School Starts

Well, just a few days before we were scheduled to start school DH and I decided that the curriculum we had picked out wasn't a good fit for our family. So I've been staying up very late (2 a.m. is the earliest I've been to bed in the last week, I think, and 6 a.m. the latest) trying to come up with a new curriculum and approach on the fly, and doing lesson planning.

I had gotten some distance into the K-5 material earlier, and with every page I was thinking, "AJ is going to be bored out of her mind with this, and this, and this . . . oh, there's something that we might want to cover . . . wow, that one is really below her level . . . most of this stuff is way below M&M's level, much less AJ's level. If I do this curriculum with AJ as written, she is going to hate school."

Most of the stuff we had picked out for M&M didn't really seem like it was going to work well as anything other than a supplement, either.

So, after a discussion with DH, we decided to have both girls do something almost completely different than we had planned.

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We're going to have M&M do the K-5 Beginnings program, or at least parts of it, instead of AJ. We're doing the first few introductory lessons with M&M and then I plan to skip all but a few activities in the first third or more of the course. We'll skip ahead to the parts that will be more interesting and challenging to her.

M&M can read and write, add and subtract, intelligently blend colors, draw recognizable objects, and do all sorts of things that aren't even on the radar in the first part of this program. So I don't see much point in having her do months of nothing but "color the frame around the letter a to develop visual recognition of the letter" types of activities.

I'm picking and choosing some of the other activities, like having her listen to a story and answer questions about it, narrating beginning compositions, etc, and we'll be working on reading at more of a first-grade level within a few weeks I think.

So far I'm ending up picking and choosing what to use from the core curriculum and then supplementing or changing things for probably 75% of the stuff we're using, even after revamping our plan.

With AJ, we're doing some first grade materials (mostly English, writing and grammar) and having her do some of the 2nd-3rd grade and up supplemental reading. For reading, I'm using an old 2nd-third grade primer which is rather advanced, and having her read other books that are more on her level. At the moment she's reading Betsy-Tacy as one of her reading activities for school, and she's loving it.

She started off reading the first chapter yesterday:

It was difficult, later, to think of a time when Betsy and Tacy had not been friends. Hill Street came to regard them almost as one person. Betsy's brown braids went with Tacy's red curls, Betsy's plump legs with Tacy's spindly ones, to school and from school, up hill and down, on errands and in play. So that when Tacy had the mumps and Betsy was obliged to make her journeys alone, saucy boys teased her: 'Where's the cheese, apple pie?' 'Where's your mush, milk?' As though she didn't feel lonesome enough already! And Hill Street knew when Sunday came, even without listening to the rolling bells, for Betsy Ray and Tacy Kelly (whose parents attended different churches), set off down Hill Street separately, looking uncomfortable and strange.

But on this March afternoon, a month before Betsy's fifth birthday, they did not know each other. They had not even seen each other, unless Betsy had glimpsed Tacy, without even knowing her for Tacy, among the children of assorted sizes moving into the house across the street. Betsy had been kept in because of bad weather, and all day she had sat with her nose pasted to the pane. It was exciting beyond words to have a family with children moving into that house.

With those first paragraphs, AJ was hooked.

I'm having her tell me about the chapters after she reads them, and I'm always impressed at the details she understands and remembers. In her free time she's choosing to read books like Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle (which we're also reading as a family) and Paddington at Work We're also using the Christian Liberty Press kindergarten science and history with her for school. We really like the science book, and the history is pretty good for the most part.

We're doing Bible with both girls together. For now I'm using the BJU K-5 Bible program as a jumping-off point, with lots of freedom to depart from that and add or change things. Today we followed up yesterday's lesson on Samuel by acting out the story of God calling to the boy Samuel, and the girls loved that. We also talked about the temple, the priest's garments, the curtain and the Holy of Holies, and Hannah's prayer and promise to God. I really enjoyed hearing the girls tell DH all about it tonight, and was surprised at how much they remembered.

The girls have started working in their Singapore math books, which they enjoy. As we expected, the first part is very easy for them, but there are a few skills that it's good for them to review, and they're buzzing through them quickly. M&M is going through about 10 lessons a day (and then only stops because I tell her she has to), and AJ is working through quite a few at a time also. AJ's math book has her working quite a bit on writing her numbers, which she finds a bit tedious but definitely needs to work on. Handwriting is a weak point for her.

We're adding in some things that the kids find more interesting and fun, too, like adding 130 plus 4 or figuring out how many people would be fed if you had 6 grapes and gave 2 to each person. Both girls really seem to enjoy math.

Yesterday was our first day of school, and it was a lot harder than I'd expected. Both girls whined and complained, called things "boring" that I'd put a lot of effort and preparation into, got frustrated when they had to wait while I helped the other with something, wanted to see what the other was doing when I asked them to work on separate things, and wanted to wander off and do their own thing when I was trying to do something with the two of them together.

