We start school next week. My how the summer has flown by!
I'm a planner, and this summer has shot my planning. In my years of homeschooling, I've never felt less prepared for a new year. But I feel like it will all be OK. I'll just be putting in alot of time on Saturdays.
Part of the time I've wanted to spend planning has been spent preparing to meet Pennsylvania's homeschool requirements. For the first time ever, I had to write--and submit--educational objectives for each child in every subject area, and while it was not especially difficult, it was time-consuming. I also spent an inordinate amount of time completing the required medical and dental examinations for each of them. You'd think that wouldn't be too difficult, but when you factor in offices that won't take all three children on the same day (so two trips to the dentist and two to the doctor right off the bat), then required follow up visits to take care of different things, complicated by the fact that our previous doctor's office neglected to send all of the requested records, it gets a bit time-consuming.
The law requires 180 days of school, and those days have to be logged and submitted to the district at the end of the year. For the first time, I'm taking cues from the unschoolers and expanding my definition of what constitutes "school". We have already logged two days of school in the last week! I have to teach health, so I counted the day we went to the dentist and got their teeth cleaned, especially since they got instruction from the dentist on how to care for their teeth. Later that same afternoon, we have a lovely extended conversation on the front porch about animals and plants which included trying to identify the types of trees in our front yard. I had that "aha!" moment as I realized that this was indeed educational and should count as a school day. Then Sunday, after the children received extended instruction in church, we came home and one child relaxed on the sofa reading Ranger Rick magazine while the other leafed through her new book "The Care and Keeping of You: the Body Book for Younger Girls", which she has barely let out of her sight since receiving it (science and health, right there!). Later that night we sat around the dining room table and had an hour-long discussion about internet safety. School day #2, completed!
Now I do have a full, more "traditional" school year all blocked out on the calendar which probably equals out to about 180 days. But the unschooling approach to marking school days will give us some latitude when those little things come up and will help things feel not-so-stressful when it comes to keeping our schedule.
So what's in store for the year?
Dallin has entered the middle school years. He's in seventh grade if going by the mainstream public educational model or sixth grade by the Waldorf model. He will start out the year with three weeks of geomety/geometric drawing. I am grateful that this will be a relatively relaxed and easy way to get started, at least from the parental prep point of view. I am using Making Math Meaningful and Waldorf Essentials' geometry book. In addition, we will spend afternoons of one week working on charcoal drawing exercises from the book Painting and Drawing in Waldorf Schools. We will continue these drawings at various intervals throughout the year. The third week of school we will also begin incorporating daily math and language arts practice into our mornings, which will continue throughout the entire school year.
Next Dallin will move into an earth science block lasting about 5 weeks. I got great inspiration for this from Carrie at The Parenting Passageway blog. She has a wonderful, detailed post about how she did this block for her daughter. She has a lot of wonderful posts about sixth grade, and we will be leaning heavily on her wisdom. The first week will be a bit of a follow-up from last year's botany, with a week-long study of habitats (this comes from a free set of lesson plans from The Nature Institute... the link can be found on Carrie's blog). Next we'll move into discussions of biomes, weather patterns and their effects on the earth, etc. And then by the third week or so we'll be firmly in the realm of mineralogy and will spend the rest of the block there. I also took great inspiration from the sixth grade lectures that Eugene Schwartz has on his website and also got ideas from Donna Simmon's book From Nature Stories to Natural Science. Another fabulous resource is the sixth gradce files at www.waldorfinspirations.com. I am excited to focus in part on some of the industries that are part of our local heritage here in Pennsylvania, such as coal and natural gas. Glass manufacturing is another big industry which I would like to cover, but I don't know if we will have time. This block lends itself well to field trips, and we are hoping to visit a coal mine, a cave, some unusual rock formations, and a gem & mineral museum.
After earth science will come three weeks of Roman history, with the other three weeks being done in February. My inspiration comes from Donna Simmons' Roman History book and Carrie's blog. I hope to start introducing some Latin in a low key and fun way at this point, to be continued throughout the year. The history block will be followed by a 2.5-3 week block focusing on literature and grammar. For the literature, I am planning to have us read and discuss the book Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain. The Waldorf Inspirations website has some fabulous ideas for projects and writing assignments working with literature, and I am going to choose a few of those for Dallin to complete. Our family will likely be visiting the Mississippi River next summer, and I am hoping that we could follow up the book reading by visiting Hannibal, Missouri, where the story is based. I am not sure about the grammar yet. We will be having weekly grammar lessons all year long, but I wanted some time to present some deeper concepts in more artistic and fun ways. The Live Ed curriculum samples show some fun ideas, and I wish I could buy their grammar book, but it is only available as part of a set and is extremely expensive.
