Satori Smiles

I have to admit we’ve fallen behind in our RightStart schedule, as we’ve been doing Math Mammoth. We should really be toward the end of RightStart B, rather than in the middle. This is really one of the more special and amazing curriculum we both love, we’ll be doing this more often to catch up.

Satori keeps asking to do the fun math (RightStart), so here she is, abacus at the ready!

Here’s Lesson 47 out of RightStart B. In this lesson, we work on adding up all the days in a year. At first, this sounds a bit tough for a 6 year old, but not if you do it this way! We first sing the song “30 Days Has September” and make a chart with the months and their days. Then I had Satori guess how many days are in an entire year. She guessed 100.

Using our abacus side 2, we take each month and add up the days. Since January is 31 days, we slide 3 beads over in the 10′s place, and 1 bead in the 1′s place. Every time we add a new month’s days, we read the new number and we ask ourselves if we can “trade”. So after a few months, we are able to trade ten 10-place beads in for one 1-hundred bead. We kept doing this until it was easy to see (below photo), that the total amount of days in 2011 was 365 days!

And here’s the chart Satori made to help her figure out the days in a year.

While I don’t consider myself the most organized in real life, I tremendously enjoy planning everything for homeschooling. I normally use Homeschool SkedTrack and plan out four months at a time. But currently there’s a lot of buzz on the homeschooling boards about crate/file folder planning out to the week for an entire school year! So one file would have all the ripped out worksheets/textbook pages/etc for ALL subjects for an entire week! I could never do that, what if I slacked off in a subject a few days? Think of all the work that would need to be done to re-organize the folders. Not for me, I’m enjoy flexibility too much.

So I’m keeping all the plans online, where things can slide to the next week easily if needed. (I’m sure that’s one of the advantages of having a whole year planned out, you wouldn’t want to let things “slide”.) But I do like having some things planned out, so I’ve decided to plan out subjects for our 2010/2011 school year, until the end of May 2011. But I won’t be having weekly file folders. I’m doing it by subject only.

Here’s my RightStart Math binder. No, I didn’t rip out all the pages of the teacher’s manual. What I did was go over EVERY lesson for the entire RightStart B program, and made sure I did printout any sheets and worksheets we might need.

In the front pocket I’m keeping our laminated Whole-Parts diagram, that we use quite often. The rest is whole punched and stick in the binder in order.

Some sheets I placed in page protectors, like Practice sheets that we’ll reuse, or other things that shouldn’t be hole-punched.

I also made sure I included in a special bag, all the little things we might need for a particular lesson. Tanagram shapes? I made them out of foam paper, they’re pretty cool! Clock flashcards for a certain lesson? All set. All those little paper parts and such for all lessons for RightStart B.

And here’s our little tote that carries our most common RightStart manipulatives. There’s no room for our abacus, but we keep it right by the tote.

Now, RightStart planning is done for the year! Some subjects are truly simple and just open-and-go, so I input all our lessons into Homeschool Skedtrack. I’m working on science now. I’m listing read-aloud books for our entire RSO Life year. Printing out stuff from the Evan-Moor Giant Science book. Etc….

At least I enjoy this kind of thing, but I’m very exhausted today. The plus side, is all this extra work beforehand will help our year progress smoothly. I hate when we have a holdup in a subject just because I didn’t print/cut something out that we need for a lesson. Anyway, I’m very excited about all the work I’ve done and ready to have another great year!

Here’s a few things we’ve been learning in math and science.

For math we filled 5 different containers all up to the same level. Satori then had to guess which container held the most liquid, and all the way down to which held the least.

She wrote down her estimates on paper and was pretty close. The bowl with the tapered bottom threw her off. We then measured them with measuring cups and wrote down the milliliter amount of liquid.

For science, we learned about sound and sound waves. After experimenting tone and pitch with rubber bands and guitar strings, we then did an experiment to see how the sound waves traveled through the air. The marble experiment was a hit with Satori, really drove the lesson home. This is explained in our science program, Building Foundations of Scientific Understanding. We shot one marble at a group of 4 marbles touching each other and only the last shot off. The energy of the moving marble transferred to the next, lost its energy and stopped. The energy kept transferring until it reached the last marble, which was the only one that moved. Just like particles in the air transferring sound waves.

