Homeschool Adventure 4th Grade

Our adventure started back up in September and thing have moved forward at very good pace.  I found a homeschool group to do some activities with.  A high school friend is currently homeschooling so our sons have been able to interact during the day.  We have gone roller skating through a homeschool program and as the weather gets colder we will be back to jumping inside to lose some energy through another homeschool special.  

We continued with our math and science program.  Daily Geography by Evan Moor works really well for LT and we just added a daily science element to our morning work.  We continue building those fine motor skill through Handwriting without Tears.   All About Spelling is a huge success and I am thinking All About Reading starting in January to build stronger reading skills.  I am looking into a more detailed grammar program.  We have worked through our reviews as we head into our first quarter ending.  Holidays are always interesting but by January we will be fully involved in 4th grade and working on being more independent in the learning process.  

As our adventure continues and we are back into our routines I will update our blog as we move along.  Thank you all for following and offering your support through kind words.  

Apraxia .... The name of the game

Apraxia

Is the name of the game that LT plays Morning, Noon and Night

This is a great post about the struggle from the parent view:

When I hear apraxia will never go away.

From the FACEBOOK Group

Speaking of Apraxia

A March Day

A March Day

For this homeschool year I decided our schedule would not be based on times but rather on items that needed to be completed before the end of the day.  LT always complained about being tired last year so instead of setting an alarm I allow him to wake on his own.  Our homeschool day starts any where between 9 and 10 am.

Two days a week our school day begins after therapy.  On these days and when it is nice out we do try to wander around in the environment until lunch time.

We cover math, reading, writing and science.  We just picked up a new health, safety and manners curriculum and we switched gears with our spelling program.  I also found a STEM curriculum that we are going to start in the next week.  I am not about busy work but rather allow for free time for him to explore his interests.

 Sometimes the free time is used to explore some educational games.

Since the "nicer" weather is returning we are going to try to do a mile walk every morning. Fresh air and physical activity and some much needed natural vitamin D.

We finished our time Chapter in Math Mammoth and started our money Unit.

It is nice to have a curriculum completely laid out for you.  It took me a lot of research and time to finally decide on this curriculum and LT is really liking the layout of the program.  We should be finishing up with our first Unit this week.  This came from A Beka Books, third grade. 

LT was doing really well with spelling but not really learning why we spelling items they way we do.

I had been researching this since I started looking into homeschooling and finally decided to purchase the program.  Our first day went really well and he enjoyed the magnet board letters.    This program comes from All About Learning , a homeschool Reading and Spelling program.

Most of the program we use mix up the medium to learn the task at hand.  This gets LT out of his seat moving around through out the day.  Which is good for him since I classify him as wiggly anyway. 

As soon we get through our first units in our three new programs I will do a review of how they work in our homeschool setting.

Rolling Right Along

Amazingly we are rolling right along.  I have made some adjustments but stuck with the idea of starting and finishing something before moving on to the next item.  I got our FB page active and we have our youtube videos reviewing what we use.  Doing this has been helpful for me because I prefer visuals when it comes to learning.  Since we have reduced some of the stress of trying to conquer to much at once, LT has done a huge turn around with therapy and is doing amazingly well lately.  

As we roll in to March, which I can't believe is here already,  I will be introducing a new health unit.  I will do a review on that once it arrives.  I have found TeacherPayTeachers be extremely useful and task cards have become one of LT's favorite activities.  

I think the major challenge has been the fact that the weather has been extremely cold and the house seems a lot smaller when you are home all day.  

I got some fun and creative from Language Arts games from A Not So Wimpy Resource and I'll share those in my next blog.

Here is to a nice weekend and while March will roll in like a lion since we will have a chance for more snow on Sunday I am hoping March will roll out like a lamb.  

How our day moves forward

I have determined Blogging is a lot harder than I thought.  I figured I would jot down ideas and share pictures but life takes over and then I realize it been a couple months since my last post.

We have started a New Year, three month into our adventure and we are a couple weeks away from the second quarter reporting.  I started a New FB page for the LT Homeschool Adventure  https://www.facebook.com/pages/LTs-Homeschool-Adventure/659704990806484
and I found inspiration from Teachers pay Teachers on material that is designed from those who know children the best.  I have to rework worksheets on lined paper LT can write on and by following a lot of these amazing teachers through blogs and other social media outlets I have been inspired to start working on our own designed worksheets.  The realistic goal is to aim for the next academic year but we will be testing out some in our 3rd grade setting.

Here is a snap shot of our day today.  

Planning desk has a nice view of outside.

Little man always complained about being tired last year so I decided to allow him to wake up on his own sleep schedule.  He wakes up anywhere between 8 to 9:30 and we have had very few melt downs or complaints about being tired since we went this route with him.  

Currently we are running on a half day schedule because I am not feeling well but we were a head of schedule before the break and should be caught up and back on schedule by the end of the week even on the half day schedule.

Planning time while the girls are getting ready for school

While his old school is already in session, LT is still snoozing away

Working on a geography lesson

I am a morning person so I do my planning in the morning.

Our day starts anywhere from 9 to 10 o'clock depending on when LT gets up and when the girls are not home until late our day usually doesn't end until almost 4.   We have lots of movement breaks and longer lunch time.  The day is set up with tasks that need to be completed.  Lawrence takes longer to complete a task, so we are not focused on time restraints right now but we are focused on starting and finishing a task.

