The longer we educate our children at home, the more comfortable I become evaluating what is working and not working in this big goal we have - to educate our children. Each September begins with new goals, plans, and books. Each January and February brings reflection, redefining of goals, and making changes accordingly.

I can have the most amazing plans and my children can have many goals and ideas but some don't work, some don't work as well as they should, some work as expected, and others exceed our wildest imaginings.

For those of you wanting to know, here is an example of what I mean:

Elnora has been interested in insects since she was a very young tot. We bought her a guide book to North American bus when she could read a little.

Best science resource purchased

 At first she perused the glossy photographs and would compare any bugs she found with the photo in the book. Then as her reading skills improved, she began reading all the information in the book. As a result we have a well-thumbed guide book and a daughter who has us and others coming to her with different bugs needing to be identified. This book was not part of any school curriculum but met an educational desire of one of our children. As you can imagine, this is one resource Mr. Beaver and I have no regrets buying! This guide book has exceeded our wildest imaginings for our daughter's science.

Since Elnora is also interested in the rainforest, and in animal classification, she thought learning Latin would be very helpful. So we purchased the Latin Road to English Grammar for her to try this year. Big mistake for all these reasons:

- It requires significant parental involvement. I am trying to teach two boys to read and I have a toddler. One of my boys has lots of medical appointments. Sorry, my name is not Supermom so early on in the school year, I told poor Elnora if she wanted to do this Latin, she would need to see how much she could manage on her own. Ahem! There's a reason this program requires significant parental involvement so it has been reclining on the shelf for a while.

- This Latin requires more than a cursory knowledge of Grammar which is something we have not pursued too strenuously yet.

- The program focuses on classical Latin but my daughter wants to know Latin as a language to classify bugs.

Needless to say, this whole program has come under my "January magnifying glass". The end result is that Latin will remain on the shelf until further notice. Elnora is much more interested in learning Portuguese as the Amazon is in Brazil and they speak Portuguese in Brazil. If she wants to go to the rainforest there to study bugs, she needs Portuguese more than Latin. I mean, you gotta be able to communicate with the locals, no?!

On that note, any cheap resources out there to study Portuguese?

Do any of you home school moms out there pull out your big lens at this time of the year?

Teaching Long Division

Growing up, math was not my favourite subject and in our family, like mother, like daughter. Elnora will write stories, compose poems, make up new languages and new alphabet symbols, draw pictures to her heart's content, learn her science, love her history but when math time rolls around, somehow, she just is not quite so enthusiastic.

I have caught her using math regularly in her day to day life and often remind her of the fact when she wonders why she has to do math. For us, Math-U-See has worked very well. While Elnora still does not really like math, she understands it quite well. For this, I do not credit my fine teaching skills but must give credit where credit is due so let's have a round of applause for:

Math-U-See!

For those of you who have a child like Elnora, I would like to share a strategy I used besides Math-U-See to help her master long division. As Steve Demme, the developer of our math program says, place value is an extremely important concept for children to master if you want them to understand math. Elnora had a tough time with a typical long division problem written this way:

   ____

5 | 345   She could not figure out where to begin to write her answer and how to keep everything in order even though she uses graph paper to work out her problems.

Remembering Steve Demme's sage advice, I colour coded the problems like this:

   ____

5 | 345

This helped her to see the hundreds, tens, and ones. I then coloured each column and told her to do the problem. When she finished it looked like this:

      69

   ____

5 | 345

     30

       45

       45

         0

I don't know my keyboard well enough to create all the lines but you get the general idea. Elnora only needed to do about 6 problems this way before she caught on.

Do any of you have ideas for teaching certain math concepts? Happy teaching!

A New Year

Normally we celebrate the beginning of a new year on New Year's Day. In the world of education in North America, the new year begins in September. For teachers it begins in August.

For us as a family, the new year began yesterday. Mr. Beaver went back to school. I think it's been the hardest on little Lucy so far. At 18 months, she thinks 10 hours is forever. She cried when her daddy left in the car and at intervals during the day we could hear her say, "Daddy vroom-vroom. Daddy? Daaadddyyy! Daddy vroom-vroom." Needless to say, she was ecstatic to see her Daddy again when he came back home!

Since Mr. Beaver started back to school, I decided to begin our year of home schooling as well. Elnora is in Grade 5 and doing Core F with Sonlight. This year is different because both Bob and Bill are doing Sonlight K. We basically did school work all day long. Having had a number of years of experience, I had expected that. The first few days of school are always extra long because we are all trying to find our groove.