Then we fired up our BrainPop and BrainPop Jr. subscriptions to see what Moby the robot had to say about sound. Satori really thinks he’s so hilarious!

So we love BrainPop, but I have to renew our subscription. They have a 5-day trial if you wanted to check BrainPop out.

RightStart Math can be pricey but well worth the investment. I hear it never goes on sale, but this morning I woke up to a pleasant surprise that the Homeschool Buyers Co-op is giving a great deal on RightStart! Depending on the number ordered, you can save up to 25%. Right now it is at 20%, but I’m positive it will hit the 25% by the time the deal expires on 6/29.

What great timing, we are just finishing up RightStart A, and I couldn’t bring myself to spend the $100 to buy the A-to-B Kit to move on to the next level.

This news is making its waves on all the homeschooling boards, as people know it’s just a rockin’ program!

The only thing is, is that if I wait for the coop to mail out RightStart B, we will have almost a month of in-between time. But that’s okay! I’m a math curriculum junkie and I also have Singapore, Miquon and MEP. I would love a chance to explore MEP and Miquon a bit more, and perhaps add one as a supplement. I hear they’re all great!

I haven’t been the best teacher this spring. We skipped several subjects for entire months, unfortunately, all the creative and fun ones. Science, history, art, music, and math… yes we consider math creative and fun when we use RightStart. I am excited to  start in again on the fun activities and projects, and of course photograph and blog accordingly!

My excuse for slacking this time – I am on a mega huge health kick this spring, and it seems that all my energy went towards that. On the plus side, I weigh less than I’ve weighed in at least the past 7 years! Satori has been such a great sport and is eating very healthy too. We hike a lot and are just having a blast this year.

Here’s some updates on how our lessons are going.

RightStart Math A

Last month we finally learned the “proper” names of numbers. One of the most appealing aspects of RightStart is that they emulate the Asian way of naming numbers: “ten 1″ (11), “ten 2″ (12), “5 ten 8″ (58). This makes so much more sense, and comes in handy in understanding place value and visualizing math concepts. Now that Satori understands numbers in this way, she now can also say them in the normal way – eleven, twelve, thirteen… twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, and so on. I loved the lessons that taught her the new names. Now I know how we came up with “eleven” (left one) and “twelve” (two left) and so on. We still use the special AL Abacus every day we do our math lessons.

We’re also in the middle of learning clocks. Here’s our little gear clock that came with our RightStart A kit. I love how they taught these lessons as well, such a great job! As we move the longer blue minutes hand, the short orange hour hand will move as well. Behind the blue hand, is a display that shows night or day, making it easy to show if 12:00 is midnight or noon.

Of course we finish up math lessons with a fun math card game, they have clock cards, time cards, hour cards, and Satori is totally thrilled to play these games.

Every now and then they have her do a short worksheet, which is no problem…

Reading

Reading is one subject we finished all our lessons in this spring, as some days we’d do multiple lessons. My goal was to have her reading chapter books this summer, we shall see on that, but she can read any children’s picture book. It surprised her that she could pick up any of her books and read them to us!

This summer we will have finished all of Ordinary Parent’s Guide to Teaching Reading and then she will have the tools to tackle reading her favorite chapter books like Roald Dahl, Avi, and so on (right now we are reading Ragweed).

The past month she learned to tackle two-syllable words, and so much more. Here’s what we did today – Lesson 190: The Soft Sound of the SC Blend. A short and sweet lesson, which is great on a day like Saturday when we don’t even plan to do any lessons!

Reading is becoming more and more effortless that she can read her own workbooks and answer them. How fun! Here’s her Geography workbook:

We are almost finished with Lollipop Logic. Most of this workbook was so easy, we probably could have done it all in a few weeks easily. But I’ll be progressing her logic work to be more challenging for her now. Here’s a page she did yesterday, this is one of the easiest pages. But I show it because I think her coloring is getting so neat.

