While all that was going on, on what otherwise would have been his first day of middle school, this was our day:

Slept in until about 8. Took our time having a healthy, hot breakfast.  No rush to get anywhere.  On to the “school day”:

Math: Lesson and practice on finding prime factors, practice on finding equivalent fractions, least common multiples, and adding unlike fractions.

Science:  Lesson on cellular biology.  Lesson on cetaceans, taxonomy of animals.  Watched videos of whales surfacing and free-diving with whales.

Grammar and Spelling:  Two practice pages on spelling rules, sentence combining, direct vs. indirect object, capitalization and punctuation, verbal analogies.  Daily list of 25 patterned spelling words.

Handwriting:  Began a new handwriting program to work with Flipper’s bad writing habits and difficulties — “Italics, Beautiful Handwriting for Children.”  Did the first two lessons.

French:  3 pages of written translations and exercises.

Phys. ed:  Running around outside, doing pushups.

Home ec:  Helping mom with washing walls, doors, and appliances; bringing in garbage and recycle bins; tidying the kitchen, doing laundry, cleaning his room, taking out the compost.

Music:  Practice on his electric guitar.

Poetry:  Tuesday Poetry Tea-Time, sharing cookies and iced tea and reading classic poetry to each other while practicing proper manners and politeness.  Well, mostly.

Reading:  Sitting outside in the sun, reading the latest in his current favourite book series.

Civics:  Watched Obama’s address to American kids online, discussed his reaction to it, and how it related to us in Canada.

All this and lunch too.  Probably about half of his work is independent, I don’t have to be actively “teaching” him or hovering over him for many of his lessons.  And he was finished everything – including “non-school” things like helping around the house, tea-time, and guitar practice – well before the neighbourhood kids were home from school. Total “academic” time was about 3 hours, maybe 3-and-a-half.

For most of the rest of the day, he played Civilization III on the PC, and regaled me with his tales of wiping Germany off the face of the earth (eeps!), learning that Kyoto was not just a misspelling of Tokyo, and finding the natural resources needed for steam locomotives to be developed.

He went snorkeling in the bathtub, helped me put together his schedule for tomorrow (his idea!), and went to bed with no homework and a smile on his face.

Whew!  A productive, happy, interesting day!

While Flipper was doing this, Pomme wanted in on the action too, of course.  She insisted on doing the same handwriting pages as Flipper, so I printed out a page for her too.  Doggone-it if she didn’t start writing beautiful “i’s” and “j’s” and “l’s”, just like that.  Shall I remind you she’s not yet 3?

She also practiced flower arranging, spoon-transfer of marbles, getting herself dressed and undressed (multiple times), emptied the dishwasher, sorted and dealt playing cards, counted on her fingers, watched Totoro again and told us all about it, acted out parts of the story, introduced us to yet another new imaginary friend, helped clean the kitchen, and “read” poetry to us at tea-time.

Now at this point, I should specify that we “do school” year-round, taking breaks and vacations whenever it’s convenient for us.  So sometimes we’re not working when kids are in school, and other times we are working when kids are not in school… which some people think is kind of weird.  But whatever.  That’s the freedom of homeschooling. We don’t have to take two months off just because it’s warm outside (we just move the lessons outside as much as possible!)  So today was not a sudden “first day back to classes,” Flipper has been “working” all summer.

But we don’t do as much over the summer as you might think, since there are summer camps, trips to visit family, gymnastics four days a week, and long lazy days where you just decide that sitting in the sun with your feet up is the most productive way to spend your time.

What did I do today? Other than working with my kids when they needed it, of course, I made cookies for tea-time, started planning fall repertoire for my band, did some laundry, cooked meals, did some gardening, goofed around on the internet, and actually updated my blog!

Homeschooling totally rocks our world.

There were days that we abided strictly to the schedule, eschewed distractions, and were finished everything by noon.  There were days that we scattered ‘lessons’ throughout the day, fitting them in here and there, while doing other things in the meantime.  And there were days when we just said “screw it, we’ve got other stuff to do today” and tried to squish that day’s lessons into the rest of the week as best as we could.  That’s one of the great things about homeschooling, though… that flexibility.

So here we go, subject by subject:

Math

We’re using RightStart Math, on level E.  At the beginning of the session, we were on lesson 39, and ended at lesson 59.   My goal was to end at lesson 65, doing a lesson pretty much every single day.  This means we “lost” one lesson each week. So, I think for the next session, I will only schedule 4 lessons each week and leave on day as a ‘games day’.  We’ve really been neglecting the games, and Flipper really does love them.  I confess that I’d like to get through this level quickly so we can get to Intermediate Geometry, but I really need to take my own advice and not worry about hurrying him through so much.

