Sierra has decided that she wants to do Saxon Math next year instead of Horizons. I'm completely fine with that. Not only does it save me money (I can borrow everything for Saxon from Option/APEX), but it seems to have less busy work, fewer lessons, and more explanations. Besides, I was planning on making the switch to Saxon some time in the near future anyway. Horizons only covers K-6.

Latin Shmatin

We've been doing Latin this year, and it's actually going really well. I'm thinking that we'll be doing it next year too. But here is the reason: I love Rosetta Stone!

Oh, we've tried a few different curriculum for the subject.

The first, Prima Latina, a work book type approach, was rather dry. It would have been OK for Sierra, but it would have never kept Bailey's interest. Also, it required a lot of work on my end. Not the happiest thing for me.

Next, due to a fluke in ordering through Options, we tried Power Glide. This curriculum uses audio stories to teach words along with a workbook for visual learning. The girls loved it! They listened to the stories, picked up the words easily, and were able to do it with very little help from me. It was a good program, but there were some big draw backs. I personally found it annoying to listen to as the stories were very much aimed at kids and the voice acting was sub par. Not a problem for the kids, but I also wanted to learn Latin. The other was that it really didn't cover a whole lot. We finished the program in two months. It was a very nice introduction actually, but that's about as far as it went.

Finally, after the fluke order was fixed, I got my hands on Rosetta Stone, a computer program using both audio and visual. It didn't take long for me to be highly impresses. All of the stuff that the girls had leaned with the previous curricula was covered in about three lessons. Now, grant it, the girls would take a few days to cover each lesson, but they still learned it faster (in a couple weeks vs a couple months). And they were just getting into the program! (It will likely take them over two years to complete the first level.) Oh and I enjoy it too.

How Rosetta Stone works is, you look at the pictures and hear the words. Then you match the pictures to the words. Next, they give you a picture and the printed words, which they read to you. Again you match. For older students, they then give you the printed words, and you have to match them with the picture without audio. The only down side is that they never actually tell you what the words mean. You have to guess. A Latin dictionary can easily solve that though. Oh, and if you want to learn grammar, you'll need to either get their accompanying workbook or some other text to teach it to you. But still, for a 3rd grader and a Kindergardener, it's fantastic! And I'm learning a lot too with seemingly little effort.

The Money Book

My husband, who is self-employed, came across a book on a financial blog geared toward those of our kind. It's called The Money Book for Freelancers, Part-Timers, and the Self-Employed: The Only Personal Finance System for People with Not so Regular Jobs.

Since I am the one who does the finances in our house, I had already come to realize that the traditional methods of saving weren't the ideal method for us. When your income flow is unpredictable, it's hard to save x amount predictably. So, I was interested, and, after reading the reviews, decided to get it.

I must say, I like it. It's easy to read and understand, and the authors use civilized humor which makes the reading enjoyable as well.

The plan works off of percentages instead of flat sums, really, really, really emphasizes prioritizing emergency savings, taxes, and retirement as well as paying off debt, and helps you find ways of prioritizing and saving for other things you want. It does all of this while understanding where the self-employed, etc are coming from (a non-stable income flow, business taxes/deductions, lack of good/any medical coverage, absence of a 401K, etc.).

Also, being a homeschooling mom, I thought about how I would like my kids to know these things. After all, don't most high school/college students fit into this category? Babysitting? Working at McDonalds? Lifeguarding over the summers? These aren't exactly stable, benefits producing jobs, but they can learn how to save according to their earnings. And, what's more, the percentage of people who fit into this category is growing rapidly. The odds are that our kids will be faced with this kind of work at some time or other in their adult careers.

In any case, especially if you fit this category of employment and even if you do not, I think it is a very enlightening and helpful read.

Multiplication Sensation

It's late in coming, but I promised to tell you what I thought about the Multiplication Sensation CD and Book by Kid Clever. I found their Listen In Addition set at our local library and was so impressed that I bought both sets, hoping that the multiplication one would help Sierra in math.

Well, it's helped. A lot! We started listening to the CD in our car about two weeks before Sierra's math program introduced multiplication. I'm so glad we did! Sierra, instead of having a complete mental breakdown on being introduced to something new (her standard reaction), found herself only mildly uncomfortable. That feeling went away quickly, and in the three weeks since, I've yet to hear a complaint out of her as she does multiplication work. It really is amazing.

As a bonus, Bailey's become proficient at counting her nickels and dimes, something she'd been struggling with earlier.

