I am thinking of doing some ‘filler’ or ‘bridge’ work this summer vacation with my kids by homeschooling.
I need links and, if this were possible, a planning calendar that is printable.
I don’t want to turn every minute of the day into a scheduled thing, but maybe an hour a day devoted to a specific subject.
Like:
Mondays: Animals & nature
Tuesday: history & art
etc…
I need help getting things sorted out.
Thanks.
Shirley! Where is everybody? I know there are some homeschoolers around here - maybe they’re busy getting ready for finals?
Anyway - I know you have at least one who’s a young youngster, so maybe this would be useful (it’s not a calendar, just a bunch of ideas for preK & K, plus more links)
http://www.besthomeschooling.org/articles/lillian_jones_ps_kdgtn.html
Good luck!
Shirl…
I work with a home-schooler. What ages are you talking about? (I’ll understand if you don’t wanna answer that, but it would help to know when I ask him).
Our local museum of science and history has a summer kids’ program. When I was a kid, my mother sent me there a couple of years, and I really enjoyed it. Perhaps your local museum has a similar program, or has some items that you could use as resources.
Son is 7 in first grade and reading at late second grade levels. Future Doper, to be sure… We need to get his math up to snuff. He kicks ass in Geography ( beating out 10 year olds in informal US map tests…woot!) and he has nice handwriting.
Daughter is 5.4 years old. She knows her letters & numbers but refuses to say them or write them. She writes her name over and over and over again, so there isn’t a problem, per se, but a lack of trying. I don’t want to push her, but I see so much of myself in her ( all the good parts…the bad parts are from her father:) ) I’m sure so many other parents out there can identify with that. She is very artsy and lives for imaginative play. Shy around strangers, a human blowhorn at home. She can organize like nobody’s business.
Both are social butterflies and both have taken it upon themselves to find their friends phone numbers and make the call to set up play dates.
You may want to check out exploratorium and chase down some of the great links there.
We homeschool, but my oldest child is only 5 so I don’t know if I can be of any help to you. However, for informal summer schooling I would recommend following your passions and, more importantly, the passions of your kids. You may want to frame your goals weekly rather than daily, allowing for the kind of sustained immersion into a topic that schooled children so rarely experience. Try setting a time in the morning (20-40 minutes) when they can do what we think of as traditional school work --vocab/reading/spelling/grammar/math facts-- then let them follow their interests around the rest of the curriculum.
You may want to start each week with a library trip during which your children are expected to explore a topic and gather some resources about it for independent study. Depending on your style, you can allow full freedom of choice, give a menu of acceptable options, or reserve veto powers. Again, since this is summer school, I’d recommend full freedom…you never know where meaningful educational experiences are going to happen, even embedded in a topic we may deem entirely un-educational.
From there, it’s up to you and your kids how studies progress and what processes you’ll use for demonstrating learning. If you really want structure within an unstructured curriculum, you can give your kids a guided study map. For example:
Monday: Choose a period in history/prehistory to research. Gather resources
Tuesday: Science, Math & Technology – report (oral, written, project) something you’ve learned about the science, math and technology of the period or explain how present science and technology are helping us understand this period better.
Wednesday: Art, Music, Literature
Thursday: Society, Economics, government or Systems
Friday: choice day. Expand on something that sparked your interest during the week.
From my experience as a public school teacher and a homeschooling parent the best advice I could give you is: Don’t fret if what you are doing doesn’t in any way resemble ‘school’. You have the opportunity to let them experience learning as it coexists with everyday life and that can be a powerful education in and of itself.
I didn’t see your response giving the ages of your kids (complete posting can take hours in this house)
Your daughter may like the Bob Books
They’re a great way to get kids reading since you only need to know a few consonant and short vowel sounds to finish the first book. We’ve used these in conjuction with Phonics Pathways to get our 5 year-old started.
I would also recommend a subscription to one or more of Carus Publishing Cricket magazines. Since we’ve started getting Click for our budding naturalist, all units of study have been sparked by something exciting he’s found in his magazine. They have a variety of quality publications for all age groups and interest categories.
Hope this helps!
