Week Two: Bigger Hearts

Since my last post about week two for Bug's Creation to Christ was so long, I decided to make the week two post for Bigger separate this week.  Let me know if you are liking the two programs posted separately or if I should try to keep them together as one post each week.

This year in Bigger the history emphasis is on America History.  Bean learned more about Christopher Columbus as well as John Cabot. 

During unit one Bean drew this map and added Columbus' first journey across the ocean.  This week we added John Cabot's journey from England to current day Canada, but I forgot to take a picture of that.  Yes, I could go do it now, but I'm feeling lazy.  Sorry, folks.

In science we are learning about the seashore.  The book used is called One Small Square: Seashore.  I must admit, this is not my favorite science book ever.  The book is written as though you are actually able to go explore a seashore multiple times over the course of many days.  That's not exactly a possibility for most people.  Thus, it leaves a lot to the imagination, which just isn't something I expect from a science text.  However, as much as I'm not a fan, Bean seems to enjoy it and she is learning some things from it. It certainly has colorful pictures, which appeal to children.

Here she drew a picture of a bird that lives on the shore and a sand dollar and star fish that live in the area between the tides.  With a lot of extra explanation from me, she does understand the difference between high and low tide, what causes them, how the strand line is made, and what kind of animals live in this area. 

 










She did an experiment to answer the question "How do the beaks that birds have help them get their food?"  For this project, make sure you have some dry oatmeal, rocks, dry beans or peas, a clothespin, pliers, and tweezers on hand.  Her written conclusion sounds vague, but her oral retelling of how they each worked differently was spot on, so I accepted it this time.

Artistic expression tied in with the idea that John Cabot found seas filled with codfish.  Believe it or not, there is an image of a fish in that painting, although you can really only see the top of it in the blue area.  The directions call for the student to lay wax paper on construction paper then etch an image of a fish onto it, thus transferring the wax to the paper.  I read from a couple other bloggers that this just did not work out well, so we just skipped trying that method and instead used a white crayon to draw the fish image, then used watercolor to paint over it.  Same concept, no frustration.

Bean is finally getting into the poetry section of each week.  I think she went into it expecting the writings to be boring or overwhelming, but spending the entire week on one poem to really understand all the words, phrases, and meaning has really been helpful.  By the end of this week, she was saying how much she like the poem.  Although we do recite the poem every day as instructed, I do not put an emphasis on memorizing it each week.  We are already memorizing a Bible verse each week and Bean struggles with memorization as it is.



Oh!!  I almost forgot something very important.  In a previous post I mentioned that I stopped doing Drawn Into the Heart of Reading (DITHOR) mid-book.  While I can still say that abandoning that book (an Amelia Earhart biography) was absolutely the right decision, I have to admit I may have jumped the gun on dropping DITHOR altogether.  After some advice from the people on the Bigger Facebook group (join it already, if you haven't yet!) I spent some time making sure I had a book at the appropriate reading level.

A suggested reading title list is provided with DITHOR, however I was having some difficulty finding a book from that list that was both interesting to Bean and available at my library.  So I visited the Scholastic book website and used their "book wizard" tool to locate biographies at the 2.5 to 3.5 reading level.  Many of these book were indeed at my library.  I had her start reading Abe Lincoln's Hat. She loved it!! The DITHOR pages were suddenly much easier with her better understanding of the book.

We won't complete the biography section of DITHOR since we wasted some time trying to figure out what worked best, but I feel very confident moving forward that this will be a great year of literature study as long as we get books at Bean's level.

On a final note, Sprout really enjoyed getting out all our math manipulative items and playing with them during school time.  She starts preschool next week and she is very excited about that!

Week Two: Rearranging CTC

Well, my post is a bit late this week.  Life has been so busy this week.  I'm sure none of you know what that's like. ;)  I'm going to make this post only about Bug's week doing Creation to Christ (CTC) since I have a lot to share.  The next post will be about week two for Bean doing Bigger.

Unit two required that we do a little adjusting to the daily schedule.  During week one we found it nearly impossible to finish all the boxes for each day.  School wasn't ending until sometime between four and five o'clock, which is just too long of a day for us.  Not to mention Bean (doing Bigger) was done closer to 2:30, making those last few hours pure misery for Bug to continue doing school. 