What's even better is that both of my girls like showing off what they know. They can now do skip counting with 2s, 3s, 4s, 5s, 6s, 7s, 9s, 10s, 11s, and 12s, multiply by 0s, 1s, 2s, 5s, 10s, 11s without much thinking, and figure out their other times tables with a little thought. Not bad at all for 5 and 7 year olds.

And only one of the songs drives me crazy. It talks about a dragon dentist who likes to pull teeth. . . squirm.

It's been an absolutely wonderful find. Highly recommended.

Listen in Addition

I've been looking around at the multiplication CDs, trying to find something to help Sierra, but had yet to find something that didn't drive me crazy. Almost all of them are very monotonous with little more then repetition of numbers and equations. And while they will help you memorize the facts, it will drive you batty in the process.

Well, at the library yesterday, I cam across an addition CD called "Listen in Addition". It had a CD and board book together, and since my kids were busy playing on the library computer, I popped it into the library's CD player and listened in. I was surprised. It was actually fun! Julie Scott, the author, has a fun song to go along with each addition set. Half of the song is fun made up stuff, the other half is the addition facts, and it's repeated twice. The book also is nicely done, showing pictures to match the songs while presenting the addition facts. There are no words to clutter the pages, just the numbers and fun drawings. This really helps those audio-visual learners put the music facts on paper.

The first ten songs cover the addition problems from 1+0 to 10+9 (each set, 0-9, getting it's own song). The last two songs go on to the addition facts that add up to ten (such as 7+3 and 6+4) and doubles (6+6, 5+5, etc.). I'll admit, they're not the best songs in the world, but they're better then everything else I've come across. I'll be able to listen to them repetitively without going nuts. Check out the web link above to hear some samples. You can also check it out from your local library (although you living in the Longmont area will have to wait until I return it).

I was able to find the multiplication equivalent, Multiplication Sensation, on Amazon (our library doesn't carry it), and I'm excited to try it out. It also comes with a book to help the visual learners. They do skip counting as well as the multiplication tables, a very useful skill, and the book is paperback instead of a board book. I'll let you know how it turns out.

True Books

For science, we don't have any one book that we use. Instead, we pick general topics, then find books at the library about those topics. Last year, for example, we studied animals. So, we would go to the library and pick out books on, say, giraffes, bring them home, read them, write a short report, and color a picture about giraffes. The next week, we'd pick another animal, and so on. This year, we're studying earth science, and we've found books on volcanoes, mountains, oceans, tornadoes, earthquakes, etc.

With all of these books that we've gone through, I've come to really like one series in particular. They've got books on almost every subject (even if our library doesn't carry them all), and they're the perfect length for second through fifth graders (they can be a bit long for the attention span of a first grader). I've yet to find a series that I like as much.

They're called True Books. They've taught my family about tornadoes, hurricanes, tsunamis, mountains, gemstones, dinosaurs, oceans, caves, volcanoes, and the list goes on. And you can find them on other subjects as well, like ecosystems, the solar system, different countries, various animals, etc. Luckily our local library caries a lot of them. They're very helpful and informative, with vocabulary words and often additional information. And best of all, they don't talk down. What more could you ask?

Sierra’s Reading Chapter Books!!!

I used to wonder if this day would ever come. There were times when it was literally like pulling teeth to get my daughter to read. She would look at a word, realize she didn’t know it by sight, and start hollering that she couldn’t read it. Words like "get", and later words like “print” would send her into a total melt down. We’re not talking that long ago either.

Only a year ago, she would agonize over reading a simple book like “Hop on Pop”. We’d been using “The Ordinary Parent’s Guide to Teaching Reading”, and she would sulk every time I brought it out. It was dry (no pictures) and put a lot of pressure on her to perform. We kept at it anyway. I didn’t know what else to do.

Last fall, however, my sister who works at an elementary school offered to let us use an on-line reading program through her school for free. I jumped at the chance. Headspreout turned out to be a lifesaver. Sierra was able to review all that she knew in a non-pressure environment and even go on to learn things she didn’t already know. She played games that helped her sound out words, taught her a number of sight words, and took her through sentence structure and reading comprehension. In a matter of weeks, she went from hating reading and thinking that she couldn’t read to actually enjoying herself. She flew through the program, completing it in just a couple months.

Sierra was now at a second grade reading level, but she was still lacking in confidence and fluency. I still worked with our old book (which she now accepted and sometimes wanted to do), but it wasn’t enough. I started having her read a book a day. “Hop on Pop” was a good start. So was “Ten Apples up on Top”. She knew these books well because her Daddy had read them to her a number of times. The hard part at first was making her actually read instead of reciting from memory.

