Clay the Rambling Homeschooling Dad

Updates on Our Homeschooling Adventure!!!

Ok - we're about a week into Our New Homeschooling Adventure! We've sought different ways to learn stuff, especially writing. Because that's been a weak point with my oldest, I've found a strategy through an excellent book: Homeschooling Your Child Step-by-Step (click here to see it on Amazon) by Lauramaery Gold and Joan M. Zielinski. I checked it out from my local library and am seriously considering dropping $2 for it used from Amazon. There is an amazing wealth of information in that book, including many different strategies for teaching your kids. I'm still going through the book - rather slowly - and have decided to try a couple of writing-based learning strategies. I like the Concept Mapping and Learning through Writing. Right now, I'm using the two strategies together to work on writing.

Concept mapping is simply a brainstorming session. On a paper with no lines, write the central idea in the center of the paper. Now write as many words as you can think of that relate to the central idea around it. Don't worry about grouping, just write the words. Afterward, begin grouping the words by circling the words with different colors. This way you know which words are related. Now, sit down and begin to put them all together.

Learning through Writing - at least the way we're doing it right now - is taking the mapped concepts and putting them in order. I have to keep reminding her that she's writing to someone who has no idea what we're talking about. That's the only hard part.

OK - so we're working on new strategies. That means we're abandoning the traditional 'curriculum-based' education. It simply was not meeting our needs. She breezed through a year's curriculum too quickly. That means it was not challenging enough. Rather than wade through all the available curricula, we've decided to go with one of the other 99 strategies mentioned in the book. Yeah, traditional curriculum-based education was not the only way to go! Woohoo!

Since I'm a science nut, we're studying a lot of science. She's writing about crystals, air pressure (inflating and deflating balloons just by heating the air in a bottle!) and her new pet spider. It was so cool watching that spider eat the first cricket we dropped in its cage! But I think the second cricket is giving us more than we bargained for - I think it was laying eggs in the dirt in the spider's cage... That's all I need - a house full of crickets!

That's my oldest. She's seven and doing nearly all her work at a third-grade level. All her friends are in second-grade. That is a bit of a pressure problem, but we've told her just not to advertise it. She can still go to the same Sunday School classes as all of her friends.

My youngest is a bit harder to entertain. She's got to do everything her way. I'm still searching for the best way to hold her attention. But we're working our way through the alphabet and numbers. She's 3 years old, so I'm not expecting calculus just yet. I just enjoy reading to her.

More to come. My digital camera hasn't gotten any decent pictures of our spider or the battle between the spider and the cricket. I'm still working on how I'll get that done.

posted by ClayMan @ 9:18 PM