handwriting 101 for pre-k'ers

So, if you haven't already gathered, I am fairly relaxed about homeschooling with kids under a certain age. I don't actually "do" a formal preschool here with them, they just kind of pick the stuff up somehow (most likely from television, educational computer games, and having big sisters teaching them this stuff). So, a few weeks ago My sweet little Kimi asked me to teach her how to write her name. I started with just a simple "KIMI" for her on the dry erase board, and in about 2 minutes she had mastered that (as we can all tell by looking at certain doors and walls in my home now LOL she likes to practice and doesn't always use paper for that). So, today when we did our core and such with the older two girls, I though to myself that maybe she'd be ready to take on the writing in Sonlight's lang. arts K program. Now remember, she is only 4 1/2 with a January birthday, so she isn't expected really at this point to be able to write her name or much of anything else. I remembered from doing this lang. arts level with my oldest girls that the first week starts off with writing their first name, so I decided to just go for it and see how it went. I got out a sheet of the Handwriting Without Tears paper (its the ONLY handwriting program I will ever use, it is WONDERFUL and I've had a lot of success with it and myoldest 2 girls) and carefully printed out "Kimberly" for her, just like I typed it. She has NEVER written a lowercase letter in her life, so I didn't expect her to do very well with it. I'm more interested in the exposure at this point with her, and getting her started on using lowercase letters.

So how did her copywork for today go? Well, here is a picture that I took of her paper (used my laptop's webcam, pardon if it is grainy or fuzzy or whatever) and you tell me how she did.



How do YOU think my 4 year old did printing her full first name for the first time, along with using some lowercase letters for the first time ever? I count a total of 5 lowercase letters in her name that she wrote, well the M could be a capital but I do think she was attempting a lowercase with it. I just simply told her to do her best with it, and that tomorrow we'd work together on the letters she had trouble with. I don't have much to work with her on as far as those letters go.......... :-)

changes to my core 1 schedule

Well I posted a couple hours ago about the girls spending all of last week on the first 2 pages of Usborne's Peoples of the World. After that post, my brain started cranking and I started thinking about this a little bit. I grabbed that book and Usborne's Houses and Homes (the next book we'll be doing after Peoples of the World) and my core 1 guide, and sat down to do a little thinking and looking.

The first 6 weeks of core 1 cover 2 pages of those two books each day. That equals 30 guide days at pace since we're doing the 5 day schedule. If we do 2 pages a week instead of 2 pages a day as scheduled, that means it would give me 30 weeks in those books. So the way I see it, I have 2 options ahead of me.

option 1: do the 2 pages a week, then go into the rest of the core as scheduled and not worry about taking longer than scheduled or planned. That would put us finishing up core 1 at around uhhhhhhhhhh mu birthday of next school year I think.

option 2: do 2 pages a week from these 2 books, and also go ahead in the guide starting in week 7 at the same time. This would give me exactly 30 weeks of material if I go at pace in the guide with the remaining material, so we'd finish the core right around the start of next school year.

The OCD part of me is screaming to do option 2, so that I can stay "on schedule" and not "get behind". But at the same time, the super relaxed part of me says to do option 1 and just see what happens. But then, I also have that nagging little part of my brain reminding me that on my notification, I said we were doing core 1 and I should try to actually do core 1 to where I'm at least 2/3 done with it when I do portfolio review (we won't be doing standardized testing prior to 5th grade by our own preferences, I refuse to teach to the test like they do in schools, and the standardized testing may or may not be used as reporting starting in 5th grade just based on the scores and how accurately we feel they reflect our girls' abilities and knowledge if we choose to do testing then). It just doesn't feel quite right to say I'm going to do core 1 and then when its time for review have to say that we did all the read alouds and poetry but only the first 6 weeks of the history, know what I mean? So, I'm kind of flip-flopping on this one.

If you have insight, input, or an option I've not tought of yet with this, please comment and tell me! I'm totally open on this, and I have a feeling Scott doesn't have much of an opinion beyond "as long as they are learning dear, whatever you choose is fine with me."

Well, I said I wanted to stretch out our core.......

So, last week I wrote about how we started core 1 finally. Well, we did day 1 of week 1 last week. Yes, that's IT. I did the reading to the girls for that day, and the 2 pages of that Usborne book had so much in it that they wanted to spend more time on that I just said OK fine and we spent Tuesday and Wednesday looking deeper at it, then took Thursday and Friday off since Scott was home on a mini-vactaion thanks to Thanksgiving holiday. So, today I am *hoping* to pick up with day 2 and move a little faster than we did day 1. But then, we have spent the day cleaning up the schoolroom and getting other little things not school-related done, so I don't know if we will get to lessons at all today.

I never expected the kids to want to spend 3 days on the material of 1 day of history, but it was certainly a fun time for us. I can't wait to see where this core takes us, and I'm really hoping that I can find a good pace that will allow us to finish it by the end of next school year. Yes, I said NEXT school year.