On the whole, the lessons have gone well.  He still has occasional ‘stubborn days’ where he insists that he’s forgotten everything he’s ever learned about math — or insists that he never learned it in the first place — but these are becoming rarer, and by the end of the worst of these lessons he always says “you know what?  That was actually kind of fun!”

He’s learned about area, square feet and yards, mixed and improper fractions, decimals, converting tenths and hundredths from fraction to decimal and vice versa, and metric measurements.  Along the way, he’s picked up squares (and other exponents) and square roots, and order of operations.

Canadian Studies/Geography

We started at lesson 2 and have completed lesson 5 out of the guidebook I’m using for a foundation, just for structure.  Each lesson involves several days of activities and we don’t do this topic every day.  We’re using some of the worksheets from this book and I’m adding in other activities like our Canada Puzzle Map.  I had hoped to be into lesson 6 but I’m happy with this pace.

He’s learned the provinces and territories and their capitals, both in terms of name and location.  He knows the oceans around the country and the postal abbreviations for each province. We also start each week singing O Canada together.   I didn’t do anything formal or grand or even print out the lyrics… I just sang for him!  He now sings along for the entire song in English, then I repeat it in French.  He’s starting to pick up some of the French bits too, and was very interested about the very different meaning of the French version of the anthem!

French

We had previously done some French language curriculum, but it never stuck and we couldn’t keep it up.  So this time around I decided to just forego the curriculum altogether and do what Charlotte Mason suggests — we’d just speak it first.

Flipper is not a boy who enjoys the physical act of writing.  All the written exercises were getting in his way.  It also just makes sense that we learn language first and foremost as a way of speaking, and then only afterwards do we learn to transpose that symbolically onto paper.

We started with reviewing the dozen or so words he already knew and adding a few ‘extra bits’ to make a couple basic sentences.  He already knew all the colour words, for instance.  So I asked him “Quel couleur est-ce que c’est?”, pointing to various things, and he’d answer “c’est rouge” or “c’est noir” or whatever it happened to be.  We didn’t worry about how c’est is a contraction of the pronoun ce and the verb est which is the third-person present conjugation of être… blah blah blah. He’ll figure that out later.

Over the session, he’s learned to count to 100, tell time, identify various foods, use comparative opposite adjective (lourd-léger, long-court, grand-petit, etc), and we’ve started singing the avoir and être conjugation songs (to the tune of Mexican Hat Dance, if you didn’t know…)

I can’t believe how much he’s loving this approach.  We spend at most 10 minutes a day and he never complains, in fact he’s excited and keen to show off what he knows.  He especially loves colours and started turning things around, asking me the question “quel couleur est-ce que c’est?” at random times.  Important point:  I never specifically taught him to say that sentence, he just imitated me saying it.

We’ll probably do purely oral french for at least one more session if not two.  Now that we’ve learned the basic verb conjugations, I plan on working in more complete sentences for him.  We’ll learn some animals and some related verbs, maybe things like dormir and courir and manger and marcher…

Literature

Under this heading, I’ve created a list of “great books” that we own, which he hasn’t read yet.  Each day he reads one chapter, more or less, and narrates it to me.  I’ve offered for him to do alternate narration styles, such as drawing a scene or making it in Lego (which, honestly, I thought he’d love), but his preference is always to just orally tell me about it.  He has really, really taken to narration.

First of all, at bedtime I’ve been reading to him from The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  I don’t officially count this as “school” for him, but we do practice narration.  In fact, we started this before we started the “new” Charlotte Mason curriculum, as kind of a ‘test run’ to see how the style suited him.  Basically, at the end of each reading I ask him to tell me “what happened”, and at the beginning of the next session I ask “now, where were we?”  It’s fascinating to see what he picks up on, what he misses, what he does and doesn’t understand.

For his “official” literature, which he is reading himself, he started with Pippi Longstocking and finished that within a week.  I couldn’t stop him from reading more than he was “supposed” to each day!

So we went to something a bit more challenging  — The Secret Garden.  I had to warm him up to that one by reading to him myself.  I would have happily read the entire book to him, but by chapter two he was hooked and insisted on reading it himself!

When that was finished, we moved on to “Island of the Blue Dolphins,” and that’s where he is now.

I had only expected to finish Pippi and be into The Secret Garden, so in this area he’s surpassed my expectations!

History

As this is the first time we’ve done history formally, we started at the very beginning.  Not in terms of the most ancient history, but just readings about history… Why we learn about history, how historians do their work, and especially, archaeology.