Oh, I gotta go make breakfast, but I’ll try to post later–I’ve got some links and stuff. Though farmwoman’s post is probably better advice than I would have thought of anyway.
Here is a page my mother created. It has lots of resources.
There are tons of free forms and stuff out there–homeschooling families will frequently make up their own stuff and then put it online for anyone else to use. Here are a few–
This woman appears to have produced every possible form and schedule:Donna Young
ChartJungle has a few too–and a bunch of annoying blinky ads.
This page pools resources from several families.
You didn’t say if your daughter is going into K or 1st. Like Farmwoman, we’ve had a good experience with Phonics Pathways–check your library to see if they have it so you can test it out first. I believe they’ve just come out with a new edition. It’s an excellent resource, but filled with hokey inspirational aphorisms. --I assume you’re already reading a lot of stories together, which is the main thing anyway–even if she isn’t quite ready to sit down and work at it, her brain is being prepared for it all by your reading.
For writing with my daughter, who is almost 5 and going into K, I just write a couple of sentences on that big-lined paper for her to copy (today was “The sun is shining. The sky is blue and the trees are green.” Yesterday it was about her love for karate.). I usually get her to help me make them up, but we’ve also summarized stories or written “The quick brown fox…”
For math, I think I might do a lot of manipulative stuff. Your library will have a whole section of kid books on math (look in 510), like G is for googol or Janice van Cleave’s very good series of experiments and games for math and science, and you can read one every week and play with the concepts. Playing with money is fun (put price tags on things and have a store, flip coins and graph heads v. tails, count by 5s and 10s), or those fun pattern blocks or tangrams or dice or dominoes, playing ‘war’ with cards, acting out story problems with toy cars or whatever–all that hands-on stuff is great for getting a real sense of numbers and geometry into your head.
I like bFarmwoman**'s ideas above a lot. Other books you might want to check out are Rebecca Rupp’s Home learning year by year, which has detailed descriptions for every grade level and good books to teach from (book-books mostly, not textbooks), and you might like to peek at The well-trained mind, which has lots of good suggestions too, but is very in-depth and meant for an entire education, so you don’t have to read it all. www.welltrainedmind.com has some good articles and a very active and helpful, though woefully inconvenient, message board.
Um, so, I’ll quite rambling now. Have fun!
Right now I am at the library ( we practically live here.) so I will definately be utilizing that as a major source of information. ( I loves my library so much!)
Thanks for the links. I will check on them later on when I have more time.
Dopers rock.
Hey, Shirley. My daughter’s in her third year of homeschooling through a charter program with the local school system; you may want to call the district and see if yours has such a program.
One of the things her counsellor told me is that these programs are very flexible, which is why they’re becoming so popular. If your child just is NOT into whatever you have scheduled, you can switch it around a little bit to keep her interest.
Discovery School has some fun and useful tools. You can also get an agenda from your local school supply store that will help you plan your week as well as all kinds of tools to make this fun for both of you.
I think I found a guideline/program to work with that agrees with my secular standards: The Story of the World. Ancient times. by susan wise bauer
It focuses on teaching the classics to the kids: history, lit and language. I’ve been trying to find it in our library system for quite some time, but finally broke down and bought the first book. It seems really good.
Anyone else familiar with this series?
Yep, I own all three volumes (4th and final is coming out next month). That Well-trained mind book and website I recommended above is by the same person/team. They’re pretty good; they’re meant to be a backbone for wider study or used as storybooks alone. The first one is simpler than the others, and meant to be read aloud to ~1st graders–each goes up a grade but can be used for any age. There are activity books available as well, with ideas for all kinds of things to do, but they aren’t necessary IMO and the artwork isn’t exactly stunning. You can just as well get supplementary picture books from the library and make up your own crafts.
I’ve found the Wise/Bauer team to be intelligent and objective, and wonderfully free of insisting that people do things their way. They do focus more on the Western world than anything else, but their stuff is still more international than your education was (if it was anything like mine/the usual).
They’re the biggest proponents of classical education around right now. For more reading on that topic from them, click here and be sure to follow the link at the bottom to Dorothy Sayers’ essay that started the whole classical-education thing. (This is all Dorothy Sayers’ fault, which is very funny to me.)