CTC is scheduled as a 4-day week.  Bigger is scheduled as a 5-day week.  That was going to cause a problem anyway, so extending CTC out over all five days killed two birds with one stone.  The trick was figuring out how best to move the boxes around.  For example:

                               Monday               Tuesday             Wednesday           Thursday
                             Read pg. 10          Read pg. 11         Read pg. 12         Read pg. 13

Let's pretend this is a week of assignments.  If I simply took Monday's assignment and waited to do it on Friday, then Bug would be reading page 10 after she had read pages 11, 12, and 13.  Instead, I needed to push one box from each day back one day.  That meant on Monday, ONE box would be held until Tuesday.  On Tuesday, TWO boxes would be held until Wednesday.  On Wednesday, THREE boxes would be held until Thursday.  On Thursday, FOUR boxes would be held until Friday.  This way, we ended up with four boxes to do on Friday (effectively one box for each previous day of the week) however, they all came from the Thursday schedule, thus keeping everything in order.

I really hope that made sense.

It worked.  She was able to get school completely done almost every day during unit two.  We will continue to do this for the rest of the school year.  Moving on...

She did a lot of work this week.  If this is how much my kids have learned in just the two weeks we've been doing this program, I can't even imagine how much they are going to have learned by the time the year is done.  I love it!

 

Bug created a cylinder seal and clay tablet out of homemade air-dry clay.  This did not turn out perfectly.  The clay only dried superficially and then began to break when she tried to roll it across the tablet.  Also, I'm certain she was suppose to etch her name along the length of the cylinder, but instead she did in going around the middle.  Oh well, she enjoyed making it (salt, flour, water) and understood the concept.

The painting, to go with The Pasture by Robert Frost, was trees/twigs (with shadows) in water.  I made the mistake of showing her some finished paintings from other people's blogs and hers looks eerily similar to one of those, so from now on, we just read the directions and make our own interpretation.

This week in Writing the focus in on descriptive writing.  She went through an excerpt from a 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and found all the descriptive nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and verbs.  I thought the different colors really helped to emphasis how much the author paints a picture in the reader's mind.  The only thing I'm still waiting on, after two weeks, is the assignment where Bug actually DOES some writing of her own.  :/

She must have been proud of her history notebooking this week because she asked me to take a picture of it.  This week she learned about time after The Flood and the generations that lead from Noah to Abram.  Man, people lived to be old back then!

For science, she did an experiment with Jell-O.  The questions was, "How does humans' sense of sight affect their sense of smell?"  There were two problems with this assignment: she is not ready to handle boiling water in order to prepare the Jell-O herself and we never eat Jell-O at our house, so identifying the taste was challenging.  

To modify, I made the Jell-O the night before when she was in bed.  This way, she did not see me altering the color of one of the bowls.  You are suppose to use lemon flavored (for the light yellow color), but I only had an old box of lime in the house, so I just used a LOT of red food dye to make the color change.  We did not eat this Jell-O beyond the few bites necessary for the experiment.  I can't handle the thought of ingesting that much Red #40.  I had Bug and Bean do the taste testing.  It all worked out well.  They thought the green was watermelon and the red was either strawberry or cherry.  

That's just a small taste of the week.  Drawn Into the Heart of Reading is going well doing the book Carry On, Mr. Bowditch.  I am truly loving the book A Child's Geography and I'm learning as much about Turkey as Bug is.  Somehow we squeeze math, dictation (spelling), grammar, and Bible study with devotion time into each day, also.  I a week or so, I'm even hoping to start a Health class with both the girls.  So much to learn!

Making It All Work

Alright. This post is not week-specific.  I'm not going to detail our exact activities of a unit.  But I am going to talk about some of the things I've learned in just the few, short days we've been doing this new (to us) HOD curriculum.

This program has not only been teaching and molding my children, it's been teaching and molding ME.  A note about myself: I am what many would consider a "Type A" personality.  What is this exactly? Well, Wikipedia says this:

    "The theory describes a Type A individual as ambitious,  rigidly organized, highly status conscious, can be sensitive, care for other people, are truthful, impatient, always try to help others, take on more than they can handle, want other people to get to the point, proactive, and obsessed with time management. People with Type A personalities are often high-achieving "workaholics" who multi-task, push themselves with deadlines, and hate both delays and ambivalence.




Geez.  When you lump all those characteristics into one paragraph, I'm not sure it paints a very pretty picture of me. Maybe I should re-think admitting to this personality!  Nonetheless, those words in red are accurate for me and directly describe how I generally operate during a school day.  This year, though, I have to make some serious changes to my thinking.

