This unformatted report is for LEA, should they knock on our door out of the blue , or anyone else who is interested in HE / is HEing a year 1 / First Grade child with or without younger sibling.
Seeing that the new academic year is about to begin again, in less than a month, if face, I think I'd better add a summary of last academic Year with Oliver, which has been delightful, and filled us both with confidence and reassurance. Him as a student, a big boy who can write stuff down and can read things around him, more or less, allowing him to know for himself when the activity farm closes , for example, so I can't sneakily drag him and his brother out of earlier, or how to measure himself for ride stability, so I can just wait in a distance and keep an eye on his brother , the list continues...
Last academic year we kept to 5 days schedule, and kept to general school holiday dates, and if we were away on holidays , we'd made up in hours during the holidays. That schedule worked for us really well, because it's quite nice to be out and about quite a lot in places like soft plays or parks when there are loads of other kids about. Many homeschoolers will probably disagree, but it works for us from social perspective and also sits comfortably with our structured approach, 'now we all study some at home some at school and now we are all on Holidays , hooray'
Unless we have an activity that runs better in the morning ( which we often do) , we do the most of our studying by 2pm in small chunks, leaving just a bit for the eve, and by then I mean anything between 5-8 pm as we are mostly out between 2-6pm at homeschool activities , playdates or just on our own day outs. This schedule suits us very well, so far we have not had any uncomfortable conversations about home schooling. Occasionally, in a way of a small talk, Oliver has been asked to which school he was going, to which he said that his school was 'at home' on which I stepped in to elaborate slightly, and that was that. Positive reaction all around, unless there were undertones which I managed to totally overlook! :)
Thought the year, we were doing 3 core subjects, Reading, Writing and Starting later in a year, Maths. Here and there we also added short 'SCIENCE lessons'.
SCIENCE
Our 'Science' sessions, to be clear, were neither science nor lessons , as such, but more like a play vaguely based on science, from soda and vinegar 'explosions' on the top of our scientific scale to just spooning the milk bottle tops out of water. It can be argued , that anything we do, including just eyeballing each other is also science, so no, it was nothing learned, but managed to be , I was hoping it would be, the easier, lighthearted side of studying. Jo-Jo has always been heavily involved in our 'science' , to make up for all those things he has not been much involved in, so much of the 'science' had to do with him. We did most of our science in one block of 2 months and then somehow fell out of the routine. I guess, I dismissed it as less important, but that was wrong , of course and I will try to stick to it this year.
READING
The fist book we tried was Well trained mind's reading manual. Because the plan is to follow 'Well trained Mind's learning philosophy whenever possible , this was our first choice, but it didn't work. I could tell the whole structure didn't make any sense to Oliver , and so we dropped pretty much on a spot. Instead , I purchased the whole set of 'SONGBIRDS' phonics , encouraged by the fact that the similar pack, just a different make , worked very well for our eldest ( now 14, semi-happily but doing well on a whole , High School, through own choice 'well, at home school lessons all I'll be doing each lesson , is studying' Well. yeah, that's the idea.)
Anyway, Oliver loved the Songbirds. We did one book a week. What really helped was writing out all unfamiliar words onto a cards and going over them / some of them if too many, before each read. Having done it with and without , I think it really helps, and it's not hard to do, just need to be consisted. In fact, 'not hard to do just need to be consistent and not expect too much to soon' is a gold rule of first time reading, in my opinion. Oliver got on with his reading very well with occasional set backs and now is very proud of himself and tries to read everything.
Sometimes Oliver would be quite happy to seat down and read ( so much so that he'd even ask to 'read' extra, at random times ) and sometimes I had to tell him that he has to 'finish his studying' in order to do so and so). As it stands now, Oliver has last two 2 books left in his PHONICS and is really looking forward to moving on to 'GROWN UP' books. With this, unfortunately, I don't see any mega love for books about him. His brother for example, loves bed night stories, and puts loads of effort in choosing them , listens carefully, has his favourites and books he 'doesn't get'. Not so with Oliver. While he loves reading tings around him , which seems to give him this feeling that he's in charge and can make his own judgements and decisions, books per say, at least fiction, is sadly 'take it or leave it for him.' I hope it will change, but my intuition is that it won't. (😢)
WRITING
In order to eventually make his writing quicker and smoother , I have decided to insist on the old-fashioned cursive writing. Another option was to leave it for later, but it seemed to me that there was no mad rush to start writing and re-learing sometimes is as tricky as learning. I'm glad I stuck to it, because Oliver is now writing using this method, and it's getting smoother. I think he would prefer to use non-cursive , as he still sneaks in non-cursive letters here and there, but at this point, there cursive is as easy for him as non-cursive.