It may sound crazy that we did school all day and didn't the kids hate it? No! Since Sonlight is such a great combination of seatwork and snuggling on the couch reading great literature together, the kids are usually quite perturbed to stop 'doing school'.

"Just one more chapter, Mamma."

"Please read more!"

"Are we done already?"

"Can't we do more school?"

I don't mind those comments at all! I also enjoy learning new things with them and seeing their eyes light up when they understand a new concept for the first time.

If you throw an 18 month old into the mix, school has many interruptions.

I read about Martin Luther to the boys today and they listened very hard. The book isn't particularly exciting and it uses difficult vocabulary but the boys were enthralled and remembered to tell Daddy about him when he came home! Reading that story gave me the chance to remind the children that they are all on this earth for a special reason and that salvation is a gift and can't be earned. What a privilege!

In spite of one of the kids spilling my coffee which had to be mopped off brand new books, the day went well. (Note to self: no coffee cups on the school table)

What helped as well was the fact that for the last 3 weeks, Mr. Beaver and I worked into the night every week day just to purge junk from our house and create a good learning environment for our school room. I am so glad we spent all that time doing it. It has paid off! With the school room and our living room boasting new book cases from Ikea, the house is in ship shape order.

I hope and pray for a smooth school year for all us home school moms out there! It is definitely a full time job!

Math 4 Preschoolers

What does one need in order to teach the little ones math?

1. The tiny book written by Dr. Ruth Beechick called An Easy Start In Arithmetic.

2. Manipulatives. I bought these cute bears at Scholar's Choice.

3. Wooden numbers. I bought mine at the Dollar store.



4. A relaxed attitude. It's amazing how much kids learn while playing!

What did we learn this week?

This blog was supposed to be about home education as well but I have written one, only one lone, post on that so far.

Well, let's remedy that!

We are on our last few weeks of the formal part of our home schooling for this school year. This week was supposed to be one of those weeks where lots of this book learning happens. We did three days.

Why?

Just blame the sun. After an extremely cold, wet spring we finally got a whole week of sunshine! I confess, I let the children play outside.

They got dirty in the sandbox.

They hunted for bugs.

They built a fort out of branches we had trimmed off one of our trees.

They blew bubbles.

They spent an inordinate amount of time on the swings.

They planted 'gardens'.

They tracked in lots and lots of sand and needed many baths. Their clothes got soiled but they've got sun-kissed legs, arms and faces. They are sleeping well and long at night and the amount of food they have consumed and water and juice they have sipped has risen astronomically.

I have been able to spend extra time organizing my home and preparing for our bathroom renovation starting next week.

I'm sure you're wondering how I can say this post is about home education! Ha, thought you'd never ask! :-)

I can tell you in one word: F L E X I B I L I T Y

Teaching my children at home means that I can allow them to take breaks like this from time to time knowing that there will be days in the summer when the kids don't know what to do. Sitting down then with a few books is no punishment especially if they are taught that education does not happen just during the school year and on week days.

Doing 30 minutes to 2 hours of 'school' per week during the summer is no hardship and allows the children to much better retain what they have learned throughout the year and not come back to school in September having forgotten so many things over the long summer. It also takes care of the days when they just need some one on one time with me.

This week I got a much needed break and so did the children. I would not be surprised if they learned nearly as much this week as in 'normal' weeks of book learning. They learned different things but they were still learning.

They learned how to get along with each other so they could stay out longer.

They learned to include Bob, who has spina bifida and can't walk. They helped him get on his plasma car, and on the swing. They brought the bugs to him for him to see and hold.

Bob learned to be patient and is now realizing that he doesn't need to worry about being left out.

Little Lucy is getting better at walking on uneven surfaces. :-)

These are just a few of the things my children learned this week. I think those are valuable things, don't you?

Home Education

Our family is one that home schools, or if you prefer to put it this way, we are home educators. I suppose you could say that we do school at home but that would actually not be quite accurate. We don't do school in the traditional sense. My children have very few work books. Most of our time is spent sitting on the couch reading books together. While my children are not constantly doing 'busy work', it is amazing to me how much they retain from the living books we read together.

The curriculum we have chosen to use for the time being is Sonlight. There have been times when we've seriously considered doing other programs but we always come back to Sonlight.

Mr. Beaver and I have attended numerous home school conventions, we have read extensively on the subject, and we have been privileged to learn from veteran home educators. Based on this research and on our own experiences thus far, we have come to the conclusion that for us, home schooling is not an activity we watch our children do or that we merely do with our children, home education is a way of life for our family. Every day we have an opportunity to learn things together as a family.

I plan to blog more about our journey as lifelong learners. Buckle your seat belts and get ready for an exciting ride!