One thing I am quickly learning is to let go of my idea of a strictly organized schedule.  I know there are plenty of other HOD users who have organized, time-block schedules for their day and it's how they juggle two or more grades/programs. I just don't think that's going to work for us.  Even though each block is suppose to have an estimated time frame for completion (per HOD), I find it varies greatly depending on the child's mood that day, ability to complete the box independently, readily available supplies, etc.  Plus, in CTC, the boxes aren't necessarily the same each day. For example, one day might have a History Project, while another does not.  Trying to stick to a block schedule was over-whelming and stressful.

So, we do a little play-it-by-ear teamed with general routine.  We always start with math lesson for Bug (in CTC), then do math with Bean (in Bigger) while Bug works on her practice problems.  After that, Bug starts with any box of her choice marked "Independent" while I begin on any box that Bean would like to tackle.  We continue this way through boxes, Bug doing independent boxes and me working with Bean, until lunch.  Meanwhile, Sprout (4 y.o.) usually watches a few cartoons, plays with playdough, digs in our popcorn box, colors at the table, listens to Bean's storytime reading, or does free-play with her toys.  Soon, she will be starting preschool in the mornings outside the home.

After lunch, Bean gets some free time with Sprout while I do some "Teacher" and "Semi-Independent" boxes in CTC with Bug.  Then we bring Bean back to the table to finish her day and Bug finishes her work.  Almost always we end by doing the storytime box in CTC while the whole family listens.  The day starts at 8:30 a.m. and has been finishing around 3:30 or 4:00 p.m.  I still have hope our day gets shorter as we get even more and more adjusted to the routine.

There's one more huge realization I had this week.  In my attempt to ensure that Bean did not fall behind (since she is a struggling student, especially in reading and math), I was actually pushing her into advanced level work.  I lost sight of the beauty of homeschooling and working with your student at their level.  She was just as frustrated, upset, and dreadful of our math and reading lessons as she had been during her brief stint in public school.  So I made the first change toward getting her back to loving to learn.  We stopped doing Drawn Into the Heart of Reading and began the Emerging Reader selected books and schedule instead.  Yep, that's right. Just stopped mid-book.  Wow, I can't explain how hard this was for me.  I'll admit, I've felt for a few days that DITHOR (or maybe just the book we picked to read?) was just too hard for her, but I kept telling myself I'd re-evaluate after we finished the first book.  Why? Why did she have to keep suffering with too difficult work? She didn't.  I needed to change for her.

I love that HOD recognizes that each student is at a different level!  For this reason, they include an alternate reading program option in Bigger.  This Emerging Reader program has specific books, a daily schedule, and comprehension questions. I happened to even own some of the books scheduled, so switching was easy to do.  Many of the other books are easily available at my local library and those that aren't are cheaply purchased through the HOD website.  We did this for the first time today.  The difference was SIGNIFICANT.  I'm not sure we started with a truly challenging book, but for today, reading time ended with a big smile on her face and she said, "I liked that story! I liked reading today so much more than the other days."  Perhaps we'll do a few of the harder books in this program and then take another stab at DITHOR in a few weeks.  Today was progress, at least.

Week One- A.k.a. The adjustment week

Whew! Week one is done.  Since we started the Tuesday after Labor Day, we didn't actually complete the week until Monday.  Also, our Friday afternoon was interrupted, so some work from that day had to be completed the next school day.

So, how did it go? Overall, I think it was.... okay.  Just like any new school year, there is a time of adjusting to the new schedule, material, and expectations of the day.  The adjusting isn't done just by the kids, either.  It's been quite a change for me, as well.  Bug ended her first day with tears because Bean was done quite a bit earlier in the day than her.  Prior to the start of school, we had discussed multiple times that she is older and in a more advanced grade, thus her work load would be heavier.  She had always seemed fine with this, but an abstract thought about the future is easier to accept than the harsh reality of the present, I guess.  By the end of the week, she was still struggling to get all her work done each day, so we'll be working on adjusting her daily schedule this week.  I'll let you know all about that in my next post.

Disclaimer:  There were certainly many positives to the week.  I think this curriculum is great so far and will work well for us.  The issues are ours to resolve at this point and not the fault of the material.   :)

So, with all that said, what did the girls do this week?  Both girls were very excited to learn that they had a painting project.  Girls love arts and crafts! You know, I bet boys do, too. :)

Bug worked on a watercolor painting that corresponded to the Robert Frost poem she studied this week.

