Current Curriculum - September 2016

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Previous post from last July here.

This post coincides with iHomeschool Network's Annual Blog Hop. This week (which I'm late on!) is Curriculum Week. Check next week for School Room Week.

We school year round and don't really follow grades. Brianna started Nov 15, 2010 coming from 3rd grade in public school and will go until whenever of whatever year. Olivia started "Preschool" on Feb 6, 2012. Joshua started "Preschool" on Sept 6, 2016. We don't follow specific grades but Brianna is anywhere from Gr. 6-10, Olivia is anywhere from Gr. 1-3, Joshua is preschool/Kindy. 

So, since we don't have set grades or set school years, I figure every 6 mths-ish I'll post what we are currently working on. We use a mishmash of traditional homeschool curriculum, workbooks bought at teacher supply stores, stuff made up completely in my head and most subjects are supplemented by printed worksheets from various sites and of course, library books. In a nut shell, we're eclectic homeschoolers.

Joshua:

He's juuuust starting out so is mostly using left overs from Olivia as we see what he like/works well for him. Some of the more common printables that we're grabbing are from 1+1+1=1, Our Little Monkeys, Homeschool Creations, Confessions of a Homeschooler and Teachers Pay Teachers.

He's still working on speech with his speech therapist. At the time of this writing, he is approx 1 year "behind" in his speech for the typical 3 yr 3 mth old child. This is WAY better than his completely non verbal-ness from a few months ago, so we'll take it! We still make use of sign language. He still uses it for words he doesn't know and we'll use it when we are trying to figure out his gibberish.

Once he has a better grasp on constant language we'll start ABCMouse with him. Olivia really liked it and he loved watching her when she did her lessons so is already familiar with it.

Olivia:

English:

We're playing around in Brave Writer's "Jot it Down" program which focuses on dictation for Olivia's age group. We do dictations for Brave Writer's Friday Freewrite and to write her Brownie Journal (basically, what she did at Brownies on a given day).

We're almost done 1+1+1=1's You Can Read program. Olivia picked up a lot of the more "sight" words with that. We feel that phonetic learning is highly important over memorizing sight words so we're spending a lot of effort on letter sounds, blending sounds and sounding out short words. We have oodles of early readers that we share in reading and Olivia is reading more and more of the words in each book. 

In the spring started Reading Eggs, an online program like ABC Mouse, but instead of learning sounds, she's now using it to read. She loves it and asks to work on it even on the weekends.

Math:
Olivia is almost done Early Math on Khan Academy. Her main curriculum is Math Mammoth, in which she just started the Gr. 2 level. It worked well for her for Gr. 1, so I hope it continues to!

With our ReadingEggs subscription came a subscription to MathSeeds which is meant for 3-8 year olds. MathSeeds starts out really young (Olivia was being made to identify numbers), but she doesn't seem to care. I'm not sure (since she didn't care) if there is a test out area to start at a higher level.

Extra Curricular:
Olivia just finished her 2nd year of soccer. She has grown so much in it since last year. Last year she would pick grass and stare off into space. This year she actively took part in drills, actually went after the ball on the field and even scored 2 goals!

Olivia joined Brownies this year. I was a Brownie as a girl, so was super excited for her to start. For some reason, she's picking up on Brianna's "I can't sleep away" and is nervous about the possibility of camps. She's slept at a friend's house several times with no issue, so I don't think it'll be a problem, but she sure thinks it will be!

Brianna: 

Math: 
We really like Math Mammoth. It's almost self-teaching once a kid can read. It breaks the new concepts down into step by step instructions. However, she's been struggling so much with math that we're trying something new altogether. We've started Time4Learning. She responds really well to "computer school work" so I'm hoping this helps with her math. We're also slowly working our way through Khan Academy. Brianna really likes the videos explaining new concepts. 

Brianna struggles a lot with math so she's "behind", only doing Gr. 6. But that's the beauty of homeschooling. She can be working on Gr. 10/11 science while being years behind in math. Math is something that we spend a lot of time trying out different things for.