But the girls certainly did appear to enjoy spending all that extra time on the material from that first day. I just hope they don't expect to spend a week on one day all the time, I don't mind doing it through these two Usborne books we're reading first in the core but I really don't think I have the patience to do it through the entire core. Heck, 180 days of core scheduled doing one day a week would be 180 weeks or uhhhhhhhh, around 3 1/2 years. Nope, that is NOT happening.

we have OFFICIALLY started core 1 today

Yes I know, we put that off long enough didn't we? I've had a very hard time trying to get us organized to do lessons, so I called it just good enough at getting a little math and language arts done each day for the most part. Well, tonight Scott decided that he was ready to start his evening read-aloud time with the girls again for bedtime, and he pulled the first read aloud book in our Sonlight core 1 schedule. He is reading 1 or 2 chapters each night to the girls until it is done, and then will pick up a book from our bookshelf to read before he moves on to the next read aloud in the core (therefore allowing me to kind of keep up with the history so that it flows a little bit on the same schedule, he won't get too far ahead of us hopefully). In the morning I plan to ask the girls to tell me about what he read tonight, then maybe we'll do the map assignment in the guide (I say maybe as a major maybe thing, we are trying to let the girls take the lead on this stuff) and hopefully I'll keep the momentum going by starting our history materials. I would LOVE to see the girls getting through their schoolwork in the mornings to free up our afternoons, especially since the little 2 kids are normally at their easiest in the mornings. We'll see how it goes though, I've been really flakey for a long time so it is going to take some serious discipline on my part to get this implemented.

our journey to becoming homeschoolers, and a plea from me

I've been thinking about this one a lot the last few days, and decided it was time to put exactly why we chose this route in one post instead of giving hints about it in many posts like I have been up until now. It is a very long story, so please have patience with me as I have 4 children to keep up with and have severe ADHD and the meds that I take make me functional but aren't really enough to keep me fully in check so this could be hard to follow and slightly random.

First I need to give a little background on educational histories for myself and my husband. Scott went to the same public school his entire career, starting at the preschool that everyone sent their children to in town at 4 and moving through the local public school to graduation. He was held back in 3rd grade because of maturity, he has an August birthday and was one of the youngest kids in his class before repeating 3rd grade. That repeat year was a good thing for him, and he went from struggling and acting out in class to getting good grades and being a good kid in class.

My school experience is completely different. I started out with private school for preschool at 3 years old and went through K there. In 1st grade I moved to the local public school and did well. I was reading with comprehension at a high school level, and capable of doing 6th grade math easily. The school bored me, but I did the best I could to jump their hoops. I moved before second grade to a new city, then mid-year again to a new city, only to end up back in the first new city for third grade. Yes, in grades 1-3 I was the new kids 4 different times in 3 different schools. Third grade was when I started having trouble in school. My grandmother had custody of me, and was abusive on top of it, and there was another new kid at my school that year. He moved there from New York City, I think his name was Chad or something like that. He wore a leather jacket and was one of those "bad boy" looking kids. The first day of school, he sized me up and decided that he was going to take me down a few pegs. See, despite my moving out of the school mid-year in 2nd grade and then back again for 3rd, I was one of the popular kids. I started out as one of the popular kids in 2nd grade, everyone wanted to hang out with me and I just had that personality that drew others to me. I was super smart, but acted like a normal kid at the same time, so nobody thought of me as that geeky kid. The other kids would ask me for homework help sometimes, but mainly they wanted to hang out with me and be my friend. I was the one to know, and I didn't take it for granted. I thought it was kind of cool to have so many people like me, and I used that to keep my standards high for my grades and actions even back then. I was one who wanted to set an example for others, and nobody was excluded because they dressed funny, didn't talk like the rest of us, or anything like that. Third grade started the same way for me, until that new kid decided he didn't like me. He started teasing me, telling me I was ugly and fat and dumb. I would ignore it, but soon enough he got everyone else in on it. When I got good grades, they canged it from saying I was dumb to teasing me for being so smart and calling me "teacher's pet." After a few months of nobody at school doing anything (I made sure to tell my teachers, the principal, my grandmother, anyone who would listen) I fought back. My grades dropped, I spent a lot of time in trouble for yelling in class (usually something obscene), and was suspended several times. In 5th grade, the principal sentenced me to Saturday school every week for the school year because I was such a disruption. The torment got worse over time too. The school did nothing, my grandmother did nothing but tell me to ignore it. She used to tell me "every time they start talking and saying nasty things, just pretend you have an eraser and erase their mouths, and if that doesn't stop it erase their entire body from your mind, pretend they aren't even there." I got straight F's in 5th grade despite being as smart as I was. I was in the gifted program in 3rd and 4th grade, until I asked to leave it because the kids there were harrassing me as well. I quit trying, and just shut down. For me, school was an escape from the abuse I endured at home, but at the same time I dreaded it because I was tormented there as well. I couldn't escape the torment and abuse, and in sixth grade I snapped and tried to swallow an entire bottle of buffered aspirin. After getting my stomach pumped and all the physical damage from it repaired, I started extensive therapy to try and repair the damage that had been done to me in public school. I also was moved to a private school an hour from home. There were only 5 kids in my classes at any given time when I was in that school. I was able to work completely at my pace in this school, and over the course of 6th and 7th grade I moved into high school advanced applied math classes (trig and pre-calculus) and I did high school biology. I remember 6th grade with biology, my lab partner was a 10th grade boy with Tourette's. I was the only one who wasn't bothered by his tics, and we worked well together. I did dissections and such, and he did all the lab sheet writing to record the information in labs. It was a great time for me, and I was devastated when my father got custody of me again right before I started 8th grade and learned that I would be attending a public school again. Thankfully, it was a district I had never been in before and they had a wonderful gifted program and pull-out services for anyone who needs them for any reason. My tutor in school the last 5 years of my education was wonderful, and she helped me to gain a lot of confidence with being back in a public school environment. I didn't apply myself as much as I could have, but still graduated in the top half of my class. I didn't have many friends either, as my previous experience in public school had led me to protect myself by withdrawing completely. I shied away from everyone, opting to just focus on my schoolwork and immersing myself in my music. I did it for my own protection, as I was not about to let anyone else close enough to me to cause me the tormet I went through in elementary school.

