Satori Smiles

We are now well in our Kindergarten Spring 2010 semester so I feel qualified to muse on Satori’s progress and to reflect on new curriculum choices. I want to start off giving myself a pat on the back for staying on top of our homeschool schedule and getting most lessons done by 11am everyday, considering my spontaneous personality. Huge hugs to Satori for participating with such joy, and for going along with some lessons that I know aren’t the most exciting.

READING

We’re using Ordinary Parent’s Guide to Teaching Reading, and the more I read about other homeschoolers and books on reading, the more glad I am to have chosen this book as our main reading program. It’s so systematic and thorough. Within our allocated 20 minutes, we easily cover a lesson a day, and a thorough review of recently covered lessons and then touch a few lessons covered months ago. Every 7-10 days we take a thorough review day, although our reviews are already thorough, so we’ll be stopping review day. We’re on lesson 118 now, in Section 13 “Common Spellings for Other Vowel Sounds” like AW, AU, OO, OU, OI, EA and so on.

Aside from the 20 minute lessons five days a week, I do not push Satori to read on her own. I want her to learn to enjoy reading and am afraid if I push it, she might get burned out or turned off by reading. Only until last month did I encourage her to read off her easy readers, which are totally below her level, but gives her the confidence of reading. So we do try to have Satori read a few books, then mama read a read-aloud, but I haven’t been consistent.

One milestone we have finally reached is Satori’s eagerness to read books. Monday night (2/8) Satori just could not get enough of her Nora Gaydos books, and read an entire set in one sitting. In 24 hours, we read both Level 1 and Level 1 Advanced sets of Nora Gaydos. She loves the stickers and laughs at the stories. (Ah, the simple things…) We’ve started Volume 2, with sentences like “The gray ape places the cake to bake on a tray.” and “The crazy snakes danced into the lake.”  This is more her level. She also started reading the Biscuit books. I’m so glad that we got this far in our reading program, it has given her the confidence to tackle beginning reading books with ease. I’m afraid she might be getting a bit too over-eager, as she sometimes wants to try to read “my” books, lol!

On a final reading note, last week Satori went gung-ho with her ReadingEggs.com online reading subscription, which we recently renewed after several months. I think she went through several maps in one day! She does this completely independently, which is a nice break for mama. She’s now on Level 2, Lesson 64, although at this point, I think she could get through all of level 3 without learning anything new that she hasn’t already learned through OPG. She is using her math skills to earn her eggs. For example, she wanted to purchase a piano for 84 eggs, but only had 24 at the time. So she worked extra hard and saved up all her eggs until she could purchase her piano.

MATH

Again, I think we chose the perfect program for ourselves. We’re on RightStart A Lesson 39 today. Recently she’s been learning how to estimate, add, write equations, money, even/odd, and dozens of other things. She is not using the abacus to add things like 7+3, but she doesn’t have it memorized either. I’m trying to get her to use the abacus, but she’s doing her addition fast and without mistakes, so we’ll see how it goes. Last night we revisited a Memory Game from Lesson 9 and she wanted to do it over and over. She has a great memory, so she kicks my butt.

I love how learning our coins – penny, nickel, and dime, it reinforces the concept of grouping things in 5s and 10s. She has no problem paying me for an apple worth 87 cents, in several different ways.

HANDWRITING

Last week I posted about a handwriting emergency, letters getting sloppy/careless. We hadn’t been focusing on handwriting at all for such a long time. My mistake! As I posted a few pictures of Satori writing, I noticed a weird pencil grip. I then launched myself into researching grips and discovered I myself have an incorrect grip. I use 2 grips, both are incorrect. Satori uses a combination of Quadropod Grip (which HWT says is okay) and sometimes something totally incorrect. So both mom and daughter have been practicing using the more commonly suggested Tripod Grip.

Satori knows exactly how each letter should be written, right down to its shape and  how to write it. When people write lowercase “e” wrong on TV, she’ll catch it and tell me how they wrote it wrong. If I forget the tiniest little detail on a letter, like forgetting to come back down on lowercase “u”, she’ll point that out and correct it for me. So daughter does teach Mama sometimes!

To get back on track, we’ve started Handwriting Without Tears First Grade book, and are using StartWrite software to make practice handwriting sheets, and are constantly checking our handwriting grip. HWT has a few tricks on  how to get a correct grip, and we’re working on those.

SPELLING

One more Step left in All-About-Spelling Level 1 and we’re on to Level 2.  I couldn’t ask for more from a program, but I think I talk about AAS enough so I’ll leave it at that.

