New Homeschool Year
here are our curricula purchases for the upcoming school year (which we start on May 1st, don't ask), by category:
Math:
Foerster's Algebra I (Student book and Solutions Manual)
Math Without Borders (video lessons) to accompany Algebra I
Westcott Metal Compass (I have no idea if Primo will need a compass this year, but he could have used one a few weeks ago while doing 'test prep' for his CAT-E, so I'm picking one up. It's $1.25, not a big deal if we don't need it this school year)
Singapore 1A/1B workbooks (for Snorzy in four years, I'm worried they will stop selling these before he gets around to starting math)
(nothing for Radish, I jumped the gun last year buying 5th grade Singapore, which we didn't need until this coming May. I also have Life of Fred Fractions, and Decimals & Percents ready for him, if he wants to start those this year)
Science:
Tarbuck Earth Science (college textbook, it looks intimidating but everyone in the online reviews I read swore this was the best thing to use for middle school/high school level Earth Science, we'll see)
Prentice Hall Science Explorer Earth Science
Earth Science Success: 50 Lesson Plans for grades 6-9 (for labwork etc to go with above)
Investigating Rocks: The Rock Cycle (from the Do It Yourself series, supposedly good hands-on experiments and activities that kids can do with little to no adult help)
Detective Science: 40 Crime Case Activities
History:
History Odyssey Modern Times (Level 1)
History Odyssey Modern Times (Level 2)- I'm so excited about having both boys use this curriculum this year, each at an appropriate level! I still haven't gotten around to writing a whole blog post about how much I love this history curriculum, but I will one of these days.
English:
Daily Grams Jr/Sr High (sad that this is the last in the series! these have been so great for my guys, they never mind doing them, it's a nice little bit of work to get them going in the morning, and their basic writing skills have grown so much since they each started doing these)
Daybook of Critical Reading and Writing, Grade 6
Daybook of Critical Reading and Writing, Grade 9
Reading Comprehension Book 4, plus Teacher Key
More Reading Comprehension Level 2, plus Teacher Key- I'm nervous and unsure about these four (above) pieces, I haven't made the guys do much in the way of reading or even writing instruction for the past few years and I don't know if they're going to be overwhelmed, or enjoy a little challenge in these areas. My thinking is that it's time (for Primo, anyway) to go back to having 'English' as a subject, aside from the reading and writing he does in science and history. In the past few years I've been acting as if he has 'tested out' of English by reading above his grade level and testing high on the CAT E at the end of each year, in both reading and writing. Now I'm starting to think in terms of transcripts and college entrance requirements, he's going to need English and I'm too lazy to want to tease out what he's doing organically and write it up.
Comedy of Errors (No Fear Shakespeare)- a young friend showed this book to me the other day, and since that young friend and her brother are going to be in a production of this play in the summer which we will certainly want to attend, I thought my guys should become familiar with the story. I love the format of these 'No Fear Shakespeare' books, wish I had had them when I first tried to read these plays!
Getting Started With Latin- I lump Latin in with English for our purposes. We finished Minimus Secundus a while ago, and I didn't know where to go next with this. I want to continue to expose them to some Latin, it can't hurt anything, but I don't want to spend a lot of time or energy on it either.
Practical Arts:
Start it Up: a Complete Teen Business Guide for Turning Your Passions Into Pay
Better Than a Lemonade Stand!: Small Business Ideas for Kids
Growing Money: A Complete Investing Guide for Kids
Let's Cut Paper (for Snorzy, to practice cutting)
Betty Crocker's Cookbook For Boys and Girls
Health:
Healthy Eating: Diet and Nutrition (another of those DIY books like the one I bought for science, this one sounds more like 'health ed' to me so I'm putting it in its own category)
Pandemic! Board Game (maybe this one is a bit of a stretch, but I usually throw in a new board game with our huge curricula buy, and tell myself it has educational value. That's how Settlers of Catan came into our lives, a few years ago)
Physical Education:
Cozy Coupe (Snorzy)
Mashoonga! Warrior Pair (we're calling these 'whack-y sticks', and I hope they'll encourage a certain Primo to want to go outside to play a bit more often)
Showing posts with label reading. Show all posts
Showing posts with label reading. Show all posts
Monday, April 20, 2015
Saturday, November 1, 2014
10 Ways to Procrastinate Writing Fiction
#1. Resurrect a lapsed blog.
As I told you last summer, I signed up for a Writing Fiction class at my local community college, rather than deciding what kind of graduate degree I want to pursue. I was very excited. And as you know if you've been reading me, to get warmed up and make sure I didn't embarrass myself in class, over the summer I did a free online course through Open University called Start Writing Fiction. I was concerned because I had never written a story before, not since I was a tiny little girl and wrote only a few sentences. Class started in late August, a little while after I wrote my last post for this blog.