English: 
We're semi-using Brave Writer's "Writer's Jungle" (bits and pieces, at least) Brianna especially enjoys their Poetry Teatimes. For spelling, as always, we don't do a lot of focus on spelling because of Brianna's Dysgraphia. Her spelling HAS improved on it's own through the use of texting, social media and using spell check on her typed work. We'll be doing NaNoWriMo for the 3rd time. The first year, she struggled to hit 12,000 words. Last year she did an impressive 20,000 and wasn't even done her story! We use CNN's Student News for daily writing (we watch the clip and she picks one topic to write a summary about).

French: 
Brianna is almost done her first year of Rosetta Stone. My grandma bought the kids the full 5 year lesson set, so she'll be good through high school. Duolingo has an app for her phone for extra, on-the-go practice. One of our neighbours tests Brianna's French periodically.

Arts: 
Brianna wants to learn guitar and we have a child's guitar and a great book - The Complete Guitar Manual, hopefully we can get around to that. She also wants to get back into playing the flute (which is currently under repairs). Hopefully she can be encouraged to put in a stronger, more frequent effort this time.

She has expressed interest in learning about some Shakespeare, so we'll  learn about him and read/watch some plays. 

She wants to do some basic art lessons to improve her drawing, so I'm looking into some good lessons for that. She also wants to learn to sew. She took a crochet class in the winter and will hopefully look to improve further in that.

Phys Ed/Health: 
Brianna normally runs with the Cornwall MultiSport Club. This year I had back to back surgeries, one being major abdominal surgery, so her coach was out of commission for the summer. Brianna is very much not self-motivating, but we hope to get her back into basic training now that I'm almost 100%. She is still walking/running/biking 10k for Terry Fox this year. She does youth yoga classes a couple times a month and yoga videos at home. Because she is overly flexible, she loves it and it greatly improves her balance and fidgeting.

Civics:
We took part in our town's first Pride parade this year, so there will be a lot of diversity learning going on in the near future. 

Life Skills: 
Brianna babysits and does random jobs for neighbours. Because of the sudden influx of money, she's learning about comparing prices and smart spending. She's looking forward to being able to get a "real" job in a couple years. She's also becoming more responsible for getting her schoolwork and chores done with less interference from us. 

Extra Curriculars:
Like Olivia, Brianna is signed up for Girl Guides this year. For her age group, she will be in PathFinders. As she has anxieties about sleeping away from home, she is super nervous about camps, but we will be trying to get her to sleepover more in the coming months at various friends' so she can try to get used to it. She also joined a Teen Tuesday program through the library where she gets to hang out with kids her age and do various activities. 


Both Girls:

History/Geography: 
We're are going to start doing Country Studies again. The kids really enjoyed them. We read about the countries, find them on maps, watch videos about them and make a bunch of food from that country. I made both Brianna and Olivia's country reports on Microsoft Word because I couldn't find anything I liked that wouldn't cost me an arm and a leg. If I can figure out how to share them here, I will. We'll be reading through History of the World and Geography of the World as our his/geo base outside of the Country Studies. 

Science:
We're currently finishing up on our Biology course. After that, we'll be taking a break from a set topic while I can put together a Weather unit. Since we live in Canada and winter is coming, it works lol Both girls went to science camp over the summer and had a blast. 

Arts:
I want to work on art some more. Brianna loves it but is fairly terrible lol So she wants to learn little ways to make her art better. Olivia on the other hand, has this idea that her drawings aren't good enough. No telling her otherwise changes her mind :( So for both girls, we'll be doing some basic art lessons, using a variety of mediums and styles.

Reading:
I made a post here about our reading plans for the year, with book titles and links.

Weekly Wrap Up - 9/9/16

We school year round but this was our first week back on full schedule. This was also Joshua's first week of school ever!

I started using a paper agenda for Brianna this summer. It's really benefited her. Olivia insisted on having a paper schedule too. There aren't agendas meant for lower elementary, so I just bought her a plain notebook and hand wrote her agenda.