Satori has been writing books about 10-15 pages long. The classical education model doesn’t start “creative writing” until Grade 5 (the Logic stage), but this kindergartner sure loves to write stories. Using her phonics and spelling she knows so far, these are fun (and funny) to read. I really need to take a picture of these books, they come complete with cute pictures! She’s been writing a story about a cat named Liz and her adventures with Gest her friend, and her babies. Here’s a few pages of one story (some misspellings corrected):

Liz met a male. The owners of the cats are mad. (picture of happy cats with collars and mad owners)

Liz saw her owner and she ran fast. The 2 cats got home. The people left Liz and Gest home.

Liz and Gest had a idea. They ran to the cat bed. (Hmmmm….) In the mornin the 2 cats be friends.

Gest and Liz got mayed (married). (Picture of Gest with a top hat and bow on. Liz with a fancy gold collar.)

The End

OTHER SUBJECTS – WRITING, GRAMMAR and LOGIC

Not much to say about Writing, Grammar, and Logic except they’re going well and only take a few minutes a day. Nothing too exciting about these subjects, but there are some Logic problems Satori loves of which she cannot get enough. Satori wants to do several lessons of vocabulary a day. She picks up on unknown words all the time and demands a definition. She attempts to use new vocabulary in her conversation. So cute!

History is amazing, I talk enough about that, so no big updates here. I did plan on going much slower in history, but we are doing one chapter a week, which is what’s recommended. Love SOTW audio CDs to listen to in the car so we can review stories already  covered. I had no clue Satori would enjoy history so much.

SPANISH

We just started using Discovery Education streaming Elementary Spanish which rocks! Satori actually asked for Spanish videos so she can learn on her own, so I simply introduced her to these. They come with a teacher’s manual PDF file. We are only on our first week, more to say about this later.

MAJORLY SLACKING ON…

Science and Art big-time. I think the prep-time of these is daunting to this perfectionist mom. We have however, been watching lots of science videos on Discovery Streaming. I keep meaning to spend an entire day to pre-prepare lessons in these 2 subjects, and then doing several in a week (I schedule these once a week).

As mama previewed our RightStart math lesson today, it called for two abacuses (or abaci) if you have them. Luckily, I had a make-your-own abacus kit so we put that together! I see this is no longer available unfortunately, but I got it for just $2.50 from RightStart. Here’s the cached page of their AL Abacus “Mini-Abby”. It is easy to make your own if you can find those little dowels and then some pony beads, popsicle sticks, and binder clips. It came in a little bag with everything (but the glue and pen) shown here.

The orange and yellow weren’t too inspiring for us, so I had Satori choose her own light and dark colors. We have tons of pony beads from our craft room, so that worked out well.

She couldn’t wait to play with it.

We just think it’s super cute.

This particular lesson today covered a multitude of things. We are finally getting back into place value (where we left off from Math-U-See last summer). So we had a bunch of tens and ones laying on the floor, and I would call out 4-ten and she would pick the number up and enter it on her abacus.

That was just a review, we had done that yesterday, and I’m finding we don’t need to review so much. We proceeded to learn how to enter 8-ten plus 1 on the abacus and call it 8-ten one. (We will call numbers these weird names for a bit longer, it makes math make so much more sense if you think of things in terms of tens and ones.)

To conclude the lesson, we learned a new game – Swim to Ten! Satori loved this and after the lesson, she played it by herself for 20 more minutes. “Swim to Ten” allowed her to practice her decision making skills as she chose which of her swimmers to move when she rolled the dice. If one lands on an “X”, she has to go back to the beginning! In beginner-mode, you can give the child a second chance. In harder mode, she has to move the first swimmer she touches. To win, you must land your swimmer exactly on the 10th spot.

I would’ve never heard Satori say the below phrase back when we used Math-U-See last summer! Satori said this to me after our RightStart lesson.

Mom, is Math all Games?

Mama replied that she indeed thought math was a lot of fun. There are certainly many games we can play using math.

In particular, RightStart sure does make math interesting and fun! And we were doing fun stuff that they didn’t even label as their “games”. I finally ordered their Math Card Games book and DVD, should arrive later next week. All the game cards already came with our RightStart Level A Starter Kit. I really wish we had focused on RightStart all fall, but since Satori has been looking forward to doing math lately, we should get caught up soon.

Here she is making her first fractal. I admit I didn’t even know what a fractal was until this afternoon! Now we have a nice little 10 triangle design to admire.

Finally we’ve reached the lessons where we go over multiple 10s. For the next few months we’ll be referring to these as ten, 2-ten, 3-ten, and so on up through 10-ten which we call hundred. Here she is showing me 6-ten and the AL Abacus. We covered this in Math-U-See, but gave these 10s nicknames like two-ty, three-ty, four-ty… MUS did an excellent job getting Satori to understand her 10s, now to see where RightStart takes us…

We’ve also learned our evens and odds this week (up to 10), something we left off on back in late September before we took our long hiatus.