I eventually dropped the reading primer when it started teaching all of the strange words in our language that we borrowed from other languages. At that point, it started to feel more like memorization work, and I was bored with it. Instead, we focused more on her book a day. Sierra was getting braver and reading longer and more complex books of her own choosing. Again, she would read books that Daddy had read to her, so they weren’t scary. She was learning fluency, which is all I was asking for at that point.

During Math and Spelling, I would make her read the instructions. She hated this at first, especially when I made her sound out a word that she didn’t recognize, but now she does it routinely. She’ll even read the word problems on her own without asking for help more often then not now. Occasionally, she would branch out and read short stories that she hadn’t read before. I also stated pointing out to her how well she could read and what she could do with a little more practice.

Well, it worked. Daddy has been reading the Tinker Bell books to the girls at night, and I’ve been telling Sierra that she could probably read them if she wanted. They’re just longer then the books she’s used to reading. That’s all.

She took my word for it, and last night, all on her own, she got out and started reading one of the Tinker Bell books. She’s read three chapters already, putting it down when she’s had enough, and picking it up again later. Daddy and I are thrilled, and that makes her want to read more.

We’ll still continue reading a book a day. It’s just good practice, but seriously, she made my year. All of my hard work hasn’t been for nothing. That’s good to know.

I have Options!

I’ve decided to put Sierra in public school next year. I’d do the same with Bailey, only her birthday is two weeks after the district’s cut off, so they won’t let me. I’ll be putting her in the year after.

Why have I decided to do this? Well, I think it will be the best thing for my kids. They’ll get the social interaction that public school offers, make new friends, and have multiple teachers. It will give them a chance to get out of the house. They’ll have a lot of extra curriculars, which I won’t be able to give them, and I’ll get to have a full day to myself each week.

Oh, did I mention that they’re only going to be going to school one day a week?

That’s right. I’m still going to be homeschooling my kids. It’s just that now they get to go to school in a classroom setting one day a week with other homeschooling kids.

The Aurora Public School District here in Colorado offers this “Options” method of schooling so that parents can benefit from the tax money they pay and give kids those added experiences that they are often missing while homeschooling (ie, classroom settings, group activities, extracurriculars, and occasional homework). They have several locations in most of the larger cities throughout Colorado. Longmont is currently working on getting a second. Among us homeschoolers, it’s a very popular program.

Basically, once a week, my kids go to “school” for 7 hours; six one hour classes, ½ hour lunch, ½ hour recess. Kindergarten and first grade have a sort of fun/play/experiment day similar to an actual school setting, but focused more on the fun stuff. Once the kids reach 2nd grade, they get to start choosing their classes (with their parent’s help, of course). Some of the options for classes include dance, art, drama, choir, keyboard, cooking, computer skills, Spanish, science, history, math games, literature, etc.

As an added benefit to parents, they can check out popular homeschool curriculum for the year at no cost, grades k-3 get two free consumable workbooks of their choice, and juniors and seniors can get two college classes per semester paid for (as long as they pass, that is).

And all of this costs a measly $25 per student per year.

Who ever said you couldn’t have your cake and eat it too?

Music My Kids Love

My kids and I like to listen to music in our car as we drive places. Nothing unusual. We’ve listened to Disney’s Greatest, Disney’s Princess, and Disney’s Children’s Favorites a number of times. We all know the songs and order by heart. Recently, however, we’ve taken a bit of a different direction.

After Halloween last year, my husband put The Nightmare Before Christmas soundtrack into our car CD player, where it happily stayed for weeks. The kids were enchanted! It was something very different from what they were used to, a little sinister, a lot of drama and depth, and a few purely instrumental tracks.

After Christmas, we switched to The Lion King Broadway Musical, which we’ve been listening to ever since. I thought that we would have been tired of it a long time ago, but when I tried to change the CD to something else, none of us were happy. It has familiar songs, lots of new ones (some utilizing acoustic guitars), a distinctly African flavor, and more fantastic instrumentals. Oh, and the singers are absolutely wonderful!

I’ve been seriously toying with the idea of putting on Joseph and His Technicolor Dream Coat next. Les Mis is fun too, but the content is a little over their heads right now. Same with Phantom of the Opera, though we have put it on for them before, and they did like it.

At home, my kids have more favorites that they like to dance to. Again, Disney is prominent, but they really like some others as well. One of the more notable is the Nutcracker Sweat. They like to be the fairies, flowers, and mushrooms in Fantasia, or Clara from the Nutcracker.

Another favorite is called Kameo. Believe it or not, it’s a videogame soundtrack, and it’s really good. There are the brave, hero songs, the soft, background world music, a plucky bassoon number, and lots more. My kids have dubbed the bassoon song the “duck” song. It’s their particular favorite, and they always jump around and dance when it’s on.