We had a bit of a rough time with Olivia. A lot more writing work is expected of her this year and she is not a fan.

Brianna has started Time4Learning and she loves it! We are using it as her full math curriculum in place of Math Mammoth as she is struggling hard. I am hoping that something new will kick start her brain a bit. We're also using the English, Science and Social Studies parts of it, but more as a supplement to the stuff we already do.

Olivia started Brownies this week and absolutely loves it! She can't wait to get her uniform and go back every week.

Learning her Brownie Promise

Joshua had a good week. I'll have a full Tot School blog post in a couple days, but it's safe to say he's enjoying himself!

Linking up with Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers and Hip Homeschool Moms

 

Back to the Grind

Today was our first day of full schedule school after a summer of lighter schedule. We're trying a bunch of new things and re-starting a bunch of old things this year (see our Current Curriculum post, coming soon!) and the kids are pretty excited.

Another bit of excitement is that Joshua is also starting school this year! Over the summer, his speech blew up. He is still very behind for his age and will continue with speech therapy but there is actual words! I quickly discovered that a huge chunk of his words includes the whole alphabet, counting to 13 and starting to list off colors and shapes. Holy jumpin'! I guess we should start working with him!

The girls have joined Girl Guides of Canada this year. Olivia is in Brownies and Brianna is in Path Finders. Both girls are super excited to meet new friends and learn/play all sorts of new activities. I am excited because I used to be in Brownies and know how much fun they'll have!

We had loads of issues with Olivia this morning but this afternoon went off without a hitch and the first day of school is in the books! Let's hope I can get back into blogging more too!

Please Stop Over-Using Programs That You Don't Need

My son, Joshua, will be 3 in June. He is mostly non-verbal. Yet he is now without speech therapy.

"Speech Issues" seem to be the "in" thing for kids to have nowadays. When Isaac and Brianna were little, I knew of, like 2 kids that had speech issues. Since Olivia and Joshua, it seems more kids have speech issues than don't.

Sadly, this is more a matter of little Suzy only says 40 words when she should be saying 50 by x age. Or little Johnny wasn't quoting Shakespeare by 2 1/2. My friends kids were referred to speech simply because they're twins that were born 3 weeks early. They were referred FROM BIRTH. They have no speech issues. Yet they took up space (two spaces actually) in the system, simply because it was assumed that they'd have issues.

Then there's a kid like Joshua. Completely normal birth circumstances. Normal development everywhere but speech. By 12 mths, he had 2 words. By 18 mths he had zero. By 24 mths he had zero. By 2.5 yrs he had 5 words (that were few and far in between).

Joshua had a speech assessment last September. It was seen that he clearly needed help. In October, Lee and I were informed that we would have to take a multi week class (to teach us how to teach him) THEN they would assess Joshua again to see if he needed individual help. The class taught us nothing that we weren't already doing with all of our kids, let alone Joshua.

In January he had another speech assessment. Clearly, he needed individual help. The worker told us that he wasn't in the group that was due to start the following month, but in the group that was due to start in May/June. However, because he would be turning 3 in June and only had 5 noises that counted as words, she would try to push him into the Feb/March group. Thankfully she succeeded.

Between the end of Feb and the beginning of April, Joshua had 7 weekly speech therapy appointments. He loved them. Sassy, his therapist was very patient with him and we got lots of new sounds out of him. We even got 2 new words! He was clearly thriving.

April 7th was our last session. We have no services until at least August when they will book an appointment for another assessment. Since we know he'll need more therapy the assessment seems like a waste of time. After the assessment, we'll be lucky to re-start therapy in October.

Our speech therapist told us that the delay was completely due to the amount of kids in their system.

Don't get me wrong! Joshua is not the only kid with speech issues. Plenty of kids DO have real speech issues. But well more than half of the kids in my town's speech system are like little Suzy above (only 40 words when she "should" have 50).