Deciding to leave off WTM ( Well Trained Mind (method)) 'till next year, we have purchased some brightly coloured wipe writing books which had things like letter 'O' ( and the rest ) looking like a show diva getting involved in some kind of a story , apart from being written and it really distracted Oliver, he didn't seem to know what it was that he was meant to be learning and failed to 'buy' the whole jolliness of it. I was with him on that one, and half way through bought another wipe it, with smaller letters, and no cartoons. Basically the wipe it equivalent of a notepad with first couple of letters with the direction hinted. Guess what , the book with jolly 'O' , the letters were NOT in cursive, but in 'wipe it' NO2 they were! So we, kind of, started all over again, and Oliver really got on with it. So WTM - like style worked for us here. Oliver 'outgrew' the hugeness of the letters and the 'wipe it''s ink kept getting on his arms as well as erasing what he'd just written, so we just moved on to the writing pad , double lines, 1.5 lines ( making with ruler ourselves) and soon after just single ones.
And that was that. We did 10 lines of single letters per day, then 10 lines of joined letter combos, then 10 lines of repeated words. It was as easy as that. Just as with reading, sometimes O did it happily and sometimes not so happily, but he certainly enjoyed his progress and was always very keen to show it off to his dad etc. Just a s with reading it became a routine, which got much easier in the second half of the year, he was very happy to be writing his own Xmas cards ( well, copying what I wrote from his narration, onto a card which draw lines in) Now, for his summer birthday parties, he comes up with stuff to write partially himself, writes more and doesn't need the lines, in fact insists on NOT having the lines.
To make things more interesting, I introduced the concept of STORY or a DICTATION ( one small page). Both , especially story, O found really hard, and always tried to avoid, and yet was by far the most proud of ( not only dad but , also nan and grandad heard of the story experience, every week) The whole story thing was much too early for him , though, as whichever way, I ended up heavily hinging and helping throughout, so we started doing SPELLING. Spelling was a winner. I'd compile a list of 20 most used words, 10 easy ( to , from , he ) and 10 more difficult ( home, ball, sleep ) and preferably something he'd covered in reading , and we did the spellings until he was comfortable with most of them , usually 2 weeks. We'd do two extremely basic stories or dictations using those words. It really worded for us. . Spelling and stories replaced writing lines, which seemed logical.
MATHS
It was always a toss between Reading and Maths, what O enjoyed more/ found easier and so, chose to do when there was a choice involved. I'd say, that throughout the year, the two the difficulties he had with the two inter changed and fluctuated, although the Reading came up the winner at the end , as because once Oliver got the initial thing of joining the sounds it pretty much went up without any sticky points whereas in Maths there were few tings that for Oliver were harder. The main and the last one we did in the year, was moving on to adding and subtracting single digits from 2 digit numbers past 20, at the end of the academic year, O has made a fantastic progress at it but would still get confused here and there. We'll see what happens when we start again. I can't say I'm surprised though , now I'm starting to receive studying materials for this year's curriculum , where O is on course to follow Grade 1 ( the curriculum we'll be following to the largest extent of all that's available is American, hence the 'grading' instead of 'year-ing', see next post) So, on a whole O is in Grade 1 but for Maths, I'd say, if he was to quickly catch up with with the quite easy elements that we didn't cover, he'd be more grade 2, not sure how that happened, but we'll stick to Grade 1 and miss bits he knows already. In terms of what O knows, he does - ,+ up to 20 very fluently , and quite well between 10s 34-3 , 55+ 2, the is touch and go with things like 28+ 5 and 93-5, and understands concept of 12-12 , 12-0 , 100 + 0 but can sometimes get confused.. The same goes for 25-5, 35+5, he gets it but not 100% and tries to stick to counting up in his head or on his fingers, where I try to insist and demo to him , how much easier it would be to just count up in 'chunky number ' that is '5'. No problem with 10s, counting back and forth to 100. He's quite good at ( and keen on) calculating in his head. We have not started on adding number one under another , this will be our very next step.
