor. No one says, "Wow, you learned Spanish? You must be a genius!" However, it is a language that makes sense.

We're back!

We're back from our trip to the snow!

We made maple-sugar-snow candy, like Laura and Mary in the Little House in the Big Woods. J made a snow man. A enjoyed cutting, cutting, and more cutting with her Kumon Workbooks. She's becoming very proficient! M enjoyed lots of Grandma laps and drawing.

Hubby and I went cross-country skiing three days in a row. I almost wish I had grown up in Minnesota so that I could have been on an XC ski team in high school. It is a lot more fun than XC running.

We're moving towards getting back into the swing of things. I made J a simple math worksheet today and of course he's reading aloud. One of his Christmas presents was his own simplified Bible that he gets to stay up later than the girls to read each night. Although that isn't "school work" it helps towards developing fluent reading skills.

We'll be moving back into RightStart B and Spell to Write and Read on Monday.

Yay for a relaxing trip!

That's all for 2010...

... we're taking a break until the relatives leave.

Merry Christmas!

German game ideas

A local mom told me about her approach to Spanish with her children. Every few weeks she chooses a game (Chutes and Ladders, checkers, Hungry Caterpillar Game, or such) and teaches her children the vocabulary which go with the game. She taught them to count for Chutes and Ladders (Mancala would be good for this, too - Chutes and Ladders makes me nuts!) or taught food words for Hungry Caterpillar foods. Then, they play the game for a few weeks.

We have a game library here, but someone without one could trade games with friends and neighbors. This localizes the use of the language well to help prevent language mixing ("We've opened up a game, now we speak Japanese!") while linking the language to positive attention from the parents. This might also encourage the children to use the language because they are less likely to be forced into situations their vocabulary can't handle. We'll definitely do this tomorrow! Stayed tuned for how it goes!

*UPDATE*

A and I had a good time playing the Brown Bear game. She volunteered all the colors but had to be coaxed through the animals (which was a surprise to me) and the fairly simple sentence structure. I think if we do it a few times she'll be pretty comfortable with it. I guess that post will come next week.

Multilingualism and bird calls

While in Boston, we were members of LEX/Hippo Family Club, which encourages multilingualism and taught us that it is actually easier to learn languages when one is learning more than one at a time. According to the research they sited, a different part of your brain turns on and your ears are better able to listen to foreign sounds when being bombarded by a large variety of them. Maybe hearing a bunch of crazy sounds at once tells you that you can't map each of them to a sound set you already know. I don't quite know. I experienced a similar thing with bird songs. After spending half an hour in the car listening to a bird sounds CD, I thought somehow I was still listening to it when I got out of the car. My ear was attuned to bird sounds and suddenly the neighborhood was full of them. When you listen a lot to multiple languages, the sounds you couldn't rightly hear at the beginning become clearer.

Learning more than one language at a time seems to be discouraged nowadays, often in chat rooms or in general conversation, but it has many precedents. Charlotte Mason's teachers taught children French and German from before age six, of course beginning with rhymes and songs, and Rudolf Steiner did the same, although I'm not sure what the two languages were! In the USA, Waldorf schools usually teach German and Spanish simultaneously. They also teach through song and rhymes.

Not to be outdone, but mainly because I think it makes a lot of sense scientifically, we'll be adding Spanish through songs and rhymes to our homeschool curriculum in spring of the coming year. I'm working on the curriculum now, but mom needs to do some work on her own (barely there) Spanish, first. I love languages! This is fun!

SWR - for our family

I'm trying to figure out how to use SWR in a way that accomplishes my goals: good spelling, exposure to Christian virtues, comfortable reading, logical thought, without having it take over my life. It seems to take a good 45 min to 1 hour to do the whole thing everyday, which would be fine if I didn't have any other goals for our homeschool time.

Here's what I'll be trying for the coming four weeks, though we'll take off a few days around Christmas. We'll be following a four day per week schedule, doing ten words per week, and having no "tests."

• Everyday: review all phonograms visually, read thirty flash cards, and focus writing one letter perfectly
• Day 1 - copy and write the week's focus phonograms
• Day 2 - write the week's ten words
• Day 3 - write the week's words on flash cards and make sentences by arranging them
• Day 4 - write a sentence from dictation and correct it

This won't lead to the sort of mastery that SWR promises, but that level of mastery seems to be coming through reading for J. Anyways, we'll do all the words over next year as is suggested.

J's consulting teacher has suggested we start the practice of ten minutes of daily journaling. We might implement that concurrently and see how things go.

This guy is a sponge!

He absorbs things but I never know what has been soaked up until he wrings himself out, however infrequently. I used to think that J couldn't count by fives. We used the abacus, but counting by fives to 100 took ten minutes as he slowly pushed the beads back and forth. A few days later, frustrated, I took it away and told him to do it without the abacus. No problem. It took less than a minute.

We had another such breakthrough today. While working on a sheet of two-digit addition and subtraction problems, I couldn't find the abacus so I told him just to go for it and "see the abacus in his mind" while I read to the girls. (Of course we were reading Petunia's Christmas - it has to be Petunia for my 2-year-old!)

He's gotten about three wrong out of twenty. Not too bad for the first time without manipulatives. If I'd found the abacus, however, he'd still be chugging away with it.

