Satori Smiles

Up until this month, Satori hasn’t been big on reading. She’s quite bright, but did not teach herself to read at an early age. When we did start using a reading program, she just followed along but did not race ahead in our reading lessons. To my dismay, she has not taken much initiative in reading on her own. I was the complete opposite as a child. Sometimes I worried she’d never take up reading for pleasure. I reminded myself she was only six.

I’ve never strongly encouraged her to read the typical early readers. She’s read only a few books over 50 pages on her own this spring. One of them was a picture book on Anne of Green Gables, which I’d say was about 3rd grade level. Other larger chapter books she would start but not finish.

Well earlier this month she started reading. She’s finally interested! She’s been reading books like The Trumpet of the Swan, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, and Anne of Green Gables Classic Starts books (more on those later). She’s perusing magazines like Ask and Click. And she’s not dropping them after reading just a few chapters. She reads during the day, before bed, the entire time we’re in the car (long time as we live far away from the city), in the grocery cart at the store… She still writes stories a lot, but now at least she’s reading stories as well.

We’ve dedicated an empty bedroom for a library in our house, but the past year we haven’t read in it much. Satori had no interest, and we do our read-alouds at night in the bedroom. The poor room has been neglected, and even worse, when we’ve finished a workbook or program, we just toss it in the room on the floor. Mounds of paper sat on the chairs and tables.

Well this week I decided to start using it again and it got cleaned and updated! I no longer have my wide-angle camera lens, so room pictures aren’t as fun/easy to take anymore, but here’s some updated photos.

The biggest change I made was adding our laminated timelines. We’ve got four Classical Education timelines on the far wall. Running along the entire twelve-foot length of the wall is our Charlie’s Playhouse Prehistory timeline. The Charlie’s Playhouse timeline is too high to touch and read easily, but we also have their Floor Mat timeline, which is the exact same thing, but bigger. The white shelf holds all our Dover coloring books, Poetry books, small history/science/math series books such as Read-and-Find-Out, If You Lived…, You Wouldn’t Want To…, as well as some chapter books.

On the left of this wall we have our magnetic paint space, but above it has a U.S. Presidents and an Ancient Civilization timeline. The closet that runs the whole length of the wall holds lots of homeschooling programs, games, manipulatives, and books.

This wall has Ancient Art history and Western Art History from 1400. The far shelf holds most of our history and science books.

I also moved our whiteboard/drawing table in here in case Satori wants to draw, doodle, or write if I’m reading aloud. She still loves her squishy beanbag!

Geography wasn’t forgotten, we’ve still got our World and US Maps in bright color in here, as well as a talking educational globe.

We’ve been using this room everyday this week, even while I was in the process of cleaning it. I want to incorporate a Read-Aloud time plus Silent Sustained Reading time, for at least a full hour of reading during the day. Our current read-aloud is The Secret Garden. We’ve also started up our Writing With Ease lessons again, the part where I read the story and she answers the questions in full sentences. We do this in the reading room now. It’s gotten her interested to read The Trumpet of the Swan.

Even Daddy joins in on the fun, as he reads his PMI book (Project Management Institute Exam). He’s taking his big test tomorrow, I wish him luck!

Someone suggested to put my curriculum addiction to good use and become a homeschooling consultant. While I am not prepared to take that big step, I will try to continue writing curriculum reviews and photo-document our experiences. It’s something I love to do, and love to see on other blogs as well.

Probably not coincidentally, I’m being bombarded with requests to post about some of the curriculum we’ve been using or are just starting. I happen to be in a blogging mood which will hopefully carry throughout the week, so as soon as we finish up our lessons today, I will start blogging our experiences with the following new programs we’re using:

• MCT Island (specifically Grammar Island for now, as we’ve just started)
• Getty-Dubay Italics Handwriting – Book B (B is 1st grade, may show sneak peek of book C)
• Reading for the Gifted Student (reading comprehension workbook we just started and really like)
• EPGY Math and LAW
• First Language Lessons 3 (just started, so may take a week to get this one up)
• Evan Moor Daily Geography Practice – Grade 2
• Evan Moor Word a Day

Also I plan to give some updates on programs that are not quite so new to us:

• Singapore Primary Math 1B
• Wordly Wise 3000 Grade 2
• Elementary Spanish
• Song School Latin
• Evan Moor
• Explode the Code 8 (our last post, as we’re finishing this up)
• All About Spelling
• Math Mammoth
• Growing with Grammar
• SOTW
• RSO

Later this month, I’ll post our experience with new curriculum that we are starting asap:

• Winning with Writing – Grade 3 (brand new writing program from the creators of Growing with Grammar)
• Singapore Science My Pals Are Here (just got the last books today, we’ll start tomorrow)

If there’s something you want to see more, feel free to comment on this post or email me. My PMs on forums fill up fast, so you can always contact me through this blog via the Contact Form or leaving a comment.