We also started a Book of Centuries and while we’re not yet in a regular routine of adding to it, he was surprisingly keen on the idea.

He already subscribes to Dig magazine which was a great resource in addition to the encyclopedias we’re using as our “core” books.  No real ‘living books’ for history this session, but we’re going to more than make up for that next session – Ancient Egypt!

Science

We’re using NOEO Science, Biology II.  Four days a week, and generally he does this independently.  I had planned to be finished week 23 at this point… looking at his notes, it seems that he’s on week 22, but hasn’t been doing the summaries for the last 2 weeks!  So some backtracking is in order, to make sure he’s actually covered everything.  And I’ll need to keep a closer eye on things next session.

Of the summaries he did in the first few weeks, one especially caught my eye.  He generally does just a short written narration, a couple sentences at most, and a more detailed drawing (one of the reasons we love this science program!)  This particular lesson was about the opossum’s defensive death-faking.  His sketch showed an opossum (with an arrow pointing to it labelled ‘opossum’), a predator looking over it (with an arrow labelled ‘predator’), and a word balloon from the predator saying “I’m not going to eat a DEAD opossum!”

He also did a really cool experiment, digging rodent bones out of an owl pellet.  I actually meant to blog about that, we took a ton of pictures… I’ll have to remember to do that.  It was fascinating.  After he had found and cleaned all the bones, we identified them and glued them onto a skeleton template.  It makes quite a keepsake!

Music

My intention for this session was to focus on Mozart… listen to Mozart every day and read a book about his life.  This got derailed a bit in the second week when the book disappeared, which was a shame because Flipper was actually enjoying it.

Still, we listened to Mozart quite a lot, and talked about some important things about him.  He knows that I’m currently playing the Requiem with the orchestra and that I’ve previously performed it in choirs.  Maybe we’ll be able to get him to come to the concert…

I had also hoped to get him back on track with regular piano practice, but that didn’t happen this session.  He is playing his electric guitar regularly and has started watching some instructional videos on YouTube.  All the same, for the most part he only wants to figure out songs he knows from “Guitar Hero”, and make up his own bizarre nonsense songs, and isn’t responsible about actually learning to play well.  Not that there’s anything wrong with what he’s doing — he actually shows some fantastic innate feel for riffs and patterns with the songs he makes up — and he’s gone so far as to create an entire tracklist for his “debut CD”, recording himself on his MP3 player, drawing the cover artwork, the whole shebang.

So I’m not at all knocking that part of it… it’s just that it’s not enough if he wants to actually get further with it, which he says he does.  He’s going to need to learn to buckle down and do some nitty-gritty practice, not just playing for fun.  One step at a time, I guess….

Grammar

We’re using Daily Grams, grade 5, one page every day.  He’s finished lesson 100, and I had planned to be on 105.  So, like Math, we’ve lost about one lesson per week.  So I’ll probably bring it down to 4 times per week for the next session.  He’s doing fine in this… still has a habit of guessing when he doesn’t know instead of looking a word up in the dictionary or (heaven forbid!) asking me for help, but he’s improved a lot.

Handwriting

Using A Reason for Handwriting, level F.   We fell behind when his book was misplaced for a couple weeks.  I used that as an opportunity to do some more ‘traditional’ Charlotte Mason style copywork, taking selections from his history or literature books, for example.  He didn’t really like that.  He complained that I made the passages too long!

The book was eventually found, and he’s completed week 18.  Hopefully next session will be more on-track.  I think maybe I’ll alternate, a week of Reason for Handwriting followed by a week of copywork from his other books… and I’ll try not to make them too long!

Poetry

Starting in the second week, we’ve been working through a basic poetry-writing manual, doing lessons twice a week.  He’s learned how to write limericks, concrete poems, rainbow poems, and parodies (possibly his favourite!)

We’ve now finished that part of the book, the next part is on writing prose stories.  I gave him the option of continuing with that, or instead, staying with poetry but reading poems (such as A Child’s Garden of Verses).  He’s chosen to write stories, so that’s what we’ll do next session.

Art

We added art appreciation in the fourth week, twice a week.  We decided to start with DaVinci.  I put the Mona Lisa as his desktop picture, but he wasn’t impressed, he wanted his dolphins back!  We looked at a bunch of DaVinci’s paintings and sketches online and chatted a bit about his life and importance.

I had him copy one of DaVinci’s paintings, and he chose “Lady with an Ermine”.  He hasn’t finished colouring it yet… but he enjoyed the project.

