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How goes your winter homeschooling so far?
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Hi everyone, I would love to hear how you and yours are doing through the winter homeschool months this year.
We’ve been really blessed to avoid major illnesses pretty much, but Mason has had three surgeries in the last 3 weeks (all planned: tendon lengthening on one foot, in a cast for 6 weeks, and this week was eye muscle surgery on each eye). Along with a host of his usual medical appointments and physical therapy. We’ve averaged 4 day school weeks since January and have been really consistent, which makes me very happy.
Looking toward spring and the end of the school year in May we are about where I thought we would be when planning the year. My high schooler finished 1/2 of Apologia Biology and is deep in her Herpetology course. We’ll pick the 2nd half of biology up next year. She’s doing okay in Algebra 1, enjoying One Year Adventure Novel, and we’ve made it to Ancient Rome in our family history studies. Literature is Little Women right now, with The Eagle of the Ninth next on the plan to go with Ancient Rome and Ancient Britain. The 5th and 4th grader are working on fractions in Math U See Epsilon, love Ancient Rome, and have a writing project starting soon that will be related to history. Science for the 5th and under crowd is God’s Design for Science and we’re on the last book we planned for the year, focused on Animals. We already did Plants and Human Body. Literature for the 5th, 4th, and 2nd grader has varied but been enjoyed by each. Dinotopia, Nancy Drew, The Inventor’s Secret, and many more. 2nd grader is flying through multiplication with very little effort. 1st grader is enjoying addition and subtraction and still working on learning to read. He’s happy to join in our history and science studies. The four younger boys are now age 5, 4, 2, and almost 4 mos and between play and story time they are enjoying these cold winter days.
We’re doing a poetry month right now so the kids have been sharing poems they find and we’ll be having a Mad Hatter Tea Party with our homeschool book club this month and share poetry.
That’s the highlights!
Our winter term is going great! I made a few changes and we are using a new schedule. My DD jokes about how we have a new schedule every week (and she’s not too far off).
We switched to Christian Kids Explore Earth & Space and are all really enjoying it. We also started Signs & Seasons, which I was really hoping to get to this year. Our last change was adding in Harmony Fine Arts…we really like this program, although it is more classical than CM. We added SOTW 2 since Famous Men wasn’t working and it’s been great. The rest of module 4 (and Visits to Europe) has been going very well.
Earlier in the year, I bought a book called Compass Drawing. My DC were really struggling with making basic circles and I couldn’t figure out what the problem was. Then, one week I got a bad compass. Half of our compasses were really loose at the hinge, so they kept moving on the kids! After getting them tightened, we are now enjoying the book. 🙂 We are also still enjoying Paper Sloyd for the Primary Grades. We start our day with Compass Drawing, Paper Sloyd, or Harmony Fine Arts, so basically some sort of art each day. My kids really like this, and it’s really helped with bad attitudes when it’s time for school! I’m taking this into account for next year and planning a few different art resources.
We are reading through Mary Poppins, Random House Book of Poetry for Children, and Poetry For Young People’s Shakespeare. We are also going through The Geology Book and others in the series (The Ocean/Weather/Cave Book). We haven’t done much nature study, but are watching birds feeding outside our window and learning their names. My 2yo especially enjoys this, almost as much as the cat! Another thing we’ve been enjoying is our almost weekly swim time. We were given a membership to a local gym with a very warm indoor pool. We go for a swim most Sunday afternoons and everyone really enjoys it.
Our 3Rs are going well. I’m working on getting everyone caught up on math, so we do a lesson each day, except Sundays. Some days we don’t get to it until just before bedtime! ELTL levels 4 & 5 have quite a bit of overlap, so I’ve been combining two of my DC for it.
I’m also in the midst of planning for next year and have several things ordered and ready to go! I’m sure we’ll be going all summer, but that’s not unusual for us.
Our winter term has been so-so.