For some reason I have been overly ambitious about homeschooling this weekend. I’ve been putting our 2011/2012 year together. I’ve broken it into Summer 2011 and 2011/2012 year (September through May). I’d love to do a lighter load this summer (2 hour days). Usually I don’t have too much of a problem narrowing choices down into a reasonable day. But I keep running into curriculum choices I can’t resist, and I’ve been hit particularly hard with curriculum lust this week.

So far, here’s what our summer is looking like. Talk about Curriculum Overload! I need to narrow this down!

If I talk it all out on my blog, maybe that will help me drop some stuff. The numbers in front of the subjects are how I rate them according to priority groups. We’ve got 4 different priorities, with a few extras at the bottom that I just added and not sure what priority (if any) they are. Taking it from the top… I’ve crossed off the things with the most potential to drop, and added question marks to things we might drop next.

• ETC 8: The first subject is ETC, which is a phonics/spelling/reading review for us. We’re on book 8, the last book, and following the above schedule, we should be done the first week of July. Then it’s over forever.
• GWG/FLL 3: The next two are purely grammar programs. We’ve had no problem using both and I love how they complement each other. But if we end up having to drop one, we’ll drop FLL temporarily. We accelerated grammar because it does so much for my little writer.
• Singapore Math: Our main math we love. In the fall we’ll go back to doing this 4-5 days a week. We’ll finish up 1B soon and dig into 2A this summer.
• Math Mammoth?: The math that was supposed to be just our supplement, but I couldn’t resist the cute workbook format I made with the ProClick and we just got done doing a week of it on our Oregon vacation. I am not sure why I’ve scheduled it more than Singapore. But this is something I will definitely lessen and probably only do when we’re out of town.
• Getty-Dubay Italics?: Satori wanted to try out a fancy new handwriting program. We started with their 2nd grade book B. The spaces to write are so huge though and it’s hard for Satori to get used to. She writes very neat and tiny. I’m not sure why we need handwriting anymore to tell the truth, so we possibly might drop this, or at least get to a more suitable book level.
• All About Spelling: One of our core favorites, but we’ll only be doing 2 days a week over the summer, switching back to 3 days/week in the fall. We’re more than halfway through Level 4 and will start Level 5 this fall.
• Writing With Ease: I feel so guilty flying without WWE on the WTM forums. Out of all our curriculum choices, this is one both Satori and I pretty much dislike. The concept behind it sounds great for young children, and I wanted to give it a third try. But we’ve got so much on our plate, this will be one of the first to drop, simply because we dread doing these lessons. I don’t know why, they’re set up as so easy to teach.
• Write Source 2?: Since Satori actually does write, this is what we use to help her with her varying writing genre. This tends to get skipped a lot, so I’ve tried to break it down into manageable chunks twice a week. We only do the student text that focuses on writing and not the other parts. We may drop this if EPGY LAW (Language Arts and Writing) covers writing well.
• Vocabulary (Wordly Wise and Evan Moore Word a Day): Satori loves to learn vocabulary and it doesn’t take long. We’ll skip the reading part of the WW workbook and learn the terms on the free online site, do the games, and do the exercises in the book.
• MCT Island?: We’ve gotten our feet wet into the Grammar book and really enjoy reading it together, but we’ve already got so much grammar. We also have their Poetry, Sentence Island, Building Language, etc… We’ll see how it goes.
• SOTW History: We’re a bit behind and wanted to take the summer to finish up SOTW 1 – Ancients in time for SOTW 2 this fall.
• RSO Life: Wrapping up Plants this summer and easing into RSO Earth and Space this fall. Satori has taken an interest in biology, so we’re going on lots of in-depth rabbit trails in this area.
• Geography: We use a variety of resources, including online geography games, puzzles, and workbooks. This summer Satori will memorize all the countries of the world. She does this easily, we are almost finished with Europe and will move to Asia next. For workbook, we’ll use the Evan-Moor Geography a Day 2nd grade. We whipped through tons of geography workbooks, this will be our first time trying this out.
• Elementary Spanish: This is super easy to implement and adds lots of vocabulary. No problem there.
• Getting Started with Spanish: Can drop this.
• Song School Latin: Can drop. If not, we’ll finish up quickly and be done with forever. We’ll start Lively Latin in the fall.
• Logic/Critical Thinking: We use various workbooks/resources, it only takes 5 minutes a few times a week, so we’ll keep this subject.
• Meet the Masters: Love this program! The art projects that have us copy a concept from the artist slow us down though, so we’ll skip those and just focus on the art appreciation aspect. I’d love to go through the program faster so we can learn about more artists, yay!
• Artistic Pursuits: We slack on this one, but it actually doesn’t take much time to do. I think Satori really enjoys it, so we’ll spend the summer and try to get through AP Book 1. No biggie if we don’t get to it every week, when we do get to it, we tend to do several lessons at once.
• Read and Understand and Daily Paragraph Editing: The next two are both Evan Moor workbooks. Both these workbooks I’ll probably slash for this summer. The Read and Understand looked interesting, we could combine reading with another subject. The Daily Paragraph Editing is fun for Satori to take a red pen and slash and edit. Maybe we’ll revisit these this fall.
• Singapore My Pals Are Here Science – This is one I just realized we could do this weekend. There is a HOTS component that might challenge Satori. This program looks interesting because there’s a text, workbook/activities, challenging book (HOTS), and other components. Kinda like Singapore Math, which we love!
• EPGY Math and LAW (Language Arts and Writing): David really wanted Satori enrolled in this, so now we’re all registered and paid and ready to roll. I’m not sure what to expect.

