Dealing with the February Blahs

 

There is something about February.  February causes all sorts of burn-out for children and teachers in school and homeschool.  I read somewhere that homeschool moms are most likely to consider enrolling their children in traditional school during the month of February.  I haven’t done a study on this, and I have no facts or charts to prove this, but I believe it.  We are all ready for a change in February.  (Let me pause to clarify something.  I am pro-education, not necessarily pro-homeschool. I am a teacher, and I loved teaching in public and private schools. We have chosen to homeschool in our family because I enjoy teaching my children at home. I don't think there is anything wrong with enrolling a homeschooled child into a traditional school if that is a better fit for your family.  But don’t let the gray days of February be a factor in your decision.)

My daughter with our morning "pins."

My secret to enduring the long, gray February days is adding something new to the routine.

Remember our loose schedule during our J-Term? It was time to get a little more structured, and we were all dragging our feet.  This February, I decided to implement some “pins.”  Pins are habits that you “pin” to another activity that you do daily to help you to remember to do it.  We always eat breakfast, so I decided to make “Breakfast with the Bible” time.  We are reading The Golden Children’s  Bible.  I also like to teach Bible verses through Seeds Family Worship.  The songs are pure scripture, and unlike many other children’s Bible songs the tunes are catchy and the singers do not sound like chipmunks. (If you were a child of the 80s and grew up in church you probably remember Psalty. You know what I’m talking about.)  Now let me be clear: We were already studying Bible, but since I pinned it to our breakfast, it helps us start our day.

After Bible time, I added another new pin.  We are reading 365 Days of Wonder.  This book is a companion to the fiction book Wonder by R.J. Palacio, but it can be used as a stand-alone book to teach precepts.  For every day of the year, there is an encouraging quote or maxim.  Most of the quotes come from historical leaders, but some are from unlikely sources (one was from a fortune cookie.)  Each quote contains words to live by that encourage my children to make better choices, be kind, and find their way in the world.  It takes us 5 minutes to read and discuss the quote.  Not only do the precepts encourage better living, they also encourage my children to think about the meaning and will be a great resource of quotations for when my children write papers.  It will be great when they start using The Lost Tools of Writing in Challenge A.  We have read quotations from several people we have studied in history.  Some of these historical leaders include Patrick Henry, Abraham Lincoln, Nelson Mandela, Gandhi, and Confucius.



Using Shopkins to teach multiplication and division

Directly after 365 Days of Wonder, I added two math pins to the morning routine.  We spend about 10 minutes studying multiplication and division facts using Times Tables the Fun Way.  (Click on the See Inside link in Amazon to see some of the illustrations). This book has stories and illustrations for the multiplication facts.  For example: 4x4 = 16 has a picture of a boy driving a jeep up a mountain.  The story basically says that you have to be 16 to drive a 4x4.  We also use counters (unifix cubes work, or beans, or beads, or what ever you have: My children like to use Shopkins or Lego men) to show what multiplication means.  4 x 4 is 4 groups of 4 and there are 16 total.  I love Times Tables the Fun Way, but you are doing a disservice for your child if you only teach them to memorize the facts instead of teaching them what multiplication is.

The last 10 minutes of our morning “pin” time is spent with Life of Fred.  We are currently working through Life of Fred: Cats. (Click Here for a Sample of LOF: Cats).  I love Life of Fred because it is math in story form.  Fred is a 5 year old math professor at Kittens University.  He comes across all sorts of math issues and solves them.  The lessons are 6 pages long and then there is a “Your Turn to Play” section that my children write on a separate sheet of paper.  The answers are on the following page.  It is important for your child to read through the answer section, not only because they go over the answer, but also because they expose children to all sorts of higher level math.  For example the problem might say “There were 4 vending machines on one side of the hallway and 5 vending machines on the other.  How many vending machines were there altogether?” and your child would write 4 + 5 = 9. The answer on the next page would have that math fact, but it also says 4v+5v= 9v;  4abc + 5abc=9abc, ect. Sometimes the problems use Greek symbols, sometimes they use square root symbols.  I love this.  The author dangles the promise of telling the whole origin story of Fred when they get to study Life of Fred Calculus.  When we read the first Life of Fred book, my then 5 year old daughter said, “I can’t wait for Calculus!” Neither can I!

The rest of the morning is spent with each child doing separate subjects.  We start with their Kumon math books.  My 9 year old is working through a multiplication book and my 6 year old is working through an addition book.  Then we do spelling, reading, writing, and study our memory work from our homeschool group.  I teach a Chemistry class in my home so we use that as our Science, and this year we have been studying British History and Literature with Our Island Story.



Shakespeare Campers perform Hamlet

At lunch we have another “pin,” although I haven’t been as consistent with it as with the morning pins.  We pin poetry to lunch.  I love poetry.  I have a whole set of Poetry for Young People Books that I bought when I was teaching 4^th grade.  We are reading the poetry of Robert Frost right now.  This summer we will be using How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare again, this time focusing on Twelfth Night.  I usually run a Shakespeare Camp at my home each summer, but I will not this year due to my son’s upcoming surgeries. 