We are covering hundreds now in RightStart and last night Satori completed her first Hundreds Chart. She was very proud of herself. Today we learned that 10 dimes make a dollar, and 30 dimes make 3 dollars. I love how it all ties together with this program.

About a year ago I promised that as soon as Satori learned money and basic addition that I would get her a play cash register. She’s been really wanting one early last spring. I think that educational toy may be just around the corner…

To be honest, I thought we’d have that cash register much sooner than this. I feel it is my fault for choosing wrong curriculum,  and not being consistent with math lessons enough. Satori picks up everything so fast, if I had been on top of things, she would have been this far already. She now loves math. We should be doing it everyday, but we only do it 3 times a week or so on average.

I sometimes feel that I am a bottleneck to Satori’s learning and that I’m going too slow for her. There are times I get distracted by side hobbies and several days can go by in that we don’t do any lessons. This happened just last week when we both got very excited to learn about birds. Can I call that a unit study? Last fall I took several months off, can I call that unschooling?  Sometimes I question if I’m capable of being a teacher. My personality is just so spontaneous. Even more, I’m so new at this. Just over twelve months ago I had no clue I would be homeschooling.

Am I going too slow? Sometimes I don’t feel like I’m challenging her enough. Are we covering enough subjects? Is there anything we’re missing? Are we covering too much? I suppose at age five I shouldn’t be worrying about all this… I also suppose I will be critical about myself and my teaching skills even when she’s fifteen.

I don’t know why I’m thinking this way tonight, but what I do know is that I get the most tremendous joy out of teaching and learning alongside Satori. We both truly enjoy our time learning together. I think my first entire year I questioned myself and if I could continue to homeschool year after year. But what I know now, as of this spring, is that my mental commitment has been made. Homeschooling is 110% one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.

I chose RightStart for the lack of emphasis on boring worksheets, but we did have a few short worksheets this past week. No problem, they were short and Satori whizzed through them! I have the order mixed up on the photo below, but the first worksheet was the simple addition by 1, for which Satori did not need the abacus. (She doesn’t need it for simple addition either, as she has been figuring simple sums in her head. She probably does this by counting, which I’m not sure is the RightStart way, but she does it fast anyway.)

We covered Level 41 on Monday, which built upon partitioning 10. Instead of memorizing addition facts that add to 10, here’s how RightStart Math approaches this. The past few lessons we’ve been using a Part-Whole Circle set with 10 in the whole circle, and another number in one of the part circles. (We previously photocopied the Part-Whole circle set and then I laminated it, so we can use dry erase markers to use it over and over.) Using the AL abacus, Satori can figure out the other number easily. We practiced this with all the sums, even writing all the possibilities down when solving word problems. We then did the Handshaking Game which was a unique game and used her toys in adding to 10.

A few days of doing this, Satori was familiar with equations for partitioning of ten. She completed the above worksheet on the left, relying on her abacus for all the equations. Then, we played a game that helped her learn her equations in a much more fun way! Addition Memory is a twist on the basic memory game in that you must find two cards that add to 10. The first time we played with all cards facing up, just to get the idea of finding cards that add to 10, such as a 6 and a 4. Then we started for real.

We like to start our Memory Games with a fun design, like a flower or pyramid. This is a smiley flower.

As we found pairs adding to 10, we lay the numbers in pairs face-up so we can visually see the numbers as added reinforcement. The first game Satori used her abacus for all but a few sums.

Mom won the first game (I do not cut her any slack), so of course we played again and again! I think we played 4 times total, each time Satori was relying on her abacus less and less. She knew when she picked up an 8, that she would need a 2. When she found a 5, she’d need the other 5. 9+1 and 10+0 were easy to figure out, I think the only ones she still needs an abacus were for 7+3 and 6+4 and vice versa.

Next time, we will start out playing the Addition Memory game until she has the last two sums memorized, and then we will play yet another RightStart Game to learn our sums to 10 – Go to the Dump!

The cards we use came with the RightStart Level A Starter Kit, and are very nice cards, sturdy and glossy, which should hold up to hundreds of math games through several children!