If we actually do follow the above schedule, here’s what our days would look like in the next two months. Monday-Thursday averages 2.5-3 hours, with 2 hours on Friday, and 1 hour (of easy stuff) on the weekend days. I really want to get everything below 2.5 hours, with a 1 hour Friday.

The last few subjects were ones I only recently discovered and that’s what tipped the scale to be overwhelming curriculum overload for me. Give us a few weeks and we’ll pare our schedule down and let you all know how it’s all working out!

Screenshots were from the online scheduling program I use – Homeschool SkedTrack. Oh and one more thing that is overwhelming me – I wanted to program my own online scheduler to have all the features I wanted. I love web programming, but it would require too much out of me right now, it’s been several years since I was last active in programming.

I’ve been away from the blog long enough to start getting antsy emails from you all! I apologize for the long time off, we’ve been busy trying to finish up the spring. Next week is our last week before we take off for our Oregon coast vacation, and when we come back, in June we start up once again on a slightly lighter Summer 2011 load.

To catch up on what we’ve been up to the past month, I’ll spam my own blog with updates!

Phonics

Starting with Reading/Phonics, we started the very last Explode the Code phonics workbook last month. This is book 8, which covers suffixes and endings. We are doing two pages a day and will finish the book and be done with ETC forever sometime this July 2011.

Working on the table together instead of her individual small desk has worked out wonderfully. (We switched to work on a large table this spring.) Yes, as you can see, sometimes she still needs dollies and lollies!

Reading

We’ve also started the last book of Beyond the Code, book 4. Not so impressed with this series, but we’ll be finishing it next week. I wouldn’t have made her do BTC if she read on her own everyday.

As for independent reading (not pushed by Mom), Satori sporadically reads, but when she does, nothing can stop her. She’ll lie down on the floor of a Barnes and Noble for an hour to read. A few weeks ago she was reading a Narnia book. This week she’s reading Matilda by Roald Dahl.

Math

Singapore Math has been a total hit in our household. It seems I haven’t posted about it in two months, so here’s a quick catchup on how we’re doing. We spent several weeks on the 1A book that I hadn’t planned on, but I’m glad we got that foundation. You may remember the photos and video I posted in March of her doing addition/subtraction using manipulatives and other unusual methods. That hard work has paid off! She can now do lots of math in her head! She does it just for fun even, like at the grocery store. The past few months she’s been showing off her multiplication skills, her negative number skills, and other things we’ve never tackled officially.

I’m amazed at what a change Singapore math has made in my daughter. The Today Show did a feature on Singapore Math last week. Here’s an article from Singapore Math Source that explains more.

We are now in 1B, and finally covered the introduction to Multiplication and Division. We used manipulatives to demonstrate the concept. I’ll blog more about Singapore math in a future post.

I’ll cover our updates in Spelling, Grammar, Logic and Art in another post.