Selfish Sewing

I've posted before about my business, LoveBugs Accessories. I make a bunch of accessory type items... soother clips, teething rings, crayon rolls, hair stuff, ect... I love creating stuff!

But I also love creating stuff for my family. LoveBugs started because I wanted to make Brianna hair stuff (or "pretties" as we call them). I've made nightgowns and pj pants several times but I've always had a hard time reading patterns and old school patterns require cutting up sizes and rendering the other sizes useless.

(I am in no way compensated for the comments below, just my honest opinion!)

Thanks to Stitch Upon a Time, A Sparkly Baby, and Patterns for Pirates (and their respective facebook groups), I've been able to start making other cool things. WITH patterns! PDF patterns are awesome and the ladies behind those shops make them easy to read and understand with lots of pictures. The latest version of Adobe Reader allows you to remove layers of patterns and only print the sizes you need (while not destroying the other sizes!).

So now, I am testing out making all sorts of different clothing items for the family! Buying fabric is so much fun when there is such a great selection online! No more being stuck with just the one in-town fabric store! I have many more patterns to try, but these are my faves so far....

Olivia's Easter dress

Matching monster shorts and tanks for Joshua and Olivia

The first real pattern dress I've made for myself

Undies for everyone!

Leggings

Olivia's panda outfit

Brianna's running clothes

Weekly *cough* Monthly Wrap Up - May

Ok, so this is kinda a Month of May Wrap Up, since I didn't really post much this month. It's been a little crazy around here prepping for my surgeries in June (15 teeth extractions and a hysterectomy). We've also been outside a LOT enjoying the totally awesome weather! Enjoy a boat load of pics!

The girls have found their new favorite schooly YouTuber - AsapSCIENCE. They have spent hours watching random videos. Some are silly (like Can You Actually Eat a Bus) but some are really cool (like What if You Stopped Going Outside). There ARE some mature videos that some may not want younger ones watching, so maybe preview before you set kids loose.

Olivia attempted to help Joshua learn how to peddle his bike. He is totally lost lol He never cared to learn to ride a tricycle so he has no idea what he's doing. Olivia is confused as to why he can't peddle. It's interesting to say the least! Olivia herself has some new bike learning to do as we took off her training wheels. She's really struggling with balance but I think that's because her training wheels were so crooked that she rode her bike off centered for so long, she has to learn how to ride upright.

Brianna had her first race of the year. Her training has MUCH improved since last year so here's hoping for a great season! Olivia had her first soccer game of the year too. She's on the red team this year which totally confused her (she was blue last year). We think we'll be signing Joshua up for soccer next year, speech depending.

We'll be starting summer schedule early, due to the aforementioned surgeries. I hope to be able to finish their biology course over the summer still. It was originally planned to be completed *before* summer schedule but life happens. Otherwise, they'll be slowly puttering their way through their various work in math and English (and in Brianna's case, French).

Olivia teaching Joshua to ride his bike

Lee helping Olivia learn to ride her bike without training wheels

Brianna's favorite school spot

Watching for our cat to give birth (sadly one was stillborn, the other we lost 5 days later)

Olivia planted her garden box by herself this year

Playing the "even/odd game" with Daddy

Open hydrants means loads of water fun!

Joshua helped plant the big garden this year

Soccer practice

Progress on my temperature blanket January-April 

Olivia's psoriasis is flaring up :(

Linking up with Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers and The Practical Mom

First Run of the Season

Brianna's first race of the season was on the 23rd. As usual, her first race is a 5K chase. The "chase" being that everyone is staggered in start times by age and sex and statistical ability. Brianna's age group is females 14 and under.

She had a fantastic first lap (2.5k). In fact, her best first lap ever! However, endurance has always been her struggling point and with the lack of training in the last year, the second lap caught up with her quickly and she ended with a fairly slow finish time. Either way, she finished! And she felt really good about it.

Brianna is suddenly the tallest kid in her age group!

46 mins 41 sec final time (accounting for staggered race start)