Our daughter has had several appointments, 3 of which required pretty significant travel, so we lost a full week there. We have to go back again this month to meet with a surgeon and urologist, and depending on on the outcome of those meetings, we could have some pretty hefty travel coming up for testing/biopsies etc… But not only that, with her ASD, I find that when her pain/discomfort increases, so do her behaviors. Now, the last couple weeks have been better, but we had 6 weeks where… I confess that I was pretty well at my limit due to daily meltdowns. It’s been a very tough season so far mentally. I guess you could call it a growing season.
But that all said — on the positive side of it all, so far (not counting my son’s current case of pink eye! Here’s praying THAT doesn’t go through the whole house!) we’ve had a very healthy winter.
Now, school-wise… it’s been up and down a bit. There’s been a lot of disruption of course. With my daughter, this is her K year (she’ll be 6 in June), and she’s doing very well. We are very relaxed/informal with her. She is a very hands-on learner. So, basically for math, she just listens/in picks up on whatever her big brother is learning, plays math games with us, and wow… she’s learned a lot without having once ever sat down for a single math lesson. She is teaching herself the addition facts to 100 (so far has mastered +1, + 10 and is working on +2). I think Charlotte Mason would be proud – she loves doing copywork. I’m sure it stems from her ASD, but she will sit for a loooong time, doing copywork. She loves to copy out addition facts, 100 charts, pages of text from books. I’ve been doing some simple, semi-guided narration work with her, mostly as a social skill to improve conversation. This winter she asked to learn to read, well she didn’t ask, she just picked up a book and started trying to figure out all the words, so, we have started working with the McGuffey Eclectic Primer. It’s going well. Again, I’m going very relaxed with it all, and so far she’s reading up to Lesson 7 well, and basically can read any CVC word, and we’re working on CCVC (digraph) words, all short vowel so far. We also add in the I Can Read It! series books for fun, as well as some Bob books. She’s trying to read everything in sight. What impresses me is her use of tone and inflection – she has picked up on that far better than I ever would have anticipated, especially given the ASD. We’re using HWT and copywork for penmanship.
For my son, he’s in grade 3, and he reads beautifully, so we’re just continuing to cement his reading fluency. We’re working through various novels with him reading out loud to me, narrating/discussing afterwards. He’s also doing HWT Cursive and copywork. His penmanship is beautiful, especially considering what a struggle it is for him. We also do family read-alouds, that we narrate/discuss (sometimes). For us, math is our achilles heel. We have tried more math programs than I even dare want to admit in the last 4 years of homeschooling. I mean, SERIOUSLY. I think we’ve averaged 3 a year. This year has been no exception. The funny thing is – my son is GOOD at math, at concrete arithmetic, operations based math. He can do word problems, time, money, measurements, fractions… However, his problems fall under the more abstract areas such as more complex problem solving (such as looking at different ways to solve a problem when there’s an unknown, or taking the information he knows and using it to find what he doesn’t know – it has to be ), he also struggles with the concept of calendar time. So… he knows the the names of days and months, he understands there’s 7 days in a week, 12 months in a year, 4 seasons in a year, but to apply those in an abstract way, seems hard for him. So example, he might say “Last week” for something that happened yesterday. He also hates math, because he hates anything that’s new or difficult. So when he can’t do it instantly, he gets really upset/frustrated and just shuts down (he also has Sensory Processing Disorder which I know contributes to this)… so…. needless to say, I have learned that spiral programs are not good for us! And so, we ditched the CLE that we were using for all of this year just recently, and we’re trying a combination of just hands on stuff, Strayer Upton and online reinforcement such as IXL and Khan.
So, so far this winter, we’ve basically just been focusing on the 3Rs, because that’s all we’ve had time for.
Because of my 12 yo’s PDD-NOS and her language-based learning disabilities, I have had to modify curriculum for her, no matter what we use. But, we seem to be on a good path right now. We officially have around 40 days of school left, although I want to continue working on character, math, and reading over the summer. My daughter’s attitude about school has been better, but she will still try to get out of doing school work sometimes.