In December we'll have the first of two short astronomy blocks. I purchased a complete block plan from Marsha Johnson's Magic of Waldorf website that I will adapt for this. I also will listen to Eugene Schwartz's lecture on the topic, and I have Charles Kovacs astronomy book as well as the Christopherus science book.
January will be Business Math... percents, interest, business formulas, etc. Hopefully we will be introducing a bit of algebra at this point. I am using Making Math Meaningful and Ernst Schuberth's math book, which is a free download at the Waldorf Online Library. (I can't remember the name of it.) Some teachers make this really fun and practical by having the child(ren) make something to sell so they can apply the principles in a really hands-on way. I don't think we will be doing that. There are not many places to sell things in our sparsely populated neighborhood, and hello, it will be the middle of winter.
In February we will do the rest of Roman history, then move into 5-6 weeks of physics. This block will be entirely from Trostli's book Physics is Fun. Then we'll have a short 2-week European geography block to prepare for Medieval history.
After spring break (during which I am hoping we can visit Philadelphia or some other fabulous American history mecca, which I can then count as "school"), we'll be starting a 4 week block on Medieval history. Between Donna Simmons' book and Carrie's blog posts on this topic, I've got it covered. After that, we end the year with our second astronomy block.
For PE, Dallin will be playing soccer and probably running track on the local middle school team. He is also planning on joining a Boy Scout troop.
Sariah's 2nd grade year doesn't seem so daunting! She starts out with two weeks of form drawing using Native American Coyote trickster tales as the story base. We will also be doing lots of watercolor painting in the afternoons. At this point we will move to weekly form drawing using Marsha Johnson's guide from www.magicofwaldorf.com. Then we will do 4 weeks of language arts based on Aesop's Fables. I love the book Teaching With the Fables by Sigi de Francesca and cannot recommend it highly enough. The goal for Sariah this year is to solidify her reading and writing skills through lots of work with word families. She will also begin having daily reading time, either reading on her own or having mom read to her. We already read nightly at bed time, but this will be during school hours and in addition to bedtime stories. I have purchased a whole slew of early reader books that I cannot wait for her to be able to enjoy.
The next block will be another 4-week block for math. I am hoping to use autumn animals as the theme--"squirrel math". I thought this would be perfect since our yard should be full of them at that point. We can get some science in along the way. I am using Making Math Meaningful and Donna Simmon's 2nd grade math book for a good part of our math this year. I think we will begin reading some of our Thornton Burgess animal stories at this point, especially the books focused on animals local to us. We'll be solidifying addition and subraction skills, working with place value, and beginning the year long focus on learning all the multiplication tables.
After this, we will have our first "saints" block. Four weeks of hearing stories about really good people who were close to God and did wonderful things for humanity. This will be the basis for all the language arts learning for those weeks. This will be the first of two such blocks, and I am including saints and heroes from many different cultures.
December will be scaled back for Sariah, mostly focused on Advent and Christmas activities and the festivals of St.Nicholas and Santa Lucia, to tie back in with our "saints" theme.
January will bring more math, with a focus on measuring time--telling time, the seasons, months and days of the week, etc. I think we'll try to fit some winter fairy tales here as well.
February will be the second saints block. March will be animal fables in the form of the Jataka Tales from India. I found a whole block already planned at the Magic of Waldorf website. April will be another pre-planned math block from the same website, this one called Lumberjack Math. This one will incorporate American Tall Tales. May will be an end-of-the year nature block focused on local plants and animals.
PE for Sariah is yet to be determined. She wants to take horseback riding lessons, and I'm hoping that would work out. I think it would be very good for her with some of her unique needs. I also think swimming would be good. I am kind of glad she doesn't seem to be showing interest in gymnastics or dance as she has done in the past. Partly because everybody's doing it, and partly because it is so hard to find dance classes that are actually appropriate for young girls. For music, she will be continuing to play the pennywhistle, and we may start piano lessons in the winter.
I'm making a concerted effort this year to make sure we get more specific drawing technique instruction as well as modeling and painting instruction for Sariah. In order to do this I'm cutting down the amount of stories we feature each week from two to one, and changing from a 2-day rhythm to a 3-day rhythm with the fourth day for extra work and the fifth day for field trips. This will help us not have to rush through things, especially the artistic activities.
For Dallin, a big focus will be on taking more time and effort with the recall portions of our lessons. This is something I've been neglecting the past few grades.