At first I was really inspired, I had a bunch of ideas (mostly hare-brained) for short stories. I wrote one of them over the course of a number of weeks, but it turned out sounding stiff and bloodless. It was about a middle-aged character having a very quiet sort of experience. Even though the class I'm taking is at a community college and meets in the evening, I am the only 'adult learner' in there, the rest of them look to be 18-19 years old. I wanted to write something that they would like, since we have to read our stories aloud and have the class critique them. I scrapped my first story at the last minute (one week before my first 'workshop') and wrote another, a YA short story about teenage Wiccans. My classmates ate it up, although they misunderstood the story somewhat.
Once I survived my first workshop, I found to my dismay that all my ideas and inspiration had dried up, and I didn't know what to write. I tried writing another story, and started it twice but both times it sounded stiff and contrived.
Meanwhile, Ariel had told me about the Young Writer's Program part of NaNoWriMo , and I helped Primo sign up. He got really excited about it, and started writing character bios and story ideas. Soon his friends were signed up too, and even Radish asked me to help him make an account. I decided to sign myself up for the regular adult version of NaNo, the 50,000 word write-a-novel-in-a-month challenge. I figured there was no way I'd make it to 50K, but writing toward that goal would give me something meaty to bring to my second (and final) workshop for class. The professor seems to prefer unfinished 'first chapter of my novel' pieces over finished short stories, and the class, too, criticizes those less. Anyway, I took my most substantial idea and wrote an outline, put it aside until November 1st.
Today. I tried, this morning, to write from that outline, and the result was the poorest, most bloodless writing that I've done so far. I think I might scrap the whole idea and write 'by the seat of my pants' in a genre, rather than straight real-world fiction.
But for this evening, I'm finding lots of other things somehow more pressing or interesting than getting to work on writing fiction. There's this poor, neglected blog, for instance. How could I let it languish for one more day? :) Also, there's:
#2. File away the kids' homeschool work in their notebooks.
#3. Make a cup of tea, and some toast with jam to go along with it.
#4. Hmm, laundry. No reason to let it sit, just because it's Saturday night!
#5. Christmas shopping! Online, natch...
#6. Email. Oh, so urgent, these messages, must read right now...
#7. Get ahead on tomorrow's chores: plan meals for the week, write lessons for the week (including all-new 'Baby Lessons'! more on that in my next post!)
#8. Read-- if I can't write fiction today, I can still immerse myself in it. Specifically, a terrific book by Octavia Butler, Wild Seed. It's so interesting to read this book after reading about it and reading the first paragraphs, broken down, in Orson Scott Card's How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy. I'm having one of my reading crises again-- I've stacked myself up with too many things to read, trying to find inspiration. I have an old favorite, Orson Scott Card's Maps in a Mirror out from the library for over a week, but untouched. And a fun, YA collection of short holiday stories called My True Love Gave to Me. Then there's the short story collection (Best American Short Stories 2014) that I don't have to read for class, but I feel like I should anyway (it was the 2013 edition that was mandatory for class, but I finished that). And the boys have several things out from the library that I want to read, and I have a few more on my NOOK, and don't get me started on magazines and non-fiction (I have three or four books about helping your homeschooler get into college which I haven't started yet).
#9. TV- and this one is ridiculous, because we only have the most basic cable and on a Saturday night there is *nothing on*, not until SNL and that's hours away.
#10. Make a list of some kind. Oh. Check.
I guess I'll be mad at myself tomorrow if I don't at least make an attempt to write something worth continuing (the 150 words I put down this morning is not it). But first, I hear Snorzy talking upstairs, more than an hour after I put him down in his crib. A few more minutes before I have to face the blank page!
As I told you last summer, I signed up for a Writing Fiction class at my local community college, rather than deciding what kind of graduate degree I want to pursue. I was very excited. And as you know if you've been reading me, to get warmed up and make sure I didn't embarrass myself in class, over the summer I did a free online course through Open University called Start Writing Fiction. I was concerned because I had never written a story before, not since I was a tiny little girl and wrote only a few sentences. Class started in late August, a little while after I wrote my last post for this blog.
At first I was really inspired, I had a bunch of ideas (mostly hare-brained) for short stories. I wrote one of them over the course of a number of weeks, but it turned out sounding stiff and bloodless. It was about a middle-aged character having a very quiet sort of experience. Even though the class I'm taking is at a community college and meets in the evening, I am the only 'adult learner' in there, the rest of them look to be 18-19 years old. I wanted to write something that they would like, since we have to read our stories aloud and have the class critique them. I scrapped my first story at the last minute (one week before my first 'workshop') and wrote another, a YA short story about teenage Wiccans. My classmates ate it up, although they misunderstood the story somewhat.