Handwriting Changes

As for handwriting, Satori got bored with HWT Cursive, so we are trying out Getty-Dubay Italics handwriting. She’s been so excited, but so far, their Book B is pretty simple. We could probably have done just as well using our StartWrite software. We’ll zip through it, and move on to C next month, which also covers italics. The last book covers calligraphy, which I think Satori will love. I also hope to improve my handwriting with this program, they have books for adults as well. I’ll talk more about my reasons for switching in a future post.

Writing

We finished Write Source Grade 1 and will be starting grade 2. I just heard that BraveWriter will be offering a program for ages 5-8, so I’ll be sure to check that out soon.

History

We’re somewhat slacking on History, but plan to focus on it this summer to finish Ancient Times and start SOTW The Middle Ages in the fall.

Science

We’re finishing up our animal studies in RSO Life and will be moving on to the Plant Kingdom this summer. We’ve taken lots of field trips (photos will be shared) to see animals. Our spring vacation should provide ample opportunity to view more life as well!

I received an email last week asking how I do it all.  I often get these emails and forum private messages along these lines. Well, here I’m admitting I most assuredly cannot do it all. I took a week break from blogging just to try to get more balance in other things in my life.

First of all, although my goal this year is to homeschool 2-3 hours a day (Tuesday through Friday), the reality is that it is more like 1-2 hours a day. That is enough time to get everything done that I need to do… IF I wasn’t addicted to blogging itself, perusing homeschooling forums, and reading about homeschooling. If it wasn’t for those addictions, things would be much easier.

I’m a night owl, and thus do not get up very early. I’m happy if I can get up before 9am. I haven’t even had breakfast yet and it’s almost 11am. Satori’s already had her breakfast and she’ll be drinking a carrot juice with me in the next 20 minutes. Then we’ll tackle about one hour of homeschooling.

After that I’ll encourage her to play while I do my own stuff. We will probably take a few hours today to go to Boulder to get groceries. We’ll hang out at a nice park enjoying the beautiful weather. Then, I’ll hope we’ll get to a second hour or two of homeschooling in the late afternoon.

That’s it. I have no strict schedule. I have a very relaxed and casual approach. Some days we might not even get to homeschooling at all! Some weekend days we’ll put in an hour. We homeschool year-round, so I don’t worry about sticking to a schedule.

I slack. I am currently slacking on history, art, writing, and music. I can go for months without doing some subjects.

We eat simply. I buy a lot of books and am obsessed with homeschool planning so I don’t have a lot of money or time to cook gourmet meals. Well, who am I kidding, I’ve never been much of a cook.

We don’t hire cleaning help. So it’s not unusual for me to take an entire day or two of from homeschooling to clean the house. You may only see pictures of neat rooms in this blog, but rest assured that they were tidied up before taken. I can’t concentrate in the middle of messes, so I try to keep the main areas clean and tidy, but sometimes that’s not possible. Currently our bedroom, playroom, office, and garage are a whirlwind mess.

If I’m in one of my homeschool obsession moods (you’ll know when I blog a lot), then I may not have time to take care of myself the way I should. I think I’ve gained 5 pounds or more since last fall. I hate that, and who wouldn’t. So this past week that I’ve been not blogging, but have been exercising and eating healthy. We’ve been enjoying the nice spring weather outside. Getting to know our local ducks in Boulder Creek…

I seem to have quite a bright daughter and I worry that I don’t challenge her enough. (This could be a separate blog post.)

I also am aware that it seems that I spend a lot of money on homeschooling books and such. I guess I do, but that’s just where I put my priority. We don’t buy often clothes, shoes, purses, fancy house stuff, expensive dinners… Here’s my signature tag I use on the homeschooling forums, and the truth for me is even worse, lol.

“If I have a little money I buy books; and if any is left, I buy food and clothes.” – Erasmus

I follow links coming into my blog sometimes and I see what some people think of me.

What I do have is passion. Whatever I decide to embark upon I put 110% of myself into it. That reflects in the way this blog is organized and our homeschooling aspects are detailed so thoroughly. I can’t help but make lists… lists of books we read, lists of curriculum we use, lists of homeschool area photos, etc… But it also probably doesn’t show the real me. In real life I’m not so organized.

That’s brutal honesty. I can’t do it all and I’m not as on top of things as some people believe. There are some things I cannot change about myself, but some that I can. I’ll try to take the things I can improve upon and work on those.