Building Fairy Gardens on a warm February day

The afternoon is usually free.  My children practice piano and guitar and play.  I try to clean and do some chores.  My daughter especially takes advantage of warmer days, building fairy gardens and running outside.

My only other pin is a read aloud at night time.  We are currently reading The Wizard of Oz.  My daughter and I are building a paper chain with all the read alouds we have read during the year of 2017. 

Here is our schedule:

8:30ish: Breakfast with the Bible (Today we are getting started at 9:30 instead of 8:30)
8:45 365 Days of Wonder
8:50 Times Tables the Fun Way
9:00 Life of Fred
9:15-12:00 Individual subjects
12:00 Lunch and Poetry
1:00 Piano, Guitar, Free Time
8:00pm Read Alouds

The changes in our schedule added only a few minutes to our school day, but the pins have made a big difference in our attitude.  Life of Fred and Times Tables the Fun Way are quirky and fun, and my children enjoy them.  Another fun way to change the schedule due to February Blahs would be to add an educational game to the routine.  Just do something different.  We were homebound this February due to my son’s surgery recovery, but in past Februarys we have spent a lot of time going to museums, or visiting family and friends.  Playdates lighten our souls!

What do you do to conquer the February Blahs?

The Truth About Sight Words

As a child, I struggled with spelling and reading sight words.  I was told over and over that English is crazy and I just have to memorize them.  Memorizing sight words works for many children.  There are long lists of high frequently sight words that children are encouraged to memorize.  I’m not saying that memorizing the sight words is a bad thing.  It’s is very efficient.  When you read this sentence, you are probably not sounding out every word.  You have probably been reading for many years and have taken some short cuts to read quickly.  I certainly don’t want to get into a Whole Language verses Phonics debacle.  The longer I work in education, the more I see that one size does not fit all.  Personally I use a classical approach to education with phonics instruction and a focus on spelling rules, but I know that there are many children that benefit from a more traditional approach.  Let’s not get into an argument about educational methods today.  That isn’t my goal.  

I want to tell you something that I discovered just recently,  years after I struggled through spelling and reading in elementary school,  years after I studied to get undergrad and graduate degrees in education,  even a few years after I stopped teaching in a classroom.  To my former students: I’m so sorry.  I would have been a much more effective reading mechanics and spelling teacher if I had known more spelling rules. Let me be clear: I learned a lot of phonics in school, but phonics alone does not a good speller make.

Fonix ulon duz not a gud spellr mak.

In school I learned the basic spelling rules: i before e except after c, and when one vowel goes walking the other does the talking. Remember those? I knew a few rules about when to double consonants, or drop the e. That was about the extent of my spelling rule knowledge.  Throughout my school years and college, I felt like I was drowning when trying to remember how to spell basic words like experience, bulletin, and field.  How I wish I could have learned more about English spelling.

Students learn the silent e rules with Super E! Who is that masked woman? The world my never know.

Here is the truth:

 

There are very few English sight words that are complete rule breakers.  Most sight words follow either a phonics rule, a spelling rule, or both.  

 

The word “have” has bothered me for years.  It looks like it should be pronounced with a long A (like the A in Acorn) doesn’t it? The A should say the long A sound because of the silent e.  The only explanation I ever received about the word "have" is that it is a sight word.  I had to remember it.  English doesn't follow the rules.

 

But at the age of 33, I learned that there are  9 different reasons for silent e.  In the word have, the e must be present because English words do not end in v.  The word “have” uses that rule instead of long vowel sound rule. 

Now I know that these obscure spelling rules sound intellectual and not very practical, but as a child with dyslexia, I would have LOVED to hear a reason why the word  “have” had an e.  I may have even remembered to spell it correctly.   



This student used Legos to build the phonogram
"oi that you may not use at the end of English words" 

I learned all these spelling rules, 28 rules all together, from a curriculum called Spell to Write and Read (SWR).  Truly, it moved me to tears to hear the English words do not end in i, u, v, or j rule. (I am not making up the bit about the happy tears...I’m very passionate about spelling rules as it turns out.)  Spell to Write and Read can be dry and not always flashy and fun, but this simple curriculum has helped me teach more than a dozen children to read.  I highly recommend using it for a struggling child.  My daughter has used it for years.



We have recently switched to Spelling You See for a change of pace, but the rules and phonics we learned from SWR have stayed with us.  I use the phonics and spelling rules daily, even with a different spelling curriculum.

If you have a child who is struggling to read or spell high frequency sight words, teach them WHY they are spelled that way with a curriculum like Spell to Write and Read.  SWR is not always teacher friendly.  It takes a while to get your bearings, but once you know what to do the weekly schedule stays the same.  Need more help? Here is a video teaching all 70 phonograms. I have several videos showing how to teach SWR, and I usually teach a beginning spelling and reading class for kindergarten and first graders in the summer.  How have you used SWR?