I am allowing her to draw more while I am reading to her, except during Bible. I am using Kids of Character by Marilyn Boyer. I began having her write answers in the book, but I have decided to cut back on the amount of writing and I am just having her answer the questions orally. It is working out much better that way. Not expending too much effort in writing answers is allowing her to really think about what she is learning. I write the memory verse in large letters and hang it on the refrigerator and also have the character trait and definition along side of the verse. I do have her write the verse in her notebook.
We are only on lesson 3 of Considering God’s Creation, but I think my daughter is enjoying it. The notebook projects are a nice addition to what we had been doing. I think we are to have some warm days this coming week, so maybe we can get outside for some real nature study.
We just started Visits to Africa this week to go along with our ancient history study. Although maps are a difficulty for my daughter, I think she enjoyed hearing the first story about a family living in Africa. We are discussing these stories orally as well. Another nice addition to our school day.
I have been having my daughter doing Spelling You See, but she does not seem to be enjoying it. Her spelling is really poor, so I have continued having her use a spelling curriculum. Although I have another SYS book for her to do next year, I have decided to start her in Explode the Code, which will also help her spelling skills. She enjoys doing ETC, so when she finishes the other SYS book, I think I will just have her work on ETC. It is also nice to be able to give her something she can do more independently. I feel I am up a creek when it comes to her spelling, because she is constantly spelling words incorrectly in her fun writing, so she does not always remember the correct spelling, even if she works on it in her curriculum. So, I figure I just keep giving her opportunities to spell things correctly, like in SYS, ETC, or just copywork, and hope some of it sticks. I have seen a little improvement.
So, although we have begun some new things recently, this half of school has been going pretty well. I’m glad to be back on my feet after a fall which broke my ankle in November. Looking forward to finishing this year stronger than it began. Although some learning comes hard for my daughter, I have seen her make significant progress this year, especially in character, which is most important.
Well, we have about 70 days of school left, which I hate!!! But, we’re steadily working towards the end. That’s good.
I’m letting go of my “must finish the book” mentality and modifying our SCM Middle Ages/Ren/Ref studies so that we will be covering most everything, albeit a bit less deep and not quite everything.
We’re good with science.
We’re good with the “feast subjects” (artist, composer, literature read alouds, etc.).
We’re good with Language Arts.
That leaves Math. We’re “behind”. So everyone has been instructed to do one lesson, check it off, and then do more! (In hopes of bringing us up to where we “ought” to be.)
Healthwise, we’re great, and I’m praising God for a winter with very few colds/illnesses. And, we’ve had some really good times as a family so far this winter.
Our winter is going okay. We made a switch of curriculum- a big one actually. And it has been a blessing. My daughter was not doing well with our curriculum we had before, so I made a switch to Heart of Dakota that I had been wanting to make for a while. We love it. She still would rather “get it done” than enjoy her learning, but she is completing everything, and we are making more measurable progress. We also switched math over to Horizons. We plan to stick with it until she finishes and then switch over to an Algebra program which I have yet to choose.
As for my son, he’s working fairly diligently to finish his work so he can graduate in June with his homeschool friends. I am trying to make the most of these last few months that he’s a homeschool student. I just posted here on the forum about my difficulty with adjusting to him growing up.
All in all, there are moments when I am optimistic about spring, and moments when I feel sad about the new phase we are entering of homeschooling only one instead of two. But, I am reminding myself daily that we will get through it and it will be a good season to be in.
I hate winter, it usually depresses me deeply, and I’m glad we are getting a little more sunshine here in Central Ohio! I like to leave winter behind, but at this time, I’d rather it stay longer, because it means my son will be with us.
We had hardly any sickness. My son had the flu only once, and the rest of us caught head colds, but only once. I am thankful that as homeschoolers, we have not been exposed to cold and flu season as much as we used to when my kiddos went to school.
I hope we all have a great spring!
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