Once I survived my first workshop, I found to my dismay that all my ideas and inspiration had dried up, and I didn't know what to write. I tried writing another story, and started it twice but both times it sounded stiff and contrived.
Meanwhile, Ariel had told me about the Young Writer's Program part of NaNoWriMo , and I helped Primo sign up. He got really excited about it, and started writing character bios and story ideas. Soon his friends were signed up too, and even Radish asked me to help him make an account. I decided to sign myself up for the regular adult version of NaNo, the 50,000 word write-a-novel-in-a-month challenge. I figured there was no way I'd make it to 50K, but writing toward that goal would give me something meaty to bring to my second (and final) workshop for class. The professor seems to prefer unfinished 'first chapter of my novel' pieces over finished short stories, and the class, too, criticizes those less. Anyway, I took my most substantial idea and wrote an outline, put it aside until November 1st.
Today. I tried, this morning, to write from that outline, and the result was the poorest, most bloodless writing that I've done so far. I think I might scrap the whole idea and write 'by the seat of my pants' in a genre, rather than straight real-world fiction.
But for this evening, I'm finding lots of other things somehow more pressing or interesting than getting to work on writing fiction. There's this poor, neglected blog, for instance. How could I let it languish for one more day? :) Also, there's:
#2. File away the kids' homeschool work in their notebooks.
#3. Make a cup of tea, and some toast with jam to go along with it.
#4. Hmm, laundry. No reason to let it sit, just because it's Saturday night!
#5. Christmas shopping! Online, natch...
#6. Email. Oh, so urgent, these messages, must read right now...
#7. Get ahead on tomorrow's chores: plan meals for the week, write lessons for the week (including all-new 'Baby Lessons'! more on that in my next post!)
#8. Read-- if I can't write fiction today, I can still immerse myself in it. Specifically, a terrific book by Octavia Butler, Wild Seed. It's so interesting to read this book after reading about it and reading the first paragraphs, broken down, in Orson Scott Card's How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy. I'm having one of my reading crises again-- I've stacked myself up with too many things to read, trying to find inspiration. I have an old favorite, Orson Scott Card's Maps in a Mirror out from the library for over a week, but untouched. And a fun, YA collection of short holiday stories called My True Love Gave to Me. Then there's the short story collection (Best American Short Stories 2014) that I don't have to read for class, but I feel like I should anyway (it was the 2013 edition that was mandatory for class, but I finished that). And the boys have several things out from the library that I want to read, and I have a few more on my NOOK, and don't get me started on magazines and non-fiction (I have three or four books about helping your homeschooler get into college which I haven't started yet).
#9. TV- and this one is ridiculous, because we only have the most basic cable and on a Saturday night there is *nothing on*, not until SNL and that's hours away.
#10. Make a list of some kind. Oh. Check.
I guess I'll be mad at myself tomorrow if I don't at least make an attempt to write something worth continuing (the 150 words I put down this morning is not it). But first, I hear Snorzy talking upstairs, more than an hour after I put him down in his crib. A few more minutes before I have to face the blank page!
Thursday, November 28, 2013
Standards
One of the things I find both interesting and challenging about homeschooling is figuring out when the boys' work is "good enough". In the beginning, with Primo, I tended to expect too much from him in his lessons. It was lucky for him that I started using the Story of the World history curriculum, which includes review questions and sample narrations for each story. Before that, throughout most of his first grade year, I read ancient history books with him and then expected him to be able to answer very detailed questions and to write long, complex narrations. I don't think it was much fun for him. Once I saw how simple the SOW questions and narrations were, I dialed it way back.
These days, though, I often worry that I'm not asking enough of Primo and Radish academically. For example, I have been allowing Radish to read and teach the history stories *instead* of writing narrations. And I have Primo doing work from a number of different sources, but not doing too much in-depth reading, research, or writing. I'm not sure if this next thing is a good example, but on Wednesday (our last day of lessons before taking an extended break), I asked the boys to collaborate on a timeline of early exploration of the New World. Granted, this was the last lesson of the morning, on the last morning of lessons before the break. But what they handed me was written using just a couple of sources, and included only a few of the people I thought they'd write about. I accepted it at the time-- they were so touchingly proud of themselves, they thought they had done excellent work. When I looked over one of the books they had used, later that day, I was surprised at how much they had left out.
And that's where the challenge comes in-- were they doing appropriate work? Should I have encouraged them to dig deeper, or was the work 'good enough'? I know there are external 'norms' of what kids in general are supposed to be capable of at each age or grade level (educational 'standards'), but I tend to believe that ignoring these standards is one of the joys of homeschooling-- I (theoretically at least) know my own kids and what they're capable of. I guess my hesitation comes in because I don't know if I should expect them to work at the limit of their capacity, or to do just what feels pretty comfortable and easy to them. Hitting just the right amount of difficulty in their work is, well, difficult.
