Silly Sentence Copywork
05 Oct 2011 2 Comments
in Academics, Handwriting Tags: copywork, Handwriting, kindergarten, silly sentence
One of the things I have added to our schedule for the sake of variety is some silly sentence copywork.
- My First Sentence Building is one fun activity we have included about once a week. The different sentence parts are color-coded, so it is simple for my four year old to match the color-coded word or phrase to the multi-colored bar, creating his own silly sentences. “The rat hops.” “His dog swims.” “A cat naps.” Then, my son writes his silly creations on the wipesheet, and I inspect his copywork after I finish working with his sister.
- Another favorite are some silly sentence puzzles that my mom picked up for us. It basically works on the same concept as above, except that, instead of color-coded, the pieces are shaped to only fit together a certain way. “The pig ate peas in a hat.” “The fox made jam on a boat.” “The frog drove a tractor on a cake.” Then, my son writes his silliness on either a wipeboard or some tablet paper for me to inspect later.
He has worked very well on his own with this activity, though he has a very hard time doing it silently. After all, it’s just too funny to keep it all to himself.
Adjusting Abeka Kindergarten
27 Sep 2011 Leave a Comment
in Academics, Handwriting, Math, Phonics
For those of you following along, you know we’ve had some issues with Abeka Kindergarten. We are on lesson 119 in Phonics and lesson 95 in Numbers, and the pace has been murderous—even with minor adjustments. So I thought I’d update you all on what we’ve decided to do differently.
Handwriting
Handwriting has been a continual adjustment. My first adjustment was to shorten the assignments. For instance, on some days, the assigments would require two pages (one page front and back) from the handwriting book in addition to about five lines of copywork. I found the copywork alone to be more than sufficient handwriting practice on those days.
My next step was to shorten the assignments to just one side of a page. First, because my poor son would work furiously to get the handwriting done and run out of time to color the pictures—a real bummer for a kindergartener. And second, because I really felt that he was getting more than enough practice throughout the day in his other exercises.
Then, Abeka started assigning “seatwork.” In other words, a child was now expected to do his handwriting and much of his phonics worksheets all by himself. “Great!” I thought to myself, “that will allow me plenty of time to work with the little one.” But that was only great in theory. The “working on his own” just wasn’t happening, even after moving him to his own special handwriting seat in the next room. My solution? Supervise handwriting and give him easier activities for his independent work (i.e. the lacing cards he begs me to do, some cutting practice, number puzzles, etc.; I’ve got files full of options).
I’m going to make one more adjustment, I think, before I’ve got this subject where I want it. I like having the copywork; I think it is an important skill. I also like having the handwriting sheets because it gives him a chance to write some of the words and specials sounds he is learning in phonics. But I think I want to vary those essentials by adding some other fun handwriting activities. I’ve got a “My First Sentence Building” game that has a handwriting wipe sheet for the child to copy the sentence he has made with the game pieces. And I have another similar activity with “funny sentence” puzzles to piece together. Each is providing handwriting practice but varying it so that we don’t feel like we are plodding through with no time to get to “the fun stuff.”
Phonics
My son’s main problem here was that the pace just went much too fast for him to master one thing before he was learning another. So I’ve nearly scrapped the lesson plans entirely and am making use of the materials in my own way. And, at least for now, I’m not worrying about the graded sheets; I’m treating them just like regular work sheets.
Additionally, I’ve added a few fun activities to vary our review of the material as well. For instance, one thing I noticed was that, although my son could rattle off all of the special sounds flashcards, he was not identifying those sounds when he saw them in words elsewhere. I’ve been combatting that problem in a couple of different ways. First, he does spell the sounds when he says them on the card: “s-t says st in stop.” Next, we play spelling games on the chalk board and with our felt letters to reinforce his knowledge of what letters make his special sounds.
I’ll call out either a word or a special sound, and he has to write the word or select the letters that make up the sound. Within just a few days, I saw a drastic improvement here. He still has trouble with “th” and “sh” sounds, but most of his other sounds he is grasping much better.
Spelling "pray"
Spelling "my"
A third activity I have done here is to reverse his special sounds flashcards. On the back of his cards are lists of words that begin with the special sound that is shown on the front. I show him the list of words, and he has to tell me what sound is on the front. And, of course, I have super dramatic reactions when I “try to trick him,” and he gets it right anyway. The first day we did this, he was rolling in the floor with delighted laughter. It was very rewarding to see.
Math
This is still my work in progress. He is acing his graded sheets still and doing well with flashcards and charts, but again the pace is so furious that we have no time to incorporate “living math,” the fun practical lessons of measuring things or playing dice games, number puzzles, money activities, etc. My goal here, even though I have yet to fully implement it, is to slow the pace where we cover the different sets of flashcards and charts on different days of the week instead of all of them every day. Next, I want to have work sheets on some days, computer math games on other days, and living math lessons on still other days.
Math adjustments are probably most difficult for me because I lack confidence. I’m not great in math, and I’m always afraid that my adjustments will cause him to miss out on a major step in the process toward understanding math. However, I feel strongly enough about what is missing from his Abeka math work, especially after comparing it to other curriculums, that I’m willing to try this adjustment. Abeka is miles ahead of everyone else on number recognition, addition, and counting; but I believe it’s rather at the expense of some of these other lessons—at least, from a homeschool point of view; a classroom approach might be totally different.