Hopefully her interest in math will continue. Right now she is even asking to do Math before Spelling! She told her Uncle Ken over the phone yesterday that she loves math. Yay!

We’ve been kinda slacking on math, but finally tonight Satori was ready to do some math! We are practicing tally marks and I think this lesson also covered the beginnings of addition. The lesson ended with a fun RightStart game – More Game!

Satori was about to put Mia to bed, when I thought of recruiting her favorite American Girl doll to play. Satori said that Mia was tired, but okay, she would play. We then had RightStart cards from 1 to 10 in their 3 styles (fingers, tally sticks, and abacus). The object of the game is to see who can get to 10 first, by drawing a card and seeing who has “more”. It is excellent practice on both recognizing at a glance her numbers in the different styles, as well as writing tally marks correctly.

Satori and Mia had so much fun that Satori wanted to play again! (She never asks to extend math lessons, so this was a big SCORE.) She said that even though Mia was very tired, it was past her bedtime and her eyes were getting red, Mia wanted to play again too.

And it was a tie in the end, both Satori and Mia won a game! (The neat tally marks circled was my writing, the rest is all Satori.) We only played to 5 the second game. Satori wants to wake up tomorrow morning and play again. She also wants to show Grandma and Grandpa how to play next week. So, Math can be Fun!!

For sure, I will now go ahead and purchase the rest of the RightStart games the week we get back from our Wisconsin trip. For those of you using a different math program, you can still take advantage of RightStart games! The link above will get you the game manual and a DVD, but if you want it ALL, you can get the entire Math Card Games Kit. This includes the games book, DVD, cards, abacus – everything you need.

RightStart Math Card Games Kit

Documenting our experience with RightStart, today we did Lesson 11 which had us pulling out our Geoboard among several other things. The past week we’d been covering things such as “parallel” and “perpendicular” and now I see where that was leading. We made squares on our geoboard today.

Big squares, little squares, diagonal squares, as long as they had 4 sides the same length.

A review on numbers 1-10 using our hands, tally sticks and the abacus… Satori can now look at any of these numbers (chunked into 5 plus) and tell me the number without hesitation. It is indeed so much easier to think of things in terms of 5s!

Here’s our AL Abacus Staircase, where Satori makes numbers 1-10 on the left side, making a pretty staircase design.

Yesterday we covered writing tally marks, which we’ll need a bit more practice in and I think she’ll get it. We’ve been extending writing tally marks in our other activities.

All summer, I kept hearing about this awesome math curriculum that had some math games that families and math students were having a blast with. Naturally I had to check it out, so I ordered RightStart Level A. It sat for about a month, but recently we started in!

RightStart Mathematics Level A

WOW. I had NO idea of exactly how cool this program was… I read the first 10 lessons and realized this program will rock in getting to understand math in your head. No counting on hands to do math. How is that? They break up numbers in chunks of 5 and 10. It’s easy to visualize with all their manipulatives and extra activities.

First off, your hand naturally has 5 fingers, both hands have 10. So you always have a “handy” way to see the numbers in the chunks of 5! Next, tally marks are grouped by 5. Here is the number 8:

Tally Marks - 8

This concept of chunks of 5 is so important, they even have a song for it! It’s easy to memorize and helps you remember your “chunks”. Here’s the first verse, included in a CD in their Right Start A Starter Kit.

Yellow is the sun, SIX is FIVE and ONE.

Finally, the manipulative they are most famous for, is their special AL Abacus (not sure what the AL stands for). Specially marked beads designate groups of 5. A row is 10. A half board is 50. Then they swap the colors to mark 51, and the full board is 100. See for yourself.

RS Abacus

Students do not have to count at all, it is easy to visualize 5 + 3 is 8, so they slide over 8 all at the same time. No more slow and erroneous counting of 1… 2… 3… and so on. Just simply 8.

AL Abacus - quantity of 8

Soon, Satori will be able to do addition and subtraction in her head! Not only that, but each lesson is very interesting and covers multiple concepts and so far in the first 7 lessons, we are learning days of the week, parallel, and so much more. You won’t be doing an entire year of just addition, now you’ve got fun, games, and an intuitive way to think of math so you “get it”.

I got RightStart for the games, I almost forgot about that in my excitement about the actual curriculum. I really think Satori is going to rock in math because of their approach. Instead of boring worksheet/flash card drills, these games will help reinforce what she’s learned. I cannot wait.

Here’s what we ordered – the Right Start Starter Kit Level A. Includes most of the manipulatives and materials we’ll need, we already have some of the extras at home. It came in a big box:

RightStart Level A Starter Kit

Here is a sample page out of a lesson, the manual/workbook are included in the above kit. As you can see, it uses visual, auditory, and kinesthetic activities to help with the lessons. And it’s fun!

Lesson page