These days, though, I often worry that I'm not asking enough of Primo and Radish academically. For example, I have been allowing Radish to read and teach the history stories *instead* of writing narrations. And I have Primo doing work from a number of different sources, but not doing too much in-depth reading, research, or writing. I'm not sure if this next thing is a good example, but on Wednesday (our last day of lessons before taking an extended break), I asked the boys to collaborate on a timeline of early exploration of the New World. Granted, this was the last lesson of the morning, on the last morning of lessons before the break. But what they handed me was written using just a couple of sources, and included only a few of the people I thought they'd write about. I accepted it at the time-- they were so touchingly proud of themselves, they thought they had done excellent work. When I looked over one of the books they had used, later that day, I was surprised at how much they had left out.
And that's where the challenge comes in-- were they doing appropriate work? Should I have encouraged them to dig deeper, or was the work 'good enough'? I know there are external 'norms' of what kids in general are supposed to be capable of at each age or grade level (educational 'standards'), but I tend to believe that ignoring these standards is one of the joys of homeschooling-- I (theoretically at least) know my own kids and what they're capable of. I guess my hesitation comes in because I don't know if I should expect them to work at the limit of their capacity, or to do just what feels pretty comfortable and easy to them. Hitting just the right amount of difficulty in their work is, well, difficult.
Monday, November 18, 2013
Small Bites
It's not ideal, but better than nothing- many Mondays this fall, I've had a little taste of help at home, in the form of my lovely niece D coming over for a two hour window after school. She watches all three boys while I get things done around here, the kinds of things I would otherwise let slide, and the kinds of things I must do but usually have to do in a harried, hurried, start-and-stop fashion. With two straight hours of uninterrupted (well, sometimes a little interrupted, but not as much so as usual) time, I can get a lot done. So far today I've planned tonight's meal (no mean feat on grocery day) and written a grocery list and meal plan for the week. Now I still have an hour left, and nothing else I need to do.
Sometimes it's hard for me to remember that it's better to spend a little time on a task, than to let it go undone. I tend to think that if I can't devote a long stretch of time to one activity, then it isn't worth doing it at all. This is how I end up with a small rainbow sweater started and set aside for *months*, untouched even though I enjoy knitting and actually *can't* do more than a few minutes at a time without damaging my hands further. And this is how I find myself going back over my day when Snorzy falls asleep at night and realizing that I didn't read to him once, all day. I'm pretty sure that never happened with the older two, I always read to them in the little in-between moments in our daily routine. I don't know where all those moments get to these days, though I have my suspicions (I'm looking at you, Pinterest!)
Those moments add up though, running into each other, combining and solidifying into the fabric that makes up my life thus far. Those chunky board books read to my bright-eyed boy will become the foundation for a lifetime of literacy for him, and memories of chanting the stories to him will stay with me as he grows up and away. And those bright eyes are always watching, his and his brothers' too- I want them to see a mama who is (almost) always intentional in how I spend my time. I reserve the right to sometimes laze in front of the tv or page through pins in search of something pretty or fun to look at. Most often though, I want to be able to close my eyes at the end of the day with the satisfied feeling of having done all the work that presented itself to me- in teaching my boys, being careful of my relationships, creating beautiful things, and nourishing my family.
Sometimes it's hard for me to remember that it's better to spend a little time on a task, than to let it go undone. I tend to think that if I can't devote a long stretch of time to one activity, then it isn't worth doing it at all. This is how I end up with a small rainbow sweater started and set aside for *months*, untouched even though I enjoy knitting and actually *can't* do more than a few minutes at a time without damaging my hands further. And this is how I find myself going back over my day when Snorzy falls asleep at night and realizing that I didn't read to him once, all day. I'm pretty sure that never happened with the older two, I always read to them in the little in-between moments in our daily routine. I don't know where all those moments get to these days, though I have my suspicions (I'm looking at you, Pinterest!)
Those moments add up though, running into each other, combining and solidifying into the fabric that makes up my life thus far. Those chunky board books read to my bright-eyed boy will become the foundation for a lifetime of literacy for him, and memories of chanting the stories to him will stay with me as he grows up and away. And those bright eyes are always watching, his and his brothers' too- I want them to see a mama who is (almost) always intentional in how I spend my time. I reserve the right to sometimes laze in front of the tv or page through pins in search of something pretty or fun to look at. Most often though, I want to be able to close my eyes at the end of the day with the satisfied feeling of having done all the work that presented itself to me- in teaching my boys, being careful of my relationships, creating beautiful things, and nourishing my family.
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