Week 1: September 21 to 24

We had two and a half days of school today after returning from our trip Tuesday and starting BSF on Wednesday.

It seems like the way to be a happy homeschooler (for me, at least), is to start small, with the basics, and add things on as we go, so that is what we did.

A has her own math to do now as it is going swimmingly. We play lots of games and do half of a lesson per day. I started her off in RightStart A, but soon found out she had learned too much from listening in to J's lessons for that to be a good fit. RightStart B works well as long as I don't drag out the lessons.

Additionally, A worked hard building some swooping patterns.

Her hard work paid off with a beautiful bridge pattern of her own design.

M set up her own working, sorting the colored pieces from a Montessori trinomial cube.

J had plenty to do as we quizzed the first sixty or so works from The Writing Road to Reading and continued in RightStart C. We finally started the geometric drawing portion, which was the part that convinced me not to switch to Singapore. As expected, he loves it.

Friday morning, as I started A's math lesson, I told J it was free play time.

"Can I please do the next math page? Please?" he begged. I gave in. Who can resist such a request?

We ended our week with the first day, for us, of German school, and we're geared up and excited about speaking more German at home again after a lot of laziness on my part over the summer.

The trouble with message boards

I used to love message boards, but I promised my hubby I'd go message board free for six months if we bought a certain curriculum. I made the promise for a few reasons. First, the point of a curriculum, for me, is to save time, so if I spend hours figuring out ways to tweak it, I shouldn't be paying lots of money for it. Second, I knew that I'd quickly become dissatisfied with any curriculum if I saw all the opinions people gave about it on a message board.

So, as with some time removed from message boards, I can see how discontent I become when I read them. The board is gossip central, with everyone talking about their new and exciting curriculum. Everyone has a brilliant child (or, at least, the outspoken people are ones with brilliant children, or, minimally, children who happened to have a brilliant five minutes that morning) and is eager to share how this that or the other curriculum was too simple/boring/slow for their child. Well, I want my children to show signs of brilliance and then start looking for that same curriculum to fail for my child, or I may just pine for that new, more perfect curriculum that will effortlessly teach my child how to spell/write/speak Spanish/train elephants/etc.

Our math curriculum is a victim of the message boards. I loved Right Start A. It was perfect. Everyday was exhilarating. Even though we haven't consistently RSed since October, I can see my son's ability to understand the math I teach him stemming directly from the great RS foundation he has.

However, comments on the boards talked about how "slow" RS is (another word for slow could be "thorough" or "careful")  and about how their children were "bored" (it is somewhat scripted, but one doesn't have to spend a lot of time on each section). Then, I, wanting to turn against it, started agreeing.

We're going back to RS tomorrow. It deserves a chance. It is exceptionally thorough and teaches concepts from multiple viewpoints. It will help prevent "holes" - which really can exist! My son is dangerous because he can figure things out, which I could do, too. The danger is that you figure out the motions to go through without actually understanding. I don't think RS will allow that!

Here's my commitment:
- four weeks
- four days per week
- 20-25 minutes per day
- do all sections
- continue to next section without extra review if seems appropriate

I'll update with my new opinion of RS in mid-February.

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.

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!

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.