this spring

Summer is totally here now so it's about time I get this note posted to record our fun spring of learning! It just struck me that we have about one more month of preschool here before summer... and then we'll (finally) launch into the long-awaited, highly anticipated journey of homeschooling!  I'm so excited for that!  (Do you hear the ridiculously naive optimism there?  :) )

So, this spring...

I am grateful beyond words for the sweet preschool our kids are at.  Joyful Preschool is run by a local group of believers in Christ so the instruction is all in Chinese but the classmates that our kids play with there are from all over the map (Australia, South Africa, England, Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore) so they also get some interaction in English with friends at playtime.

This will probably sound really silly to others, but we've had our kids in preschool here for mornings M-F for years now and usually I've thought that this was simply their time to learn Chinese.  I know they're playing, doing cute crafts, singing songs... but I had very low expectations that they would really be learning much else, anything substantial.  But I was wrong!  Yipee!

Isaiah especially has learned so much this spring.  Matt and I both spent time with the big two over Chinese New Year Break (Jan- Feb) going over double digit numbers....  43 is forty three kind of thing.  It was strange to us how difficult it seemed to be to them.  They were doing better in Chinese than in English!  But very soon into this semester, they both took off.  There's no hesitation on numbers now for Isaiah and usually not for Marian (though she sometimes still gets 43 and 34 mixed up.... that sort of thing).

But Isaiah has really blasted into the math world with surprising speed recently.  He often likes to ask  "what's 4+10"  or "whats 10-7?".  In April (I think) he asked me "what's 7-9" and I thought he'd be blown away with that one......  I told him "negative 2" and he told me I was right.  But I was sure he had no idea what the negative deal really was.... again, I was wrong.  I don't know where he's learned it, but he really does get it.  And I thought it was his teachers in his kindergarden level math class at school that must have taught him, but they thought it must be us at home....  He was introduced to negative concept at school but he's far past his class in it evidently....  we are just so excited to see him learning and loving math so well!

So this spring, as I realized that our big two especially are learning so much, and their days are full of class and book time already I've simplified our homeschool goals for this season to just this:

**Bible verse review, hymns at home
**8:30- 12:20 morning preschool:  lots of excellent math, Hanzi (Chinese characters), crafts, songs &
    exercises, nature observation, China culture...
**Reading lesson with both,
**Piano lesson (weekly) and piano practice daily for Isaiah  (God has provided a wonderful teacher who comes to our home and opens each lesson with prayer:) )

That's it!  It's been fun and it's been super exciting to see them both becoming readers.  We've stuck with the "Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons" book by Engelmann and have thoroughly appreciated it.    I think I already wrote about how I forgot about this resource that had been recommended and then I got it, and thought we couldn't use it since our kids were so far past where that book starts.   I wish so much I would have started those lessons with Isaiah a year earlier!  It is what it is though... He finished all 100 just before he turned 6.

It worked great to breeze through the beginning and make the most of the latter lessons.  I was feeling so stuck at the slow sound-it-out spot we were at... but Isaiah is well past it now.... and Marian is well on her way.  Thank you Lord!

What a joy to learn together, to serve my kids in learning to explore and marvel at our world and it's Maker!  Oh God be glorified in our learning together!

Kinder Reading

In the previous post, I moaned about jumping in way too deep with the wrong reading curriculum.  But my husband has wisely advised me to make the most of it and just stick with it and READ as much as we can with our kids.  They're bright and they're catching onto this reading thing despite their poorly planned homeschool days and scatterbrained mama...  Praise the Lord!

A few weeks ago, my tutor cancelled class one morning and I had the chance to skim through all 400 ish pages of the Kindergarten workbook and teachers book to try to select a simplified version that might be most helpful/useful for our kids, considering the level they're already at.  So now I have these simplified workbooks (xeroxed worksheets for them to write on) for each of them and I'm going through those, starfall, and will be adding in a few lessons (see below) and I think that will be our K reading plan.

We just recieved the book Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons.  I have heard a half dozen moms rave about this book....  it must be The Way to go.  But, our kids are welllll past lesson one now (at 5.75 and 4.4 years old) and it seems plain enough that we don't need to go back to start to lesson one just to do things this one way.

Here's a brief list of the perks I've picked up from this book

So, as of today, we're going to try to put our noses down and stick with this makeshift plan.... and I am encouraged with where they're at already.... that our kids are learning to read!  How Exciting!!!
Gifts from the exceptionally kind Jeanne @ Book Ends, arrived a few days ago so our kids now have a nice little pile of beginning reader books to select from.  We're already done with the first book on each of their reading charts and these two are *Motivated*.  Ice Cream for every 5 books they read.   This is a fun time!

Lavish thanks and cheers for my hubby (for advising me to not pitch every program that didn't seem perfectly suited to us in its orginal form) and to Jeanne.  Oh these books.....

They're reading!!!  (beginning to!!)  What a JOY!!!

Kinder curricula

I had heard that a stay at home mom, when she just does her normal thing (read aloud to the kids, talk about letters as you can) will have her kids ready for kindergarden or beginning reading.  I didn't think it could quite be right.... but I have been gladly surprised.

So far in my investigations into homeschool curriculums, I think I'm most interested in using My Father's World (largely a Charlotte Mason approach, but with terrible artistry) and Veritas Press (which seems to me to be the best of the best of the Classical Educational style- looks especially good for older kids and has masterpiece artwork from K on up) and then also Singapore Math.  I'm really excited about and content to see these products and curricula on our horizon.

Anyway... I ordered the Veritas Press Museum Combo Kit for K - 1st grade.  It's beautiful.  Artwork all spectacular (really important for our artistic boy) and obviously all high quality stuff but hte problem is we just didn't need it.  I wouldn't recommend any mom like me to get this.

We could have skipped it altogether (and it wasn't cheap!  would have been nice to save that $220!!) and just continued with the Leap Frog Letter Factory DVD, Word Factory (we don't watch TV or many DVDs but these two are so helpful for when we need that kind of break) then with the starfall website and ABCya website educational games and with the simple reading, sounding out words that we do....  I think we could have skipped the entire K year of this Veritas Press kit at least.  Still, it will be fun to play around with some of the beautiful worksheets and the paper dolls and doll-house style Museum where the kids can hang art- a masterpiece for every letter in the alphabet.  Much of it is very clever (though I'm not a fan of the music CD.)

If I could go back, I would maybe have bought the Delightful Reading kit at Simply Charlotte Mason.org.  It's about $50 and looks excellent too.   Most importantly, this short series of articles for teaching kids to read (this is the way to go folks-  excellent ways to engage kids with letters- and free!) plus the few things I mentioned above (DVDs we already have and websites we already use) would have maybe been all we needed....  oh well.  We've got 4 kids to use this kit on and I think it will be fun to play around a bit more with the letters they already know.

Singapore Math.  I was a bit intimidated when a friend told me that her daughter (one month older than Isaiah) has already gotten into the Earlybird Activity book A.  But when it arrived I realized.... it's basically just a glorified activity workbook.  Grandma has loaded us with dozens of educational workbooks to play with and this first level textbook is basically just a pretty step up of that same material.   Again... we could have skipped it.  I think we'll be passing level B and I'll look more carefully at what material is covered in the next level up.

To sum it up... perhaps I should have paid a LOT more attention to the few people who told me that Kindergarten doesn't need to be taken too seriously.  Glad I didn't get any more materials than this!

Since our kids are in morning Chinese preschool, I was only planning on doing a bit of math and teaching reading this year.  This morning Isaiah's homework for preschool was to mark which animals have living births and which lay eggs....  higher level science than I remember studying anytime before junior high school!