SOCIAL
We tried all local HE groups over this year, and unfortunately none of them seem to have stuck. In many of them kids were older , the mix of ages doest works brilliantly for us, and both boys just tend to play with one another. I tried going to the same group with evener mix of kids for ages and ages, but no joy. Neither of the boys have any objections to going there, but seeing that if not there we'd do something else, there's always the Q, why bother. I'd say it's the age, but it is not. This is what happened in church groups we used to go, some were a hit and some were a miss , and there , you had a more reasonable mix of kids. So yes, no chance of bullying and seeing that you kid is happy and balanced is precious, but this is, definitely my least favourite part of homeschooling so far.
On a plus side, very much because of home schooling, he had a chance to catch up wth his existing close friends and get particularly close to with them. 2 main friends are going to the mainstream school this year, being 6 months younger than Oliver, so this should be interesting, we happened to be friends wth their parents , in equal measure, and, additionally , are very interested in all boys at least listening to regular Russian, so we intend to keep socialise regularly , whatever the school situation. This one is great news.
Having tried several , Oliver found one HE activity , that he absolutely loves, which is gymnastics. He also made a close friend there, who he sees regularly, which is absolutely fantastic with the added bonus of the little boy and his mum also being RUSSIAN speakers.
Finally, after losing touch for a little while, Oliver started seeing another good friend of his, a friend he's made in a pre-school, which is also great news.
There are also multiple home-school events , about monthly, Kidzania, Legoland, Zoo and so on, it's not heavy continuity or much of a friendship making ground, though the potential is there , of course, but it offers fantastic opportunity of frequent activities, way days, from HE or just E point of view, an opportunity for my boys to see and experience different things, learn and get excited.
We have Wisley Gardens and Lookout discover centre memberships as well as are frequent visitors of science museum.
So, all in all Oliver has a very busy social / beyond school life at the moment and I hope it's not going to change with the new academic year, though , still , I'm really hoping to find a free-flow social group, which he and his brother could have looked forward to, though at the moment I'm feeling it's out of my hands a bit , which makes me want to live in America ( that's the only thing that does, lol, that's HE is more commonplace.
RUSSIAN language.
I've decided to throw in a white towel and scrap it, at least in lesson form. It doesn't work and wastes time, I'm not consistent enough and there is no environment where English is just isn't available. I keep on speaking Russian to both of them and they now seem to largely understand, so we'll keep on, but I will no longer be trying to flog this dead horse of formally teaching him or getting him to talk back to me in Russian. I think it's doable , even at this stage, but I'm not sure , that deep down I fee it's a important as some other things to stick it out.
So. What's with JO?
I was wondering how all this thing with 'younger sibling' was going to pan out and , in all honesty, it worked out to be much easier than I initially thought. Jo ended up watching more TV than anticipated but all in all he stayed out and enjoyed 'his own space' it seemed. That's just how he is, or at least how he was, this year past. Science apart, though I decided that there's no need to teach him anything formally at the gentle age of 2, he's picked up quite a few numbers along the way and seems to know all these things like very common letters and all colours without anyone teaching him, whereas Oliver I actually taught that, so he's picking stuff up. On the other hand, Jo doest seem to have relate to his own age readily and clearly much prefers to socialise with his brother and his friends , which is , due to some difference in cognition in nothing else, can get a bit one-sided ( 'no if mummy is the one looking for you, hiding next to her seat won't work, dear, I'll count to 20 instead , go hide somewhere else) Jo seems to be much more sociable and easy going than Oliver, too, if much less analytical and full of sharp observations) So, after the initial plan not to bother putting him in pre-school, we decided to do it after all. See how he gets on, give him an opportunity to make his own friends , to see some other kids totally without his brother, see how he likes the whole thing. Unless there is a really good reason for it, we have no plans to put either boys in mainstream school but pre-school might give us ( and him ) an indication of weather we should make space for his own, not with Oliver , activities.
And with this, I'm going to finish this long - winded report, as. think I'd covered all the nuances of our last year's experience as HE family. ( Yeah, family as a whole , it fits perfectly with us, our work, our plans and our life outlook, this HE) In my next entry, I'm going to outline the details of our adopted WTM curriculum for next year, and initial , subject to use and review , learning Resources.