In our last week, we found a fun book about DaVinci in our library, a real “living book,” a kid’s story based on real events in DaVinci’s life with large colourful pictures.  It was a very easy read for him, intended for younger kids for sure, but he found it fun and enjoyable.

Miscellaneous

Finally, there are a few various things that we put in once or twice a week.  To work on his logic skills, I schedule a Mind Benders puzzle once a week — though he loves these so much he’ll often do extras on his own time.  He’s now in book A3.

To work on reading comprehension and analysis, he has one Reading Detective lesson per week.  He’s very good at getting the point of a story, but still has trouble with the analysis of where the information came from.

And also on reading comprehension but also with values lessons, he does studies on Aesop’s fables twice a week.  I believe the workbook is called “Christian Values Using Aesop’s Fables.”  They’re short and easy lessons, and he enjoys them.

Whew.  I think that’s it… It really is enlightening to get this all written up, to see just how much we are doing!  Some days we just feel so lazy, it’s good to remind ourselves that overall, we’re more than fine.

In addition to these, I’m hoping to add some journalling and/or dictation next session, or maybe get back into our spelling practice.  I’m really looking forward to the Ancient Egypt studies, though!  I’ve learned more just in preparing for this unit, than I ever learned in school about Ancient History (which is precisely: nothing at all).

“Aww, I hate grammar… I’m so sad and pouty…”

“Just kidding!  This is one of my favourite workbooks! Can I do a couple extra pages?”

Okay, so I made up that last bit… he didn’t ask to do extra pages.  But he does like this book, and this is a boy who hates writing and worksheets.  As in, screaming-fits-and-flailing-tantrums-hates-writing.  In fact, one of the reasons we like Easy Grammar and the corresponding Daily Grams so much is that it’s not over-intensive on the writing side of things.  The Daily Grams really are very quick, less than 5 minutes to do the day’s activity, and the full textbook lessons are generally only 15 minutes or so.

This year we’re just doing the Daily Grams (grade 5), after having finished grade 4 Easy Grammar last year.  There’s so much review and repetition from one grade to the next (which is great because you don’t have to start over at the beginning if you only discover this series when you’re already 9 or 10 or 11… ) and he understood what he’d already learned pretty well that I didn’t think it was necessary for him to do the full lesson book.  I also felt he’d benefit more, at the stage where he is right now, with brief, quick reviews of a variety of grammar issues, rather than concentrated practice of just once concept at a time for an extended period of time.

The new things in grade 5 only get cursory explanations in the Daily Grams, but for the most part they’re all he needs, and where it’s not, I can fill in the blanks for him.

Once he’s done the Daily Grams, we’ll go back to the full Easy Grammar textbook  for grade 6.  And possibly do the grade 6 Daily Grams at the same time, that will depend on how much practice he needs at that time.   After that… the plan is that we’re DONE grammar, at least in a formal sense.  He’ll have a full foundation in how english syntax works which should carry him through the middle school years.  Then if, down the line, he decides that he’s fascinated by the intricacies of language and wants to study it more indepth, we’ll probably go back to Easy Grammar and look at their advanced workbooks.  But this is as far as I’m going to make him do grammar.

I should also clarify, that we don’t consider ourselves “Christian Homeschoolers” although we more or less subscribe to the Christian faith. I’ve drifted more towards agnosticism myself in the past few years, and I hope to instill a sense of religious understanding and freedom for my son as he grows and matures, to come to intelligent decisions regarding his faith. We do use some Christian materials when they are of good quality, and Flipper enjoys them. I do think there are useful lessons on character development in our Christian materials. But our educational philosophy is not religion-centered or dogmatic, religion is simply one part of our life… how large a part it plays varies widely from person to person within our family!

Anyway, here’s what’s currently on our homeschool shelf:

RightStart Math level E
NOEO Science Biology II
Daily Grams Grade 5
Reason for Handwriting level F
Natural Speller
Reading Detective A1
Usborne Seashore Sticker Book

He also does piano and guitar practice, as well as exercise and martial arts practice.

Here’s what’s on deck to come up next, as we finish things off we add in something else:

Draw & Write Through History: Greece and Rome
Mind Benders A3
RightStart Intermediate Geometry
Easy Grammar Grade 6
Canadian Government unit study
Le Francais Facile 1A
J’Aime Lire
Christian Virtues through Aesop’s Fables
Word Roots A1
100 Vocabulary Words Kids Need to Know for Grade 5
100 Vocabulary Words Kids Need to Know for Grade 6
How to Write Poetry
How to Write Stories

More detailed reviews and explorations of some of these materials will come in later posts. I’ll also talk in later posts about what we’re doing with Pomme, who is, of course, only almost 2 years old!