I swore that I would never let any children I had go through what I did, and when I met my aunt and uncle at 18 I was introduced to homeschooling. I thought it was interesting, parents teaching their own kids, so I looked into it during my pregnancy with Missa. By the time she was born, I was convinced and knew my kids would be homeschooled. I then started working on Scott about this, as he had an acceptably decent experience in school. I don't know if he knows much of what I went through in school myself, but he agreed to take it a year at a time at first and see where it went. Preschool went fairly well, although I doubted my ability to do it so I enrolled Missa in the school Scott attended when he was in school (that's where we lived, he grew up at the address we lived for the first 6 years we were together). Just 3 weeks before school started, we moved to a different city. The school district we moved to is the one I was in the second half of my 2nd grade year. We opted not to enroll Missa in school, but to homeschool her instead. We felt it would be too much change for her on top of moving to a new city and no longer having her own bedroom.

The first half of her K year went pretty well at home, but it was stressful for me. I was trying to do too much, this I know now. So, in January at the start of 2nd semester she was enrolled in the local school to finish the year. I felt like a failure to her, every day was a struggle to get her to school and I had to deal with tantrums every time. She didn't do well in school, and quickly became withdrawn and lost all confidence in herself. We decided to pull her out at the end of the school year, and go back to teaching her ourselves. In a moment of insecurity, we decided to go with Ohio Virtual Academy to help us build our confidence and develop the consistency we needed for schooling. We had a great year in K and 1st grade with Missa and Liddy with OHVA. It helped us to build our confidence and develop a routine for consistency.

We had only planned to do OHVA for that year, but we felt that since it had gone so well we wanted to try a second year with them. That lasted about 6 weeks before we withdrew from the school to strike out on our own. The pace just was too much with our family dynamic and lifestyle, we needed more flexibility than what the school could offer us. So we bought our curriculum and went for it.

I still have a lot of doubts, and wonder if I can pull this off. But honestly, right now my girls are creating stuff with play dough together, playing nicely and having a great time. They are having no problems sharing or taking turns with certain colors and tools. Even my 3 year old is doing well with that. We are reading books together as a family on a daily basis, and that desire to learn has returned to Missa. Sometimes Liddy says she wants to go to public school, but Missa insists that she never wants to go back there. I have considered sending Liddy and Kimi next school year, since both are ahead of the curriculum in our local schools, so they can see what it is all about, but I know that Missa is perfectly content to never go back to public school.

Our journey to homeschooling has been a complicated one, full of a lot of pain and emotional turmoil. It is not something that we decided on lightly, and I suspect still that Scott is not truly on board with the idea of it. He asked me at lunch today what the girls were doing, and when I told him they were enjoying the play dough he asked me what educational purpose it served so I had to break it down (with the motor delays in our home, the motor development that sculpting gives is a wonderful thing, and it serves double duty by providing them with an artistic outlet and working on the skills of playing together, sharing, and taking turns nicely with limited supplies of certain things). But I can honestly say that at the end of the day, I can't imagine ever sending my girls happily off to the public schools where we live for any reason as long as I am able to teach them myself. The social drawbacks of the local schools are just great for me to willingly do it.