Next we should, fingers crossed, be back to our full routine and hopefully I'll be able to keep up with blogging.

Happy New Year and Thank you for reading and following our adventure.  

Woo Hoo, Yes and Oh My, No.

It was a Woo Hoo YES and an Oh My NO

type of day

Do you know what this?  It is a huge step forward.  Eight weeks in and this is the first story organizer he wrote on his own, actually the first story organizer he has done.  I might have to frame this and put it on the wall.   It helps when he enjoys the story and this was laid out in a way where it was easier to follow the sequencing of the story.  He understood the organizer, Woo Hoo!

And then we have our big fail of the day.  I had a feeling he was not completely understanding grammar and this quick review proves it.  The rules are not sticking with him, which again is part of his apraxic issue but since we are tackling this home adventure I can rework the rest of the week to include some extra practice and review as we move forward.  The funny argument we have going on is about spoken words used compared to written words.   Take the word fish, its plural is fish.  Question number five has fishies as a choice and LT choose that as the answer (he did choose the wrong rule spelling as fishys) and he has tons of spoken examples to prove his point about using fishy and fishies in our language.  This is the struggles of someone with a processing disorder.  Grammar will be an interesting struggle for the rest of the year and probably the rest of his life.

Our Failures are also our Greatest Achievements

Major Pat on the Back 

and those moments on how did he get through the last two years not knowing how to do these things.  

We are rolling into our 7th week and we are 2 weeks away from our first Quarter being completed.  We have had some amazing accomplishments but still have some major fails that need adjusting. 

The math program is running smoothly and Lawrence is doing very well with it.  It is a common core curriculum and the program I went with does make one think outside the box but it lacks review, repetition and memorization of math facts which I think is what is really lacking in the common core curriculum as a whole.  So I have supplemented the program with math review and we are currently working on developing our multiplication lapbooks to strengthen math facts.   He has done very well with the 100 addition facts but his time to complete is from 18 minutes to 25 minutes for the 5 minute drills.  We do need to work on time but I am more concerned with  the idea that he know the facts rather than the time it takes to complete them.  

In the past he has done horribly on spelling words but I could never understand how they presented them in the school setting.  They seemed to be random not linked to reading or grammar they were working on.  Lawrence never liked the activities in school linked to the spelling word reviews.  My girls had worked with McGraw Hill where the reading, grammar and spelling and vocab all worked together, I decided to give that a try.  I removed sorts and spelling sentences, the sentences especially since he was going to see them through out our readings for the week.  He works through the workbook over 4 days and I added flashcards for ABC order and 2 times each on the paper through Handwriting without tears.  This paper has been a huge help in ending some of the writing frustrations associated with the small lined papers.  After 5 weeks we have success.  He learns spelling patterns and sees them in sentences.  He is very proud of his accomplishments and has noticed he is accomplishing things he had not accomplished or mastered in the past.

He is enjoying the non ending mold experiement.  He is loving the daily geography lessons because it is all about maps and pirates use maps.  He enjoys getting up and doing a 15 minute non-school related activity between lessons and he loves it even more when the break turns out to be a little longer because Mom has something else she needs to complete.  There are days I can not figure out why he gets so upset over doing the work and then there are days where he does everything on his own without prompting him to do it.  Our biggest accomplishment is just starting and finishing a lesson, even if it means the lesson has been put off till tomorrow.  We do not move forward until I know he has a basic understanding of what we are working on.  Which brings us to my next paragraph.  

We have some major obstacles that we will classify as our failures right now.  ELA is our worst subject .  He hates writing or sequencing thoughts to put into a sentence.  Sequencing is one of his major problems with his apraxia.  He will not write past a sentence, he can not add to prompts or come up with ideas to write about.  He doesn't understand sentence structures when it comes to actually writing them and he is so hit or miss with grammar: nouns, pronouns and verbs.  He is enjoying the trips to the library, he is reading Chapter books, he is doing well with the A to Z reading program and really enjoys the RAZ kid app especially where you record your voice reading and then listen to what you read.  His comprehension of what he read is really good.  So we have doubled up on reading, writing and grammar in an effort to give Lawrence more experience and build confidence.    I am also still adjusting the curriculum in hopes of the finding the items that "clicks" with him.  

So based on my title "Our failures are also our greatest achievements"  I have experienced a very different aspect of teaching and inspiring someone to learn.  Lawrence was playing around with a learning app and he was intentionally and unintentionally getting problems wrong.  He was enjoying the wrong answers and listening to way the chosen answer was wrong.  He actually was learning from the mistakes without getting frustrated because he got it wrong.   It made me realize while seeing the smile on his face with his accomplishments with doing well with math and spelling, if his failures are presented in a way that he learns something new from them, then the failures are just as important.  We as a society try to protect our children from failures forgetting that these children had to fall several times before they were able to walk.  That failure to move forward or stand was the driving force that made them want to try harder to reach the goal of walking even though at that point they didn't realize that was the goal.  Lawrence over these last couple of weeks has taught me a lot.  He has a lot of obstacles to over come but because the pressure has been removed he is able to explore at his pace.  We are making a positive advancement forward, even though some is coming at a snails pace.