 Bean experimented with mixing colors to get different shades of purple.  Then she painted ocean waves with a swirly blue sky.  Oh, and we studied Columbus sailing across the ocean this week.  That was convenient. ;)

To reinforce the locations of each continent and ocean, Bean taped index cards to a large ball.  The only big one we have around the house is primarily used for outdoor play, so it is filthy. Please, pay no attention the the dingy, grayish-pink color of the ball!

Bug loved her science experiment.  To demonstrate the concept of camouflage, she dropped M&Ms into a basket full of colored paper and had two minutes to find as many as she could.  Beforehand, she formed a hypothesis about which color would be found most and which one least.  Then she recorded her results and formed her conclusion.  Of course, the best part was at the end when the whole family got to devour the material.   Yum!

Sit ups! Jumping jacks! Running in place! Memorizing Bible verses is more fun when using those large muscle groups at the same time.

On Bean's last day she drew her own picture of the earth as depicted in one of the books we read.  This week she added Columbus' route to the Americas, but she'll be adding more things to it as we continue.  Her coloring was a bit sloppy, yes, but it was the end of the day, she'd had a rough time during the previous reading section, and I didn't feel the need to be picky about that one thing.

Overall, we did a LOT more fun learning activities than we did last year during my pieced-together curriculum.  Bug commented on how much she appreciated that all the subjects were covering the same material (that unit-study concept I was excited about, too) and Bean slowly realized it isn't as much work each day as it seemed like it was going to be. Onward we continue!

Preparation for Creation to Christ

I've already shown the steps I took to prepare for Bean's year doing Heart of Dakota's (HOD) Bigger Hearts for His Glory curriculum.  I also spent a little time preparing for Bug's year doing Creation to Christ (CTC) from the same company.

I started by making two binders with dividers.  The first is her math folder and has dividers for Facts Tests, Lesson, and Practice.  Our experience from doing Saxon math last year is that she will need the entire 2 inch binder dedicated to just this subject.  She is doing Saxon 7/6 instead of the Singapore Math that HOD recommends.  That's something I like about this program.  It's customizable!

This one is for the HOD curriculum.  The tabs are for English, Spelling (or Dictation as it's called in this program), Writing, Geography, and Genesis.  See that big gap between the tabs?  Yeah, that's because, yet again, I used what I had on hand and I didn't have a full set.  Ehh... it works just the same.

Just like in Bigger, I put page markers in the sections of the manual that we would need on a regular basis.  Those are Narration, Dictation, and Poetry.  Again, I strongly recommend something better than Post-It notes as your dividers since these are going to get tattered pretty quickly.

Here again are the pictures of the page protector trial I am doing, as noted in my last post.  We are actually a couple days into the program and I have to say it's working well so far.

I took the student notebook pages from HOD out of the plastic and put them in this one inch, 3-ring binder.  They even provide a great cover page for the front.  I also stuck a divider tab in here after the pre-printed pages for us to have a place to put miscellaneous history pages (so far, handwritten answers to questions).

I just noticed she needs to customize this cover with her name. :)

I went to the Facebook and Yahoo! pages for CTC and printed off the science notebook pages some other people have created and made available for free to the public.  A huge shout of thanks to these people because I can tell they put hours of hard work into these.  The ones I chose are fun and colorful and are going to make science even more fun for Bug!  Science gets its own binder, too.  If I'd had a couple more 2 inch binders around the house, I may have considered combining some of these subjects into one.

I used the CD provided with the geography book to print all the maps and a few travel logs.  I'm not sure how many of those logs she'll need for the whole year, so I just printed a couple to get Bug started.  I stuck all these pages in the Geography section of her binder.

To make things easier for myself, I took the book we are using for the Storytime part of our day (I actually read this book out loud to her) and divided it into the 20 days we will study it.  Since we start the year with a focus on biographies, we chose one about Laura Ingalls Wilder.  We are also getting the DVDs of Little House on the Prairie from Netflix, so this is all tying together very well.

Finally, I divided the pages for her Drawn Into the Heart of Reading book selection (Carry On, Mr. Bowditch) into sections to be read over 15 days and wrote those pages in her workbook schedule.  She is doing level 6/7/8.