I'm a planner, and this summer has shot my planning. In my years of homeschooling, I've never felt less prepared for a new year. But I feel like it will all be OK. I'll just be putting in alot of time on Saturdays.
Part of the time I've wanted to spend planning has been spent preparing to meet Pennsylvania's homeschool requirements. For the first time ever, I had to write--and submit--educational objectives for each child in every subject area, and while it was not especially difficult, it was time-consuming. I also spent an inordinate amount of time completing the required medical and dental examinations for each of them. You'd think that wouldn't be too difficult, but when you factor in offices that won't take all three children on the same day (so two trips to the dentist and two to the doctor right off the bat), then required follow up visits to take care of different things, complicated by the fact that our previous doctor's office neglected to send all of the requested records, it gets a bit time-consuming.
The law requires 180 days of school, and those days have to be logged and submitted to the district at the end of the year. For the first time, I'm taking cues from the unschoolers and expanding my definition of what constitutes "school". We have already logged two days of school in the last week! I have to teach health, so I counted the day we went to the dentist and got their teeth cleaned, especially since they got instruction from the dentist on how to care for their teeth. Later that same afternoon, we have a lovely extended conversation on the front porch about animals and plants which included trying to identify the types of trees in our front yard. I had that "aha!" moment as I realized that this was indeed educational and should count as a school day. Then Sunday, after the children received extended instruction in church, we came home and one child relaxed on the sofa reading Ranger Rick magazine while the other leafed through her new book "The Care and Keeping of You: the Body Book for Younger Girls", which she has barely let out of her sight since receiving it (science and health, right there!). Later that night we sat around the dining room table and had an hour-long discussion about internet safety. School day #2, completed!
Now I do have a full, more "traditional" school year all blocked out on the calendar which probably equals out to about 180 days. But the unschooling approach to marking school days will give us some latitude when those little things come up and will help things feel not-so-stressful when it comes to keeping our schedule.
So what's in store for the year?
Dallin has entered the middle school years. He's in seventh grade if going by the mainstream public educational model or sixth grade by the Waldorf model. He will start out the year with three weeks of geomety/geometric drawing. I am grateful that this will be a relatively relaxed and easy way to get started, at least from the parental prep point of view. I am using Making Math Meaningful and Waldorf Essentials' geometry book. In addition, we will spend afternoons of one week working on charcoal drawing exercises from the book Painting and Drawing in Waldorf Schools. We will continue these drawings at various intervals throughout the year. The third week of school we will also begin incorporating daily math and language arts practice into our mornings, which will continue throughout the entire school year.
Next Dallin will move into an earth science block lasting about 5 weeks. I got great inspiration for this from Carrie at The Parenting Passageway blog. She has a wonderful, detailed post about how she did this block for her daughter. She has a lot of wonderful posts about sixth grade, and we will be leaning heavily on her wisdom. The first week will be a bit of a follow-up from last year's botany, with a week-long study of habitats (this comes from a free set of lesson plans from The Nature Institute... the link can be found on Carrie's blog). Next we'll move into discussions of biomes, weather patterns and their effects on the earth, etc. And then by the third week or so we'll be firmly in the realm of mineralogy and will spend the rest of the block there. I also took great inspiration from the sixth grade lectures that Eugene Schwartz has on his website and also got ideas from Donna Simmon's book From Nature Stories to Natural Science. Another fabulous resource is the sixth gradce files at www.waldorfinspirations.com. I am excited to focus in part on some of the industries that are part of our local heritage here in Pennsylvania, such as coal and natural gas. Glass manufacturing is another big industry which I would like to cover, but I don't know if we will have time. This block lends itself well to field trips, and we are hoping to visit a coal mine, a cave, some unusual rock formations, and a gem & mineral museum.
After earth science will come three weeks of Roman history, with the other three weeks being done in February. My inspiration comes from Donna Simmons' Roman History book and Carrie's blog. I hope to start introducing some Latin in a low key and fun way at this point, to be continued throughout the year. The history block will be followed by a 2.5-3 week block focusing on literature and grammar. For the literature, I am planning to have us read and discuss the book Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain. The Waldorf Inspirations website has some fabulous ideas for projects and writing assignments working with literature, and I am going to choose a few of those for Dallin to complete. Our family will likely be visiting the Mississippi River next summer, and I am hoping that we could follow up the book reading by visiting Hannibal, Missouri, where the story is based. I am not sure about the grammar yet. We will be having weekly grammar lessons all year long, but I wanted some time to present some deeper concepts in more artistic and fun ways. The Live Ed curriculum samples show some fun ideas, and I wish I could buy their grammar book, but it is only available as part of a set and is extremely expensive.