(disclaimer: I know that my personal experience in public school for the 3 1/2 years that I was tormented so much are not typical experiences that children have. I realize that my experience was unusual and that my difficult home life at the same time did not help things any, and that I may have a slightly skewed view of what happened to me growing up. I have many repressed memories that I am working to unlock now, the majority of what I know of my own childhood comes from what I was told by others, and from reading paperwork recoding events. I also know that many children who experience what I tell of my own time in school are the ones who either commit suicide, like I attempted to do, or they take an automatic weapon to school and open fire on everyone in sight. Please take my experience to heart and share it with your children if they are in school, and pass it to everyone you know who has children in school or works with public and private school children. Don't let this continue, I am almost 29 years old. This is NOT a new problem in schools, and will not go away unless we as adults step in and do something drastic by getting the word out there!)

New month, new goals and Halloween fun!

Well, as you may already know, especially if you follow my blog and have been reading lately, we decided to leave OHVA and k12 in October. What you may NOT know, however, is that for the past two weeks I have been fighting mono. Yes, our last week of OHVA and first week of independence I have been down for the count. It isn't much of an issue though, as we had decided as a family to give the girls some time to decompress from the pressure of OHVA academics and just enjoy life and learn to love one another and love learning. So, I was hoping that I'd be able to get up and running with our new curriculum today, but I made the decision to take the kids out Trick Or Treating up in Johnstown on Thursday night with my mother-in-law and Scott. The kids had a blast hitting our old neighborhood (we went down the street we lived on and saw all our old neighbors and friends, it was GREAT) and Scott and I enjoyed catching up for a few minutes with some of our friends and neighbors and seeing some of his family. The only way it could have been better would have been if my aunt, uncle, and cousins were going to be home that night so we could have stopped in to see them as well. But we see them at church when we can get there, so it isn't much of a big issue that we didn't see them that night. The girls got enough candy to make a dozen dentists faint, and they ate almost every bit of it within 3 days. Yes, I allowed total free reign over the candy, we had a full paper grocery sack of it and I just wanted it out before I gained 10lbs. So they gorged.

Now, onto our plans for this month. It will require a little information on what we have decided to do with the kids so that you can get a feel for the dynamic here.

I started my college classes up again last week, which is giving us an interesting feel to evenings. I tend to work on my schoolwork after supper, when my mind is usually sharpest and Scott is home to handle the kids. This works well for me, I dedicate 2-4 hours a night (depending on how busy we've been with chores and other things that need done during the day) and am keeping up pretty well for the most part. I have a draft of an essay due today, so I'll actually be working a good bit today on it during chores time since I've opted to attempt to do laundry today as my big chore. I say ATTEMPT because my washer, as much as I love it, has a sensor that is going bad and the part is on backorder for another week or two, so it won't do spin cycle sometimes and I have to let the machine sit a few hours to reset when that sensor malfunctions (what it does, it senses the water draining from my machine and tells the machine to do that high speed spin at the end of its final rinse, its a real pain when it doesn't work). My big goal for ME this month is to keep up and pass my college class, which will be a challenge because it is ENGLICH COMPOSITION 1 and I do *not* do well with English comp classes. I never got that foundational background in grammar and English despite going to one of the best public schools in the state as a child during the critical years for grammar development. However, I am a natural writer so I can muddle a B in this class pretty easily, I hope. I'll be happy with a C though, since this is one of my weaker areas.

For the girls, well we have a totally different plan. We are thinking of starting lessons up with them on a more official level around Thanksgiving possibly, to allow me to recover from my mono since Trick or Treat night set me back so badly (I was feeling pretty good Thursday, then Friday I felt like I got run over by a Mac truck again and still feel that way here on Monday morning). Here's what I have in mind when we do get started.

UNSCHOOLING.

Now, we're not going all-out radical unschooling here. I don't have the trust in my kids for that. HOWEVER, I will allow them to dictate what and when for academics. If they choose to spend a week or two focusing on math workbooks that I've got for them (Miquon for Missa, Horizons for Liddy) or a month working on lang arts worksheets (I have Explode the Code and Sonlight lang arts for them to do as they want), then that is fine. Since we love reading and books, I chose to purchase Sonlight core 1 to read daily to them. Core 1 is the first part of a 2-year world history program, and I am going to follow the guide mostly for this program as far as reading schedules go for each book. We may or may not use the timeline stuff, mapwork, and the discussion questions and such. I'm going to play it by ear mostly on that. Science, we're going to explore science books i have on hand from my earlier cores (core 1 is the 4th core I own, so we're pulling books from science P3/4, P4/5, and K as our exploration). We plan to learn a lot through living life and exploring, and throughv reading great books.

So, that's my plan. We're going to read books in P3/4 and core 1 this year, encourage the girls to do math and lang. arts at their pace and interest, and sxplore a lot of science books and topics. And we'll start once I'm over fighting this mono.