Until the school year starts this fall, I will break these posts up into several sections. The way I see it, I don’t currently have enough information about how well my kids perform in the different areas to start assigning the work we will be performing each day. For now I will post mostly to a section on what I am doing academically with the kids to prepare them for next year (Progress) and to a section what I am doing write now to gather information to prepare the plan (Planning). I will also throw in a little about what is going on in daily life (Life).
Progress
We have Saxon Math 2 and 3. I looked through Saxon Math 2 first and saw that Christian was beyond that. I looked at Saxon Math 3 and believe that the main things he is missing there is multiplication and division. I think he is at the stage where he does not need to do everything in that curricula, but I need to pick and chose what he does very carefully so that we can fill in the holes that he is missing. For the first time, we sat down and went through a whole lesson (59 of Saxon Math 3) and he did great.
Both of us enjoyed it very much because we got to sit together and work on something that was challenging to him. He struggled a little bit on the multiplication part so I am going to move back to the beginning and find those lessons that emphasize multiplication with the idea that I can skip some stuff that he already has. That being said, I think it will be quite good in laying a foundation for future work if we go through most of it.
For math, I am going to leave Kelly working through here normal government school program. Toward the end of the year, I will give her the Saxon Middle Grades Placement Test and then place her where she belongs as I mentioned in an earlier post.
The Well Trained Mind book I am reading now calls for a lot of memorization. Kelly, Christian, and I have been memorizing things together for a long time now. This year, Kelly is working on memorizing Matthew 5 and Christian is memorizing Psalms 8 and 9 from the King James Version of the bible. We like to read from the New International Version, but believe the KJV and the Reina Valera version (Spanish) are a lot prettier for memorization. The way we have done it in the past is by me reading them the verse on which we are working after which they repeat it back to me seven time. Then they repeat all the verses they have learned together a couple of times at the end.
The Well Trained Mind recommends that the student record whatever they are memorizing and then repeat the verses in unison with the recording until they have it down. I think what I am going to do is set up a system that combines the two approaches. I will start making the children responsible for their own memorization using a tape recorder, then every night before they go to bed, I will have them repeat all that they have learned to me a couple of times. Tonight, we will start doing the first recording.
Planning
I think I have a pretty good teaching plan now for mathematics because I have settled on Saxon Math and they have everything well structured for the whole year. The next thing I will try to tackle is history. The basic premise for the study of history is that the students start from the beginning. I had mentioned earlier that, as I foundation from which to work, we would use The Story of the World Volume 1. The Well Trained Mind recommends The Usborne Book of World History for students in the grammar stage and Kingfisher Illustrated History of the World for students in the logic stage. Unfortunately, Kingfisher Illustrated History of the World is out of print and costs over $200.00 from many used book stores. After some investigation, I found that The Kingfisher History Encyclopedia has replaced Kingfisher Illustrated History of the World and will work just fine. I am sure I will get all of those books.
The next thing I will investigate is the supporting books Kelly and Christian will need to to go along with the above mentioned survey books. In addition, we are planning to by a set of The World Book Encyclopedia.