Meanwhile, Baby E whined incessantly when she wasn't building herself a stool to climb up on the couch and get into the hamster cage, throwing a tantrum because I wouldn't give her the book I was trying to read to the girls, or getting into some other mischief.

Today I reorganized a bit, left out some of the repetitive things in various subjects, and took a more relaxed approach with a few more hands-on activities, and it went much better. It probably also helped that we didn't have chiropractor and allergist appointments like we did yesterday, which meant that Baby E's nap didn't get interrupted and she was in a much better mood.

DH and I have been looking into a literature-based program called Sonlight. So far we're very impressed with it. It has options to study at a particular grade/age level with variations for different reading levels, so that a child like AJ or M&M can be reading at a 4th- or 5th-grade level of difficulty, but with a kindergarten level of themes.

Many materials that are at AJ's reading level are really too mature for her age, and she still needs kindergarten-level instruction in many areas even though she's so advanced in areas like reading. It seems like Sonlight does a really good job of balancing reading level with maturity level.

They include a lot more depth and context in things like history, too. Sonlight history is much less US-centric than many other history programs, and gives a more honest view, it seems, of various cultures and time periods.

The Christian Liberty history is the best textbook I've seen for the age level, and is the only kindergarten history I could find that seemed to be remotely challenging and interesting for AJ's level. But it still oversimplifies or puts a spin on some things to the point that DH and I think it's kind of misleading and confusing in a few chapters (such as skipping everything between Apostle Paul and Martin Luther in the summary of church history, and following the all-too-common pitfall of exaggerating the "Christianity" of certain important historical figures in a somewhat misguided attempt to make some facts and periods of history seem more "Christian" than they really are) so we'll end up supplementing or skipping those parts. (We really like the CL science book so far.)

We want to teach our kids from a Christian worldview, of course--but not at the expense of a full, honest, contextual view of history and other subjects. We tend to think that claiming an event or person was more godly than they were tends to backfire, and probably won't prepare the kids as well for life or even deepen their faith as much as a less sanitized approach would.

It seems from what we've seen so far that the Sonlight curriculum avoids those pitfalls. It appears to make history more accessible, interesting and memorable while at the same time taking a more in-depth and accurate approach to it and other subjects. We could even continue to use Singapore math (it's even one of several math programs they offer) or another program we choose for math and a few other subjects, while using Sonlight for science, history, reading/grammar, etc.

Not that any "curriculum" will be perfect . . . I doubt we'll ever find something we end up using from start to finish exactly as written for every subject. Of course not. But we're thinking we'll end up trying Sonlight program next year. We're strongly considering ordering the kindergarten program this year even though we now have a self-built curriculum that will probably be workable for at least the first half of the year.

If any of my readers have experience (good or bad) with Sonlight or know of anyone who has used it, I'd love to hear about it. It would sure be nice not to have to essentially create our own curriculum from scratch every year, but to still have something that seemed to fit our family's needs well.

Baby E, meanwhile, is enthralled with her newfound skill of walking, and wants to do it constantly. No longer is she content to be carried or slung--she wants to be ON HER OWN FEET, thank you very much. Not that she stays on her feet for long--she's still quite wobbly and falls down a lot. But walking is suddenly the most interesting and fun activity in the world--next to climbing up and sliding down everything she can scale, that is.

Today at lunch she was making us all laugh by trying desperately to wink. She tried blinking both eyes first, then she took her little hands and was pushing one eye open and closed with her fingers. It looked like it should hurt, but she was so delighted with our laughter that she kept doing it until I took her upstairs for a nap.

Later, she was holding her ear and I wondered if she had an earache. But then I realized that she had her hand cupped over her ear while she repeated, "Hewwo? Hello? Hi dere! Hi!"

She was pretending to talk on the phone.

Baby E does an amazing amount of imaginary play for a 13-month-old.

And now, I'm off to bed--far too late again. Even my allergist scolded me today for not taking care of myself. (BTW, I didn't test positive to any food allergens, which was a nice surprise after testing highly allergic to so many environmental allergens. I know I have some food intolerances, but for the most part those aren't as scary or as difficult to deal with as Baby E's food allergies.)

I simply must figure out a way to get more sleep and prioritize better in getting things done.

(Hint to self: spending many hours building an elaborate wardrobe [complete with hanging rod, a shelf, a net for small accessories, and a swinging door with a knob and latch] out of a cardboard box for the kids' playclothes was probably not the best use of an entire evening this weekend, even if it was fun--and even if a couple of the kids' textbooks recommended setting up a dress-up area as part of school preparation.)