To Approach The Approach

Sorry for the absence and that's all I have to say about that.

It is another homeschool year to begin.  I feel like an old hat at starting and still a inexperienced fool at finishing.  Sadly, of the 3 years we have begun homeschooling, we have finished in a public institution.  Mostly from the results of self doubt, frustration, and lack of support.  Always while preparing or what I like to call overloading my senses with way too much information, I come across a mission or purpose statement.

Why do this? To put it in writing, because I want to.  I have wanted to and knew I would since the day I was planning my wedding.  This is what my intention was, goal, the envision of my future, prodigy, etc.   I AM that mom.  At the end of each year, I would feel defeated, why am I not.  

I know why we stopped, but the frustrating part is within the public institution even within 2 weeks, there was no sense of satisfaction with their product.  It was just that at least I am not the one failing them, I will allow the institute to fail them, just as it failed me. Yes, they would read better and add better, but the missing part that was not being provided was thinking.

Where was I going wrong? I feel as though I have touched on every type of learning style and approach.  I have tried a few.  I have done workboxes twice now.  I have tried to keep it simple, kept it fun, and have stuck them on the computer.  I have child centered myself to a tizzy.  The reality is I have 4 children in a small house.  I must live and eat and let them play in this space that we school.  The least bit of chaos and disorder sends the world we know of into a tizzy of fret and despair. I have uncluttered and sorted and organized, to the point of enough.  For us this enough is just barely enough for us and way too much for the house.   What is a mom to do!

I can say that, as always, I excitedly started my kids back to school right after I picked them up from their last day.  Well, maybe the following Monday.  Mentally, I knew they needed to be deprogrammed, but in practice I just couldn't do it. Let's say, forethought and planning was at a maximum, Just enough!

I must be eclectic. As summer progressed, I would boast, oh, we are eclectic. The reality was we would do a collection of stuff on Monday and then maybe again 2 more times a week.  Combing the pins, I just knew if I could make a workbox system, everything would really flow together.  Cleverly, I used the milk crates and vinyl folders and cute labels.  Instead of doing school a few times a week, we now accomplished it just on Mondays.  I must not be doing something right!!!!!!!!

As I mentally torture myself through this whole administration aspect and planning portion of homeschooling, I actually got the blessing to overhear a conversation on several topics of reading and writing. The lasting statement I heard from another mom with older elementary children was  I wish I would have read this book before I ever would have taken them out of school. What is this book, I have to know! Invading myself into the conversation, I learned for the first time about Susan Wise Bauer and the well educated mind.  I was given just a name and I went home in a mission.  It was fine, I had plenty of time, I wasn't schooling as it was.

I got home and found http://www.welltrainedmind.com/ and was amazed with the information.  Now, we are expecting #5 at the first of the year and I am just tired on top of it all.  So I printed up a few articles, got a highlighter, and crawled into bed. Immediately, it was like my mind had been on a 2 year celery diet and I was just been given a steak dinner. I had to chew it, but it was remarkable.  It spoke to me, this is what I have been searching for.  I found it.

I have purpose! I homeschool my children through thick and thin, because I want to educate them to think and learn on their own.  I want them to be prepared for any university to continue to explore and discover, without the hurtles of being ill prepared for general education.  I refuse to allow my children to have the substandard education that was available to me and is still available to them.


Focus, now, focus. At first, let just say, the book is complete from birth to senior year on equipping  you with the knowledge of resources and very heavy.  As I read, I was jotting every bit of information down. After 3 days of reading, collecting, and organizing, I realized!  The method is actually very simple. My brain can stay focus.  Focused, because reading material is in lined with history.  Full pictures are being painted, not partial.  Best of all, the book provides listings of references, reading list, etc. to help you narrow your choices that will maintain the method.

By default, I started planning the year's schedule, the weekly layout, all the way to the daily expectation, a first!  For the first time ever, we will begin school at home the Monday after Labor day.  until then, I am preparing them to use their brain in a new way, so we a cutting TV down to 1 hour a week and we are filling them with audio books.  I want their minds to feed off language, not images.  I want them to create their own images.  These next weeks, will give us plenty of time to train in being responsible around the house.

I love you for visiting and commenting.  I look forward to sharing our adventures as always.
~trish

Phonic Word Wall Book

I bought Systematic Sequential Phonics about 2 years ago, but I found my then Pre-K, but almost 5 year old was not ready.  So it got shelved. 

As I am organizing our school supplies, I came across it and realized it would fit nicely into our first grade work.  I think it could work good for even kindergarten, but my boy is just not there yet.

So this book does a nice job telling mom what to do!  Oh, I like that.  So it has reproducible pages in the back, so you can make your own alphabet tiles and a word building worksheet.

Things I like:

• Lessons are grouped by 5 with a focus for each week, systematically introducing letters a few at a time.
• It only takes about 10-15 minutes to do the lesson on a one on one basis.
• There is no prep work for the lesson besides photocopy of the word building worksheets (optional) and the prep work of making the letter tiles.
• I do not have to review the lesson before I teach it, I read it for the first time as do the lesson.
• Tract the words they learn.

I did find the book on Amazon for about $13-18.  I can tell you that it makes me sick, I bought mine a couple years ago for $26, yikes!  I have found the local teacher stores have a tendency to be more money.

So having just a little space, I have been trying to figure out how to make a home school word wall.  So with some work I did this.

I am using the 4 by 6 index cards.  I used some good card stock for the covers.  I printed out the letter tabs and the cover onto card stock and got my mommy tools out to do the job!