Once my research was done and I knew what I needed to prepare, this only took me less that an hour to fully accomplish.  Not bad!!  Hopefully I can save your some of that research time.  I did have to run to the store afterward and pick up the painting supplies that are recommended in the introduction to the manual.  I think my grand total for these purchases came to less than $40.  This picture doesn't include the tablet of paper, the masking tape, or the hard piece of plastic to tape her paper to as she's working (this helps keep the paper from curling since it is getting wet).

Want a bonus pic? Here's our bookshelf with all our homeschool material, whether it's stuff we are using this year or not.

Our first few days have past and I look forward to showing you all the stuff Bug and Bean are completing this week!

Introduction and preparing for Bigger Hearts for His Glory

This is our second year homeschooling and our first year doing the Heart of Dakota (HOD) curriculum.  I know I've benefited from the knowledge of those who've done the program before me, so I decided to pass along my knowledge for those who may come after me.  First, let me introduce my family.  There's myself and my husband, Darling Dear.  We have three beautiful daughters: Bug is 10 years old and in 5th grade, Bean is 8 years old and in 3rd grade, and Sprout is 4 years old and will be doing preschool outside the home.  For one year, having her taught by someone else will giving me just a little more time to focus on the older girls and adjust to the new little one (Gummy Bear) we will have joining our family in January 2014.

Ok, so introductions are out of the way.  Let's move on to schooling! Here's a look at what I did to prepare for the beginning of this program.  Since the girls are doing two different levels, I'll show you each individually.

Bean is doing Bigger Hearts for His Glory.  After reading the introduction in the teacher's manual, I used Post-It notes to mark the sections of importance (Narration, Dictation, and Poetry for our needs).  You probably could should use real page markers, but I was being cheap and using what I had on hand.

I'm a big "mark it off when you're done" person, but I don't want to write in the manuals so that I can re-use them as the girls age.  So, what to do?  Hmm. Well, I'm test-driving a page protector situation.  I cut off the side of the protector that had the holes and then slipped them over the current day's pages.  We used a dry erase marker to X off each thing as it was done, then erased and moved the protectors to the next day.  I'll let you know if it gets bothersome, but here's a couple pics to try to show what I did.

 

 Then I created two three-ring binders for Bean. In the first, I added dividers and labeled them "Math," "English," "Spelling," and "History."  Under the History section, I visited the HOD Facebook and Yahoo! pages that correspond with the Bigger program and printed off some History notebooking pages that were available there.  Since Bean is not a big writer and loves the feel of a fill-it-in workbook, I think these are going to be very helpful.

For the second binder, I labeled it "Science." There are going to be enough pages for this topic for it to get its own binder.  Again, I used what I had on hand already, which was a soft cover binder so a cover sheet wasn't an option.  But if I was being more purposeful, I would have gotten one where I could just slip a cover sheet under the front plastic piece.  That would be prettier, too. :) I also utilized those Facebook and Yahoo! pages I mentioned earlier to print off Science notebooking and lab pages for the entire year.

Finally, we are using Drawn Into the Heart of Reading (DITHOR) this year for literature, which is also a HOD program. Bean is doing the 2/3 level, so I picked up an age appropriate biography from the library.  We will begin the year learning about Amelia Earhart.  Fun!  I divided the pages into 15 days and marked the page numbers in the front of her DITHOR workbook.

As you can see, I was late on taking the picture and she had already marked off day one.  Oops!

The two final things I did were get a globe from my local thrift shop and get a box to hold 3x5 index cards (I already had the cards at home).  TRUTHFULLY....my mother-in-law got hold of these for me.  She's great at supporting our homeschooling journey. :) The globe is older and thus some of the country names might be a little outdated, so it is only temporary until I can get to the store to purchase a new one.

Outside of this curriculum, we are doing Saxon Math- Intermediate 3 (this is actually a substitution of the Singapore Math that HOD recommends), a health course, and piano.  We will wait a week to start the health and piano classes, though, to give ourselves some time to adjust to the new schedule. Oh, and we also use A Reason for Handwriting as a substitution for much of the copywork items HOD offers.

Whew! This SEEMS like a lot, but really it was very little work to prepare for the entire year.  I'll admit the only thing I haven't done is prepare the timeline that she'll complete throughout the year.  I'll let you know how that goes when I get to it.

Stay tuned for the next post and I'll let you know what I did to prepare for Bug's year of Creation to Christ. I'll also be posting each week about what we did during the week for each program. It should be good!