I did have a plan. We'd start school in September, after Labor Day. And I'd planned to have time to plan -- the last two weeks of this month. But when the kids woke up and saw our new white board mounted up on the wall and a new bookshelf ready and loaded, they literally begged through breakfast that today be the first day of school. And what can you say to that?
You see... I didn't see this coming a few months ago, but over the summer we decided to teach Jonathan at home this year. I'll share the details of the path that led us here sometime soon, but suffice it to say for the moment that we are all excited about the year ahead.
We'll be a part of a local Classical Conversations community, which will provide some additional structure for our classical education based curriculum, a classroom experience once a week, and new friendships and community. Orientation for CC is this next Monday, and we'll begin CC classes at the end of next week.
For today, I pulled out some of the things we'd been working on anyways and created a light home school day to start. We went over math concepts as we did our calendar time, then focused on behavior, character, and rules as we reviewed "The Original 21 Rules of This House." It's such a great, concrete explanation of appropriate and kind behavior, and the kids actually like reading through it and looking at the pictures. Just as classroom teachers spend the first days and weeks establishing appropriate expectations, reviewing rules, and introducing a new routine, I'm focusing the next few weeks on establishing routines and responsibilities that will provide a good foundation for a smoothly running home / school environment.
After our recent vacation on the beach, I'd ordered a bunch of beach-themed books from the library, so we spent some time with those. We reviewed rhyming words and some basic spelling, learned about crabs, snails, turtles and other shelled animals, and then read about the Magic School Bus' trip to tide pools, learning about the adaptation of animals to their unique micro-environments. Later in the afternoon we began what I think is our 5th Dr. Doolittle book. Jonathan's totally hooked, and Abby jumps in and out with questions and comments as we go.
Their favorite part of the day was doing Show and Tell at Jonathan's suggestion. We worked on introducing ourselves and our topic, appropriate manners for an audience, and asking relevant questions after a presentation. It was such a trip to hear Jonathan stand up and tell us very seriously about his new loader, and to watch Abby enthusiastically share all about her Tiger. I wish I could remember verbatim the questions they asked each other afterwards. I had to turn around to keep from cracking up at their adorably engaging questions and comments. Communication, including debate and public speaking skills, are heavily emphasized in Classical Conversations, and Jonathan will also be regularly doing show and tell and small presentations with his CC classmates. He LOVES show and tell ;)
These are the BOB books that I was so tickled to buy used on Craigslist last week. They are a wonderful set of phonics readers, and Jonathan is already enjoying them.
I built put together our HomeSchool bookshelf last night after the kids went to bed, and I'll confess I was excited to load it up with our curriculum for the year. I love that it has room to separate out subjects into their own cubbies to make books easy to find, and that I have baskets to keep supplies like math games contained and out of small hands until the right time.
What did Joshua do while we did school? He napped initially, then played happily beside us. He sat in my lap while we read stories, and we included a few board books for him as well :)
Well, that was the first day of school, on a whim! We have a really great set of materials for the year. It will be interesting to see when the year wraps up what we've found to work well for us, and what we've decided to leave behind. For the moment, I've picked Horizons Phonics and Reading, BOB books for additional phonics readers; Handwriting Without Tears; Singapore Math; Story of the World for history and geography; Long Story Short and the Jesus Storybook Bible; and an assortment of readers, nature observations, and earth science experiments for science. I know that probably any, absolutely every, experienced home schooling parent would tell me that all of that will be too much for this first year. So we'll stay disciplined with the basics and discover what works best for the rest as we go. Did you notice their little chalkboard sign makes no mention of a grade? This may be Jonathan's preK year, or his kindergarten year... we'll take it one day at a time and find out in May where we arrived!
And now, I'd better get some sleep before our busy day tomorrow. I went ahead and put together a loose schedule, and we have our second of four play dates scheduled this week -- not typical for us, but fun.
I'll wrap up with this shot for my current photography workshop. The assignment was an image in response to Chopin's Nocturne in B Major opus 32 no. 1 piano solo.
Addendum: I posted here and then saw this article on Facebook, referenced as "spot on" by a friend from college with a doctorate in philosophy who teaches public high school. After I spent some of this afternoon reading on classical education models for writing instruction, the contrast between the writing described in this article and the teaching employed by some classical educators certainly struck a chord. It's not at all the reason we began pursuing home schooling, but articles like this and the dissatisfaction of nearly every public school teacher I know do catch my attention.
No comments:
Post a Comment