On the move

I did it again - I revamped the school but this time I did exactly what I wanted.  I didn't try to work around our online school - I did it completely different.  I am using our online school as the guide but I am going to do what I want with the actual lessons.  Now, I didn't do this all on my own.  I am using a lot of ideas from Liese (her blog is The Colorado Adventure on the right side over there).  Remember also that I taught for 10 years so I know how to teach, I was just trying to do what the school wanted me to do.  My friend doesn't and I don't want to.  I don't know why it took me so long to get here and it will take a lot of patience with Cairn to get going exactly the way I want do school but in the end Cairn will love this and hopefully, I still stop hearing "I hate school."

So what did I do.  I threw out all the books first.  Then we went to the library on Sunday with a list of the topics they were going to be studying this week and we got books.  At night I did some quick research about websites, videos, projects to learn the objectives that the girls need to learn.  So for example, Cairn's first units in Science is Weather and she is very excited about the unit.  We went through the first lesson on the computer (before I revamped) and she didn't learn/remember anything and it was simple stuff - what are the 4 kinds of precipitation?  I knew the lessons weren't working for her because she didn't like school but this really proved to me that I wasn't connecting her education to the way she learns because even when she was excited about a topic she didn't learn.

Today, Cairn started working on a lapbook (pictures coming when there is something in it) about weather (science).  She also has some books on measuring (math), different types of maps (history), pronouns (language skills) and poetry (composition).  I have a game about pronouns and nouns to reinforce what she learned.  We are going to create another lapbook for maps and she is writing several poems this week.  She has art and Spanish still.  She is doing Rosetta Stone on the computer for Spanish and I will come up with some games and activities to help her with vocabulary.  Art I am still working on.

Skylar worked on some literature and we learned the parts of a magazine.  Cairn was able to teach her a lot because she just did a short unit on magazines.  Cairn thought it was fun to teach Skylar and Skylar liked that Cairn was teaching her something.  For phonics, we played a beginning sound game - everyone.  Andrew did a great job playing even though I helped him a lot.  He liked imitating the sounds with me.  Next time I should have the letters for him to make the connection when he hears the sound but for today it was fine.  We quickly worked through the unit on shapes, color and size for math.  I wasn't going through each lesson to get her in the routine of school but with the change I decided to just use it as a review and move forward.   All of us did an art lesson after dinner from Skylar's lesson list.  It was about lines.  Cairn got a review, Skylar and Andrew learned a lot and it was good practice for Andrew to draw simple lines.  He felt very successful.

All in all it was a pretty good day.  I still have a lot of negativity from Cairn but I will be patient.  When had a long time at bedtime about the good parts of today.  She liked playing the games and she liked teaching the littles.  I use to make it that games couldn't be played until the lesson was finished but now games are the lesson.  I hope this works because it was a lot more fun today and I can see so many possibilities for so many other lessons.  Another example, there is Prairie Preschool at the Plains Conservation Center - this month they are doing water on the prairie.  Guess what?  There are several objectives in Cairn's science unit about grasslands that would meet this lesson.  Yes, the class is geared toward younger kids but she already knows that she has a book about grasslands that will help her.  She made that connection - she will get some hands on time and connection time about grasslands.

Tomorrow brings another day and hopefully more improvement.