 To get my home made tabs strong, I folded them in half, added  some good glue and a clothespin.

Finally, with the use of a good hole punch and some ribbon to bind it. Of course, you could just get a binder and do it that way.  See thanks to pinterest, I was inspired by!

To make it easy for you, click here for the wood wall tabs.
Have a great day teaching!
~trish

Phonemes versus phonics

Alright, before this week I had no idea what a phoneme was.  Do you?  So there is this little known secret to the outside world that reading is made up of to very important functions that must work together, phonemes and phonics.  In homeschooling mommy terms, your ears must know what it is hearing in order for your mouth to read it. Hmm, could this have been my own personal delay in my comprehension, we could only wonder.

Sorry, I diverged. So a little catch up.  Yes, I am still stumbling my way through homeschooling my 1st and K kids ,while managing the destruction from a 1 and 3 year old.  I guess I am eclectic by nature in my educating method. Right up until last Monday night, I have felt very overwhelmed.  I then realized, I really need a scope and sequence.  I can teach my kids anything, I know it, I just need to know what and when.  In desperation, I called a friend who was a school teacher and said HELP!  I am so overwhelmed and when I read the state standards, I am humbly overwhelmed that I do not speak that language.

I was directed to several different county links that have provided a Plain English scope and sequence per grade and peace began to wash over me. So over the past week, I have re-organized, because some of my frustration was a geography thing in my home.  I have let go and began to move forth.  Patience, the details of my reorganizations will be shared at another time.

So back to my point, within the Language Arts discipline for both K and 1st is a section on Phonemic Awareness and Phonics.  Hmm, awareness and they miss spelled phonics (ha,ha higher education). I was a bit on the thought of, well isn’t that all r-e-a-d-i-n-g, but apparently not.  You see reading is comprised of understanding what you hear and then being able to reproduce it from written form.  As much as this can make sense, it is a lot like flour and water make glue, but add an egg and you got cake.  Actually, that is very appropriate.

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From: http://reading.uoregon.edu/big_ideas/pa/pa_what.php

Phonemic Awareness (PA) is:

1. the ability to hear and manipulate the sounds in spoken words and the understanding that spoken words and syllables are made up of sequences of speech sounds (Yopp, 1992; see References).
2. essential to learning to read in an alphabetic writing system, because letters represent sounds or phonemes. Without phonemic awareness, phonics makes little sense.
3. fundamental to mapping speech to print. If a child cannot hear that "man" and "moon" begin with the same sound or cannot blend the sounds /rrrrrruuuuuunnnnn/ into the word "run", he or she may have great difficulty connecting sounds with their written symbols or blending sounds to make a word.
4. essential to learning to read in an alphabetic writing system.
5. a strong predictor of children who experience early reading success.

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An important distinction:

• Phonemic awareness is NOT phonics.
• Phonemic awareness is AUDITORY and does not involve words in print.

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And this is what they have to say about teaching it!

Phonemic Awareness is a critical component of reading instruction but not an entire reading program. It absolutely needs to be taught, but should only be 10-15 minutes per day of your reading instruction.

Teachers increase effectiveness when the manipulation of letters is added to phonemic awareness tasks. Phonemic awareness is an auditory skill, but once children start to become familiar with the concept, teachers can introduce letter tiles or squares and manipulate them to form sounds and words.

Phonemic awareness needs to be taught explicitly. The instructional program must show children what they are expected to do. Teachers must model skills they want children to perform before the children are asked to demonstrate the skill.

If you focus on just a few types of phonemic awareness, you get better results. There are a lot of skills in phonemic awareness, but research has found that blending and segmentation are the 2 critical skills that must be taught. Instruction must focus on blending and segmenting words at the phoneme, or sound level. This is an auditory task.

Research has found that you get better results when teaching phonemic awareness to small groups of children rather than an entire class

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As you look further into Oregon’s Big Idea Lessons, they illustrate the best methods.  In Florida, there is a great website that has lots of PDFs to print about all aspects of Phonemics, but my internet keeps timing out, maybe you will have better luck. www.fcrr.org

There are tons of information that can help you practice these skills, see http://www.readingresource.net/phonemicawareness.html

And as wikipedia will tell us Phonics is then taking letters to form the Phonemics, so we can read, see.

phon·ics/ˈfäniks/

Noun:

A method of teaching people to read by correlating sounds with letters or groups of letters in an alphabetic writing system.

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So where do we begin, well as a mom, make it fun. So we are going to play a game.  I am going to go to use a list of words, mostly cvc words. (cvc is consonant vowel consonant, like cow, mom, man, cat, dog)

With my list, I am going to say the word to my 1st grader and have her isolate the first, middle and final one syllable sound. To my K I am going to say the word the word 2 times and sometimes change one sound at the beginning, end or middle.  He will tell me same or not.

So it would go like this.

ME: Miss first grader, Please tell me the beginning sound of dog?

1ST: dog begins with /dddd/

ME: what is the middle sound for dog?

1ST: /ooooo/

ME: And the final sound?

1ST: /gggggg/

ME: great job!  Here is a skittle.

ME: Mr. Kindergartener, are these two words the same or different, dog/log?

K: Different.

ME: Which word is different from these 3: dog/dog/log?

K: log

ME Great job, have a skittles!

So that is what I am doing this week, let’s see how it goes.  It seems such a simple task, but none the less, an important one.  Doing it together, I plan to only do it for about 10-15 minutes.  And then we move on.

So did you know about phonemic awareness?

~Trish