If we feel like Japanese music, we put in a compellation of songs from Hayao Miyazaki’s movies. These include such titles as Kiki’s Delivery Service, My Neighbor Totoro, Castle in the Sky, Porco Roso, and Naussica. Miyazaki is Japan’s equivalent of Walt Disney, and his works are absolutely wonderful!

My kids also like to play Christmas music all year round, and their favorite (until they left it out and it got broken) was Manheim Steamroller Christmas Extraordinaire. It uses a lot of synthesizers and almost no vocals to play a number of Christmas favorites.

My oldest, who loves drama, also likes Rachmaninoff; very intense, dramatic, emotional, and complex piano music.

Anyway, those are some of the CDs we like to listen to. I like the idea of introducing a lot of different kinds of music to my kids, and why not make it good music that I enjoy as well?

The Ins and Outs of Me

Since Christmas, my girls and I have been learning about the human body, and things are going well.

The core book, or spine, that we use is the Kingfisher's First Encyclopedia of the Human Body. I actually rather like the book. Subjects are covered in two page spreads which are not overly crowded with photos or information. Pictures are simple, colorful, and fun. The text is also simple and straight forward, and the concepts are geared toward young children. More often then not, they also have small experiments that can be done to illustrate different concepts. (For example, when talking about how muscles work, they have the readers bent their arm, feeling both the triceps and biceps change shape.)

For lessons, I have clumped subjects together into about 16 groups. They are only four to six pages of text, or about 20 minutes reading. We read the pages, do any activities on those pages, and then color pictures about what we studied. While the girls are coloring, I ask them about whatever experiment we did and fill out an experiment page (What did we use? What did we do? What happened? What did we learn?). After (or before) that, I ask the girls to tell me about what they learned, and I write that down too. Simple, and it only takes 30 to 40 minutes.

I have not been able to find a simple enough coloring book, so for pictures to color, I have traced some of the drawings in the book, photo copied them, and let my girls color. (Copy paper is really useful here :)

Sierra's Reading List

Thought I’d mention the books that my husband has read to Sierra over this past year. He reads to her almost every night after reading short picture books to my other two in preparations for bedtime. Anyway, here’s their list, in descending order, from Sierra’s favorite to least favorite. Enjoy.

Ramona the Brave
Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh
Stewart Little
Fairy Dust and the Quest for the Egg
Tink, North of Never Land
The Hobbit
The Tales of Despereaux
Bunnicula
The Princess and the Goblin
The Complete Tales of Beatrix Potter
The Trumpet of the Swan
The Book of Three

I did it! Sort of.

I did it! I reached my goal of reading an average of a book a week this year! Well . . . that is . . . if you count all of the books that I read more then once.

One of my friends had the great idea of reading a book a week this year, and I thought that I would see if I could do it too. My reading list was nowhere near as ambitious as hers was, but I still had a lot of fun, and read some really good books.

Officially, I only read a total of 48 books, four shy of the required 52. However, if you include all of the books that I read more then once, I read 60. Got that? 60!!!

Here are some of my favorites:

Eat, Drink, and be Healthy
Wuthering Heights
Jane Eyer
The Brothers Karamazov
Middlemarch
Pride and Prejudice
The Witch of Blackbird Pond
Mara, Daughter of the Nile
Howel's Moving Castle
Twilight (and series)

Scribble Art

We've recently taken up art at our homeschool.  It was mostly because I was trying to find something to do during that 15-30 minute lull after Sierra was done with school and before it was time to pick up Bailey from preschool.  Also, I found it too difficult to take all three of my kids, Blake in particular, to out local museum's Discovery Days (weekly art projects for ages 2-6).

At first, we just did a little of this, a little of that.  My mom had given us a bunch of small projects for the kids to do (making bracelets, painting sun catchers, etc.), so we started on those while I searched for a good book of ideas.

A couple years ago, I picked up a book called Mudworks by MaryAnn F. Kohl.  I liked it a lot, but there wasn't much besides sculpting, exploring, and playing with different compounds.  Well, last week, a friend of mine told me she had another art book by MaryAnn Kohl, Scribble Art.  Turns out, it's exactly what I was looking for.

Remember making crayon rubbings?  What about spatter painting?  Finger painting?  Collages?  Scribble Art is based upon the premiss of exploration.  There are no specific outcomes to the projects.  What she does instead is give you a list of materials, the process used, and variations that you can do with the materials/processes.  The final outcome is open ended.  The best part, for me, is that the projects can be easily adapted to a wide range of ages, from preschoolers through adult.  You can make the project as complex or as simple as you want.  I can enjoy the art experience right along with my kids.  Another bonus is that most of the materials used are found lying around the house (crayons, chalk, tape, yarn, glue, tissue paper, string, newspaper, baking supplies, etc.).