Although I love blogging everyday, and love hanging out on homeschooling forums, I need to have a healthy balance. (I think I blog about this at least once a year.) I am going to try to blog just a few times a week, rather than everyday. I am going to limit my time on forums. I’ll be making sure I get my healthy “me” time. I’ll be trying to hit up the neglected subjects, while at the same time, keeping my relaxed attitude so we can take advantage of the beautiful spring weather and just being happy as a family.

Let’s see how it goes.

Someone asked whether you can flip the books back and have it still lie flat. Here’s what they say on their website:

GBC ProClick® spines allow pages to lie flat with 360° rotation and let you easily add and remove sheets.

Image from GBC ProClick website

Here’s an image of one of our books with the pages flipped back and it is lying flat.

Another view. Since these spines do have a tiny vertical “spine”, there is an small gap but it doesn’t hinder the books ability to lie perfectly flat. I did look around our homeschool for the comb binders and found some on our old MUS books. They have a very thick spine which prevents the books from lying flat. The bigger the book, the thicker the spine, and the less they lie flat. The advantage is that you can put a label on the spine.

After I got done posting about the ProClick yesterday, I thought I should have included some close-ups of the spines themselves. What appealed to me most about the ProClick is that you can easily zip them back open and insert more pages. Hopefully these photos will help you see how the spines open and close.

You can click the rings together with your own hands or use the tool. I find it just as easy to zip them up manually. They do include a zip tool to zip/unzip the spines, which is fun to use.

Another Africa notebook we made yesterday showing both the back and cover…

We made a few more books for Satori today. She requested I make her a writing journal, so I had her pick out a nice cover, and then we were able to make this beautiful book in a few minutes. I turned away for a moment, and then found this nice thank-you note on top of her new journal.

We’re so excited about the possibilities and can hardly get any actual schoolwork done! We plan to make notebooks for her drawing lessons next. We’ll be making tons more journals of course as well, as writing journals are Satori’s absolute favorite things in the world.

I’ve found myself purchasing tons of eBooks and PDFs versions for our curriculum. I print them out and place them in a Staples Better Binder. That habit was getting too expensive, especially at $9 per binder. I also found myself loving spiral bound books, as they lie flat. So I was open to some new ideas…

Yesterday I took the splurge and purchased a ProClick P50 Binding System. I found the best deal at Office Depot, where I got it in-store for just $50. I got some sturdy back covers, glossy front covers, and some combs, and the total came to under $100. You can use your own cardstock for covers though, so the fancy covers aren’t necessary.

Right away I bound my History Odyssey Ancients book that I hadn’t been using as it was just loose papers that I had filed away a year ago. Now, I have a beautiful, glossy history book!

One thing I am losing over putting them in binders is the ability to place a label on the spine. I have colored tape that I rolled around a top coil, so we’ll see how that works in identifying them if they’re all on the shelf.

Here’s a look at how thick it is, with the clear front cover and black, sturdy backing.

A look at the device itself. It looks very simple, and it is – yet it’s very sturdy and weighted, so you stick the papers in, and then run the top thing over the papers to punch the holes. This inexpensive version will punch 6 papers at a time, but I normally like thicker or glossy papers, so I only punch 3-4 pages at a time to make it easier. It’s super easy to run the top over the papers if you give it a manageable job.

I purchased two boxes of spines, for 45-page and 85-page capacity. If you do use covers, that lowers the capacity. There are only three sizes of spines that I’m aware of, and the 110-page capacity spines I could only find in boxes of 100 for $50. I decided to wait on those.

I love these special ProClick spines because you can open them back up, take out, reinsert papers, and then zip them back up! They feel nice and sturdy, and they look great. Books now lie flat.

I asked for some ideas over at the WTM last night… Thanks ladies! I finally found a use for the beautiful scrapbook papers I had been collecting just because they’re so pretty, even though I’m not a scrapbooker! The spines are easily cut. So I made a cute mini-notebook on Africa for Satori to use.

I made this template super quickly last night, but hey she totally loves her new notebook! She even slept with it last night. We’ll be putting all 53 African countries in here (more on that later).

Another great idea is to put the spines on top, which makes it easier for a child to write in a workbook.

Since the spines hold up to 85 pages (110 if I purchase the bigger size), not all complete programs will fit. Some people split their programs up into different volumes. Also, an affordable option is to purchase 3:1 spiral coils (Thanks Paula for this idea), which are both more cost effective and hold more paper. The con is that they won’t click back open. This is a good idea for larger teacher’s manuals.