The Colton Family Schoolhouse

Progress seems to happen very slowly, or even not at all, and then all of a sudden. For the first several weeks of school, writing the number 8 trips Anya up every time. Which way to go from the top? It always gets loopy in the wrong direction. Distinguishing the  b 's and d 's is trouble too: "big" is "dig" and "dip" is... "bip"?  We practice. The whiteboard works well for the 8 's. She can try, and mess up, and then erase it--which eases her frustration. Just a few a day.  I find some ideas for b 's and d 's in the back of the reading curriculum teacher's guide. With your left hand, hold your pointer and thumb in a circle, and stick your other fingers straight up. Do the same with your other hand. Imagine an e between them, to spell bed!  This doesn't work. It's too hard for her to hold her fingers like that, and imagining bed is just too complicated.  We keep at it. She practices some more 8 's.  In math, we...

Last year for reading lessons we used a set of books called Dash into Reading. The stories and illustrations are very cute and kid-friendly, and the first set was a good, low-key introduction to the very basics... but as we got into the second set I became more and more unhappy with the series. First of all, I kept finding mistakes in the order of what was taught, which made for an awkward experience for both learner and teacher. Second, I began to realize that the ways new concepts were taught were inadequate for a thorough learning experience and required too much extra planning on my part (the books are cute, but the suggested method for teaching is frankly very boring and I just can't settle for that). I began to notice that Anya was often of guessing based on the pictures in the book rather than truly decoding the words.  So, we finished out the second set at the end of kindergarten, but I was ready for something different this fall. The Gentle + Classical kindergarten curricu...

If you were a fly on the wall during a math lesson here, you'd probably see us playing games. That's one of the things I like most about the Math with Confidence curriculum. We toss beanbags to practice counting (Alina now loves to join in), we play card games or set up pretend stores, we have little races or hunts to find objects and make equations with them. It's very hands-on and visual.  We had been working hard on basic addition facts for several weeks, and then last week the lessons switched to shapes. I felt like it was a welcome switch, but also some of the shape lessons seemed too basic and repetitive for Anya. We ended up condensing two weeks' worth of lessons into one week, to speed through the basic stuff and then focus on the newer concepts: halves, fourths, and congruent shapes.  There was a lot of paper cutting and folding, and some sample cutting of plums into halves and fourths.  The warm-ups (at the beginning of the lessons) and math activity pages (at...

Last week, our science focus was the heart.  I found a unit study on Teachers Pay Teachers that goes through the main systems of the body. It's a fun study with lots of book and project recommendations, and we've all learned a lot already! Anya has shared some of her favorite new facts with her doctor at her wellness checkup and her friends at our homeschool co-op (we start each week by asking the kids if they want to share a fun fact or joke)--and whenever someone asks her about her favorite part of school, she talks about science. And Alina, who generally does her own thing during math and writing, always wants to join in for science.  I've decided to take the unit study more slowly than it's written, spending four lessons per body system rather than two. I think that's more appropriate for the girls' age.  Anyway, sometimes that means I need to do a little searching online for an extra experiment or activity. The two heart activities we did last week were a f...