Bennett and Ellie Grace: Homeschool

I’ve talked about it here and there, but I don’t really have a post dedicated to how Ellie handled homeschool last year and I want a record of how it went for our purpose (and her curiosity as she gets older).

I L.O.V.E teaching. I am thankful that my international business/law journey was derailed and I landed in education by total accident.

I was like (most) other public school educators out there at the end of my career…FED up with the amount of testing and wasted time in needless meetings and observations. Those things took away from the number one reason we were educators…which is TO TEACH.

When the twins were born and Bennett was about to come home we knew he would have special needs and I really think it was then that we decided homeschool would work out best for us. Then came the CF diagnosis for Ellie and myself and it just solidified our choice.

I am not going to lie. There are days that I think sending Ellie off to public school would be easier, but I know in my heart that it would not be better (for our family).

I know that when Ellie gets sick it’s a typical 10 days of treatment and either Cullen or myself will end up with it too. Let’s say Ellie got sick 4 times out of the school year ~ that is an estimated 40 days (20 if she just missed 5 days for treatment, dr appt’s and recoup time which is still a ton of school to miss) she would miss from instruction. If I can limit her exposure to all the illness that travels around (especially in a school setting) I am not only keeping her health a priority I am also keeping her education and instructional time a priority.

2011-2012 was our first year to use a purchased curriculum. Ellie was only a pre-k classification, but I decided to begin a kinder curriculum b/c I thought she had a good enough foundation from our previous year of studies.

I chose the Saxon program for phonics and math and I was not disappointed at all.

I student taught with the Saxon program and I liked it back then. I don’t think one should solely rely on a scripted curriculum, so I used my education background and supplemented with some other resources. (although I do feel that saxon phonics is a great “complete” phonics program that really helped Ellie have a successful kinder year)

At the end of the year Ellie can:

- tell me how many syllables are in a given word

-isolate/id the initial sound/letter of a word and state the rime

-mastered rhyming words

-knows that a sentence is a group of words separated by spaces and with capitalization and punctuation (although she still doesn’t not use punctuation when she is creating her own “sentences”)

-knows every vowel(long and short) and consonant and their sounds

-can differentiate b/w upper and lower case letters and uses them appropriately (usually!!)

-can spell most words by relying on her knowledge of basic phonics

-can code unknown words to establish pronunciation

-can id a number of site words on the kinder list of words to know (although, I am still searching for a better list of words…)

-is reading! I am going to test her this coming week to id her reading level, but a beginning reader is what I would classify her as.

I know I am missing a ton of what she can do, but this is the basic (and in my eyes some of the most important) skills she needed for me to consider our “kinder” year a successful one.

Math is another story and a whole other post on its own!

So, while she is supposed to just be entering kinder this August we are actually ahead. (which makes me feel like we have a little buffer is we hit a bump in the road)

Choosing curriculum is STRESSFUL for me!! If she is successful it’s all good, but if for some reason she is not the blame falls totally on me! I have spent the last month studying curriculums, reading homeschool blogs and in August I will be attending the state homeschool conference.

This is my rough outline for what we will be using:

phonics/spelling: Saxon (and I am also going to buy All about spelling and All about Reading)

Math: Saxon (the rest of last year’s lessons) and Math U See primer level (Ellie knows a lot of the skills at the beginning of the primer level of math u see and saxon. I don’t feel like Saxon moves fast enough, but I don’t think MUS was complete enough on its own…so, a combo of both is what we are trying. Fingers crossed it doesn’t make me crazy!!)

History/Geography: Road trip USA (THIS is an awesome blog for homeschoolers…it has been one of my go to sites for info)

Foreign Language: speekee tv (Ellie loves to speak spanish!)

PE: We are joining SATCH which is a Christian homeschool PE group…she will be playing volleyball once/week for 1.5 hours per session) in addition to gym and dance

Art and bible are still up in the air. I think I will enroll her in the art studio by our house again in the fall…and I am still trying to narrow down a bible program we will use to start each day.