In December we'll have the first of two short astronomy blocks. I purchased a complete block plan from Marsha Johnson's Magic of Waldorf website that I will adapt for this. I also will listen to Eugene Schwartz's lecture on the topic, and I have Charles Kovacs astronomy book as well as the Christopherus science book.
January will be Business Math... percents, interest, business formulas, etc. Hopefully we will be introducing a bit of algebra at this point. I am using Making Math Meaningful and Ernst Schuberth's math book, which is a free download at the Waldorf Online Library. (I can't remember the name of it.) Some teachers make this really fun and practical by having the child(ren) make something to sell so they can apply the principles in a really hands-on way. I don't think we will be doing that. There are not many places to sell things in our sparsely populated neighborhood, and hello, it will be the middle of winter.
In February we will do the rest of Roman history, then move into 5-6 weeks of physics. This block will be entirely from Trostli's book Physics is Fun. Then we'll have a short 2-week European geography block to prepare for Medieval history.
After spring break (during which I am hoping we can visit Philadelphia or some other fabulous American history mecca, which I can then count as "school"), we'll be starting a 4 week block on Medieval history. Between Donna Simmons' book and Carrie's blog posts on this topic, I've got it covered. After that, we end the year with our second astronomy block.
For PE, Dallin will be playing soccer and probably running track on the local middle school team. He is also planning on joining a Boy Scout troop.
Sariah's 2nd grade year doesn't seem so daunting! She starts out with two weeks of form drawing using Native American Coyote trickster tales as the story base. We will also be doing lots of watercolor painting in the afternoons. At this point we will move to weekly form drawing using Marsha Johnson's guide from www.magicofwaldorf.com. Then we will do 4 weeks of language arts based on Aesop's Fables. I love the book Teaching With the Fables by Sigi de Francesca and cannot recommend it highly enough. The goal for Sariah this year is to solidify her reading and writing skills through lots of work with word families. She will also begin having daily reading time, either reading on her own or having mom read to her. We already read nightly at bed time, but this will be during school hours and in addition to bedtime stories. I have purchased a whole slew of early reader books that I cannot wait for her to be able to enjoy.
The next block will be another 4-week block for math. I am hoping to use autumn animals as the theme--"squirrel math". I thought this would be perfect since our yard should be full of them at that point. We can get some science in along the way. I am using Making Math Meaningful and Donna Simmon's 2nd grade math book for a good part of our math this year. I think we will begin reading some of our Thornton Burgess animal stories at this point, especially the books focused on animals local to us. We'll be solidifying addition and subraction skills, working with place value, and beginning the year long focus on learning all the multiplication tables.
After this, we will have our first "saints" block. Four weeks of hearing stories about really good people who were close to God and did wonderful things for humanity. This will be the basis for all the language arts learning for those weeks. This will be the first of two such blocks, and I am including saints and heroes from many different cultures.
December will be scaled back for Sariah, mostly focused on Advent and Christmas activities and the festivals of St.Nicholas and Santa Lucia, to tie back in with our "saints" theme.
January will bring more math, with a focus on measuring time--telling time, the seasons, months and days of the week, etc. I think we'll try to fit some winter fairy tales here as well.
February will be the second saints block. March will be animal fables in the form of the Jataka Tales from India. I found a whole block already planned at the Magic of Waldorf website. April will be another pre-planned math block from the same website, this one called Lumberjack Math. This one will incorporate American Tall Tales. May will be an end-of-the year nature block focused on local plants and animals.
PE for Sariah is yet to be determined. She wants to take horseback riding lessons, and I'm hoping that would work out. I think it would be very good for her with some of her unique needs. I also think swimming would be good. I am kind of glad she doesn't seem to be showing interest in gymnastics or dance as she has done in the past. Partly because everybody's doing it, and partly because it is so hard to find dance classes that are actually appropriate for young girls. For music, she will be continuing to play the pennywhistle, and we may start piano lessons in the winter.
I'm making a concerted effort this year to make sure we get more specific drawing technique instruction as well as modeling and painting instruction for Sariah. In order to do this I'm cutting down the amount of stories we feature each week from two to one, and changing from a 2-day rhythm to a 3-day rhythm with the fourth day for extra work and the fifth day for field trips. This will help us not have to rush through things, especially the artistic activities.
For Dallin, a big focus will be on taking more time and effort with the recall portions of our lessons. This is something I've been neglecting the past few grades.
Comments
It's message 19834 on Dec 2, 2010 if you want to check it out. It uses the Charles Kovacs book.
Best to you all, Cathy