It's a great book.  Check it out at your local library (I know Longmont has it).  You can also "look inside" on Amazon.com  here.

Lions and Tigers and Bears

We recently started learning about animals for our science study.  We use the Kingfishers First Encyclopedia of Animals as a general resource (as suggested in The Well Trained Mind), but I've found that it really doesn't do much.  There isn't enough information on the animals to feel like you're actually sinking your teeth in, no matter what your age is.

We have discovered that books about the animals written in a story like manner captivate my children best.  Often, these narrations contain enough interesting facts and a wealth of pictures to excite their young minds.  Lists of facts are too dry, but a story is engaging.  You can find a wealth of these books at your library, especially on the common animal topics like bugs, penguins, elephants, etc.

Another great resource that we have found is National Geographic's free coloring pages (find the link on the side bar).  Just print them out, and you've got a beautiful, realistic picture to color.   Other coloring resources that I like are the Dover Coloring Books (found on Amazon for $3.99 each).  Again, they are realistic drawings for you to color.  My favorite ones are the Coral Reef and Wild Animals.  They are less cluttered with background, which is good for the young artist.  Forest Animals is also a nice one with more background habitat.

We're also planning on making a trip to the zoo sometime this year.  (The Denver Zoo has the occasional free day if money is an issue.)  

Science is fun, and kids love animals.  It's going to be a great school year!

Horizon's Math

When my daughter started kindergarden, she was already starting to do math in her head.  I took it as a sign that she was ready and embarked upon the task of finding a good kindergarden math curriculum.  

I hear a lot about Saxon Math, so that's where I started my search.  It looked good to me in their descriptions, so I ordered all of the materials (teacher's book, K calendar, and manipulatives). But when I got everything out to look at the lessons and so forth, I didn't like what I saw.  Everything was scripted (something I'm not to keen on, especially in math and science), and it seemed like it was meant more for Pre-K then Kindergarden ("These are called bear counters.  What colors do you see?  What is your favorite color?  Let's play with them for five minutes and then put them away until the next time where we will do the same thing").  The lessons, in the attempt to cover everything, progressed slowly.  Only about half way through did it give any sort of "real" math. 

While I had been waiting for the Saxon stuff to come, I came across another curriculum, Horizon's Math.  Like Saxon, it used a spiral method of teaching with lots of short reviews. It had no scripting (which appealed to me), all of the manipulatives used were easily found around the house, and the workbook pages were colorful and attractive.  It was also rated highly by other homeschoolers.  So, I decided that I would order that curriculum as well and compare the two, sending back whichever I decided not to use.

When I compared them, Horizons won hands down.  Not only was it less expensive, but it progressed at a good pace and wasn't dumbed down in order to cover "everything".  By the end of the first month we were starting addition, telling time to the hour, and reading calendars.  At the end of the year, we were working on subtraction, skip counting by 2s, 3s, and 4s, and reading clocks to the five minutes.  Things also covered were counting to one-hundred by 1s, 5s and 10s, counting money using pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters and dollar bills, measurements in centimeters and inches, and introduction to gallons, cups, liters, quarts, word problems, and a number of other things.  I really, really liked it.

My only gripes were that, I felt, occasionally they would introduce too many things at once and that I found little use for the instructor's manual.

We are now starting the 1st grade set, this time without the teachers manual.  The lay out is a little different, and they have added tests every ten lessons or so (I  haven't decided weather I will use them or not). The curriculum promises the same spiral method and advanced speed.  I'm optimistic.

Other reviews can be found at Homeschool Reviews.

The Well Trained Mind

When I was first looking at homeschooling my children, I found myself being drawn toward the Classical method.  I like structure.  I like organization.  I want my children to learn more about the classics and history then I did in public school.  And what's wrong with Latin anyway?

So, I was thrilled when I found The Well Trained Mind by Jessie Wise and her daughter Susan Wise Bauer.  In it, they lay out how to give your children a Classical education.  They give you practically everything you need: curriculum to use,  book lists,  schedules, time frames, vendor addresses, and more.  They even break down their teaching methods into the three parts of the trivium where they devote a chapter to each subject explain how to teach it.  That book gave me the structure and confidence that I needed.  After reading it, I finally felt like I could give my kids the education that I wanted for them.

Anyone who is interested in homeschooling should at least take a look at this book.  It covers more then just the Classical method.  For those who want to pursue the Classical method, it is a must.