Praise the Lord, it has only taken me a couple of weeks to identify the trouble spots and find the adjustments I want to make! Last year, it took me nearly six months. We are well on our way, and every day I’m a little more satisfied with what we’ve got going.
And my son, he probably never knew we weren’t happy. The kid is wild about learning.
The rest of the plans…
03 Aug 2011 5 Comments
in Academics, Critical Thinking, Curriculum, Handwriting, Math, Phonics Tags: academics, critical thinking, curriculum, kindergarten, letter of the week, manuscript, math, phonics, preschool
Well, we’ve covered my two subjects that took the most planning. Today, I’m sharing the rest of the year!
Bible
For Bible this year, I’m hoping to do a survey of sorts of the entire Bible. My goal is to give the kids an idea of its message as an entire book instead of a lot of individual stories. So, here’s how I’m trying to accomplish that with a four and a half year old kindergartner and a soon-to-be-three preschooler. One of the things I’ve picked up for Bible this year is 50 Great Bible Stories audio CD, which tells the story of the Bible in an audio book format. I’m wanting to foster a little more independence and the feel of their own quiet time with God.
Together, we’ll go through What the Bible is All About for Young Explorers. With this book, we’ll be learning the books of the Bible within each category: the books of the law, the books of history, the books of poetry, etc. I figured that broke down the task of memorizing the books of the Bible into bite-sized pieces. Also, What the Bible is All About provides great outlines, synopses of each book, and the purposes of each book within God’s greater message of the Bible. We’ll cover all of that, but probably focus on memorizing a short summary of what each book is about, or a key verse from the book. I’ll make adjustments as we go along.
Critical Thinking
This is a subject we don’t want to neglect, as part of their classical education. I have it positioned in our day right before math, and I have a few different ways I’m wanting to teach it.
We’ll start out the year in the Building Thinking Skills and add in Lollipop Logic as the year progresses. BTS starts very simple with grouping similar objects and tracing a path between objects without touching their sides. Lollipop Logic progresses to organizing a process into the right order (building a tower, picking apples from a tree) and finishing analogies. I have my son doing three pages a week from these books. On the other days, we are going to play with our teddy bears.
With the teddy bears, we’ll work on finishing patterns and get into a little bit of graphing this year. The little one will follow our routine, doing her teddy bears (working on grouping colors and sizes) on the days Brother is doing his pages. On her workbook days, she’ll have a few pages of her own from these fun books.
Phonics and Numbers
My son will be working through the A Beka Kindergarten books for this subject and reading through the A Beka little readers, as well. I’ll adjust the pace as needed, but so far he’s done great. I’ve started in the books this summer and skipped about 60 lessons of review work. He never missed a beat. My son is the child that stays motivated by a challenge. If I have him doing the same thing for too long, he gets very bored. With that said, I’ll probably cut some of the handwriting assignments. On some days he is assigned two manuscript pages and copywork! That’s okay to keep a classroom of kids busy, but I’ve got better busy-work planned than handwriting. And handwriting is one of those skills you can incorporate into so many other areas of study. So, all that to say, I make adjustments; I don’t follow A Beka “by the book.”
For the little one, she’ll be doing Erica’s Letter of the Week curriculum. I had her doing some of the activities last year: the coloring pages, puzzles, and motor skill activities. This year, I’ll have her doing it all. She is so excited! She has really been upset with me for not filling her pockets this summer. I’m thinking she’ll be very ready to do “school” with me this fall. I’ll also have lots of her “toddler” activities interspersed to keep her busy.
And that does it for curriculum this year! Our schedule, in summary, will be about 15 minutes per activity, or about two hours a day.
See what other’s are planning at the “not back to school” blog hop, and thanks for stopping by.
Discovering what works
26 Jul 2011 Leave a Comment
in Academics, Handwriting, Homeschool Thoughts Tags: failures, Handwriting, kindergarten, manuscript, success
For this year, I went ahead and purchased the A Beka Kindergarten Handwriting for manuscript. It has saved so much time compared to making my own sheets, more than I even thought it would. However, I was really surprised at how small the lines were! I really thought the lines were that size in first grade.
My son does fine with the individual letters and even the individual words, but the sentences, all crammed into one line, have been a real challenge for him. My first clue was that his handwriting pages started to get really sloppy and took him forever to complete, and then it seemed as though he’d forgotten even how to form the letters sometimes. But when I watched him, I realized why.
His first word was fine, but come the second word of the sentence he was already squished right next to his starting dot. So when he tried to start the next word, he had no room and had no idea how to form the letter.
After the fourth time of erasing that line and trying again, I finally had recognized the problem. I got out my tablet paper and told him to copy the sentence there instead. What had been frustration and agony turned to absolute relief! He finished the sentence without the aid of any of those annoying red starting dots. And with the larger lines, his letters had room.
Of course, we’ll still need to work on spacing the words and eventually move to those smaller lines. But you should have seen the zest with which he tackled that page!
I’m writing about it because I think it was a huge learning experience for me, recognizing the symptoms of a problem and finding the solution. Someone once told me that if you look into the eyes of a child you are teaching and they’ve lost their spark, stop and come back to it another day. But coming back to the same problem day after day, might not always be the solution. Sometimes, it might be taking a step back to the last place of success.
After all, we’re all motivated when we feel successful.