Fiber arts

I don't think we had any fiber arts classes at any school I went to growing up, but our Independent Study Program (ISP) school has a weekly fiber arts class that anyone is welcome to drop into. I give great credit to the teacher: she doesn't know who will be there any given week, the students range in age from 5 to 18 (with the most students between 8 and 12), and younger siblings are always part of the mix. She brings neat ideas, a laid back attitude, and a desire to help everyone.

DS5 started with weaving last year when we received and second-hand loom from a moving neighbor. He's since used a potholder loom and sewn a few "purses", all of which get abandoned immediately after being made. The teacher has patiently helped J improve his handsewing and has started him out on a circular "knifty knitter". Maybe I could motivate him to finish his "knifty" hat before our cabin trip!

Today A (4) made her own snowman and cut out the pieces for her own reindeer and M (2) cut out pieces we used for an elfish creature of sorts. A even figured out how to use the hot glue gun (while I was distracted by M). No burns, thankfully.

I'm thankful to be able to confine this mess to a school building, to have someone else gather things like googly eyes and pompoms, and to have the wealth of ideas and support the teacher has to offer. 

Songs and rhymes - are they connecting?

We've been singing songs in Molly's toddler German school class since September and she usually responds by sucking her thumb and possibly hiding her face. It hasn't been very encouraging until this Wednesday when we were supposed to be quiet during John's circle time. Then, out of the blue, Molly started singing, "Hoppe hoppe Reiter!"

Later that day, she started singing the toddler class Christmas song, "Kling, Glocke, klingelingeling."

And this morning, as I began singing, "Ich bin da, du bist da, wir sind alle da" to wake up the big kids, she lit up and said, "Ist Molly da?" (or at least the toddler version).

She's been soaking it up like a sponge - and finally I'm seeing the sponge being wrung out.

Torture reading?

I've bought and read all about Spell to Write and Read and can't decide if I like it.

I like intensive phonics and have become a better speller by working through it myself, but I can't get over her phrase "torture reading" to describe early reading by children who haven't already memorized something like 200 words (which, in SWR, they have examined phonetically and not just memorized by sight).

Torture reading? I can barely get books out of my son's hands and he's well on his way to memorizing words - by seeing them in books all the time.

We started with some super-silly phonetic readers which had my son laughing out loud, but after about a month of those, he moved onto anything and everything he could get his hands on, but usually real books that he had heard me reading aloud in the past. That is how we've moved into a whole-word phonetic blend, with difficult words he can recognize by context within a sea of decipherable words.

We pick up SWR every few weeks and work through a word list. We've made our way through 60 words so far and my son knows about 40 phonograms. I don't know if it will stick at some point. I'm glad we're doing it, but I'm still in the dating phase.

Contig Jr.

Thanks to Let's Play Math we played our first round of Contig Jr. today and it was a complete success. Each turn led to multiple computations as my son tried every combination of addition and subtraction he could come up with to maximize his points. We'll definitely add this to our repertoire.

War and Peace

We play lots of War (and Peace) in our house. It's the the card game that's worth 1000 worksheets.

We're currently using it for addition and pre-subtraction. Today, we played War. J added up his cards (we played with three at a time per person), then added up my cards, told me which hand was more, and by how much (stealth subtraction). I gave him the abacus to use when necessary. I do worry that he's not noticing patterns because of his dependence on the abacus, but I'll probably wait a while before requiring him to do it mentally. Now, I simply point out ways he could have done the calculation more quickly.

"Notice you had 9, 7, and 3. You could have added 7 and 3 first, and then 9. Then you wouldn't have needed the abacus."

Time will show whether systematic teaching will be necessary a few months down the road or if games will suffice!

Not self-esteem, self-usefulness

I love this phrase - "self-usefulness." You don't need to focus on self-esteem, goes the argument, if the child knows he is useful. How to instill self-usefulness? Work.

We've been spending the past four days with my parents and you can see the self-usefulness glow on my son's face. He's been truly working the Granddad, remodeling the front bedroom. He's helped install molding, puttied to texture the walls, sanded, painted primer and a first coat, and, for some reason I don't know, used a circular saw. He now has work clothes and is thrilled.

But how do I put him to work in our little rented condo? No work is quite as exciting as remodeling with Granddad, but raking the redwood needles is still quite important. I think he is old enough to vacuum the children's room, help with more dinner prep, and take a larger role in cleaning up after dinner.

Any other ideas? Suggestions heartily invited!

The math dilemma

What should I do about math?

Should we continue to follow a formal curriculum? We absolutely loved RightStart A, but B just doesn't fit right. On some days, we can do five lessons in twenty minutes because they are so easy for John. On another, we can't finish the first part of the lesson because it is so hard. Such lessons can take us a week. I feel like I spend the whole time tweaking and frustrated. We play math games, something which John loves. I recently started giving him mazes and let him work through Rush Hour Jr. for a few days for math time. I feel like we ought to do math, yet nothing but math games seems to fit right now.

Introduction

Hi! My name is Emily Grace and I am a bookaholic.

I read everywhere and everything. I read more books in a month than most people read in a year.

My husband reads, too. He reads more non-fiction than me, and mostly work related, but his work (research) is his hobby and he clearly loves it and is somewhat amazed that he is being paid to do something he loves so much.

I used to be a skeptic of unschooling. I still am somewhat of a skeptic. Yet, in our learning-loving household, I am constantly amazed at how much learning gets done without initiation on my part. I hope to muse about the balance of student-led learning and parent-directed learning as it plays out in our household.

I don't want to be a perfectionist about this blog, but to post short posts that will help our families understand homeschooling and remind me of some of the things we've accomplished.