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nightgalaxy
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| Posted: April 21 2014 at 8:19pm | IP Logged
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Hello again,
I hope everyone had a wonderful Easter.
Well, after deciding that my rising 6th grader would go to Catholic school, I am back to the drawing board. He visited there a few weeks ago and came back telling me the foul language and sexual jokes all the 5th grade boys were making around the lunch table. So much for a spiritual haven.
Back to considering homeschooling. I have done a ton of research and I am trying to figure out how to make this good for son and me too. My dilemma is that I need to spend so much one on one with my 15 year old son who has autism and who is learning at at 3rd-5th grade level depending on subject. In order to also homeschool my rising 6th grader, I really need his day and curriculum to be structured and as independent as possible. He already has a tendency to try to be the center of attention of the house with his personality and frequent ideas and interuptions. Its going to be a real change from the quiet my teen son and I are used to, unless I keep younger son happily busy.
I am thinking of the following options and would love any feedback:
Using CLE for LA, Reading, and Math and CHC's 6th grade social studies and science. Maybe Teaching Textbooks too for math for reinforcement.
Using all CHC for everything (maybe Teaching Texbooks for math though)
Using St Thomas Aquinas Academy (STAA). I like that they offer a baseline assessment, and a lot of art emphasis and options. My son is definitely on the creative/artsy side.
He is a good student (B's and an occasional A in a rigorous public elementary school) but not a great student. He needs prompting to get his homework done and not the best in self organization. He does tend to get distracted and needs structure and routine. He also struggles some with abstract concepts. I worry a bit about whether he can handle "classical" education.
I will be enrolling him in a local homeschool outsource science lab class. (so I could technically drop the science course).
He will also do an art class with others somewhere and maybe a half day Catholic Friday fun coop. He is a social bee, loves interaction and creating and other kids really like him too. He is becoming a leader.
I would love a critique of my plans and a vote for one of them so I can get moving here. I will be so happy once I decide.
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CrunchyMom
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| Posted: April 22 2014 at 6:01am | IP Logged
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I am not famimliar with those programs, but I did want to second what Sally said about Mater Amabilis. If you would like to consider it among your options, 6th grade would be a great year to jump in, especially regarding history. 7th would be harder.
I put together notebooks with daily assignment sheets for my oldest. I include copywork sheets, math worksheets, etc... It is a good bit of work, but it means he can work completely independently except coming to me for math help and dictation.
My second is not reading independently, and temperamentally, he is a lot like you describe you rising 6th grader. I don't know if you have seen Easy Peasy Homeschool, but after having a hard time facilitating his lessons with a newborn who didn't nap, I borrowed some of her lessons and used her format to make a private blog for him. Melinda mentioned using audio books, and I pulled his lessons using recordings from librivox, though I am looking to see how I might link to files on the computer so that I can use other recordings, too, as I plan for next year. He started using the online version of Explode the Code and Xtra Math, so the blog has given him a lot of independence and me some breathing space.
If you look and Jen's lesson plans from Wildflowers and Marbles, you can see another format for organizing weekly checklists that the child can use independently.
__________________
Lindsay
Five Boys(6/04) (6/06) (9/08)(3/11),(7/13), and 1 girl (5/16)
My Symphony
[URL=http://mysymphonygarden.blogspot.com/]Lost in the Cosmos[/UR
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SallyT
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| Posted: April 23 2014 at 8:09am | IP Logged
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I'm in the middle of writing a year's worth of daily checklists for my rising 6th grader, who needs more structure and accountability than my current loose weekly block schedule provides. I'm actually doing this for all three of mine still at home: my plan is to give each child a set of printed plans with a place to check off each task as it's done.
Both my 5th and 6th graders have their day divided into two basic "blocks": table work and reading. They can read first or do table work first . . . I don't care how they approach their day, so long as everything gets checked off. A typical day for the 6th grader is looking like this:
__Copywork (I choose the passage)
__Math lesson (I specify which lesson, what pages, etc; this will most likely be done with me)
__Grammar lesson ( 3x/week -- I think we're going to go with KISS grammar through middle school)
__Visual Latin lesson (again, I'm specifying exactly what lesson, what to do in that lesson)
Then he has a list of 5-6 readings daily. They're not super-long, though they are meaty. I've pulled my reading lists from Mater Amabilis and Ambleside Online (we're starting their "read the whole bible in 6 years" program, though I have to figure out how to get the whole *Catholic* Bible in there, since AO doesn't include the "apocrypha!").
I'm planning 10-week terms, not 12, to give us some catch-up time and general leeway in our year.
One thing to consider as you plan, though, is that kids who have been in school may -- well, *do,* I think -- need some time to "deschool." This was something I didn't want to believe when we pulled a 9-year-old out of school, many moons ago, but it was true. Our first year of homeschooling wound up being far less "schooly" and structured than I had visualized, simply because that child needed time to transition from the world of school to the world of home. For them it is a huge transition and often very disorienting, even when school has not been a good experience.
So what I was thinking, as I was describing my own plans, was that these are plans for a child who has never been to school in his life and is totally acclimated to things like doing daily copywork and having a big list of readings. It's what he's been doing forever, so that the reasonable next step is to ramp up his ability to follow a syllabus more or less independently.
This would *not* have been reasonable next step for my first homeschooled child, coming off four years of school. My goals for her, that first year, very quickly became more about re-learning how to be together all the time than about anything academic. We went to the library a lot, so that she always had something good to read; we had some good read-alouds going; we went places together; we cooked a lot; I think we did absolutely no math for an entire semester, though my memory is hazy now . . . Basically we did what seemed kind of scarily to me like missing an entire year of school to lie around and read and do art and stuff.
And that child is now a junior in college. She actually graduated and went away at 17, so in the long run "missing" that year didn't make much difference. This is not to give you a formula for what *you* should do next year, but bear in mind that in the beginning, less may truly be more, and that it may stand you in good stead to have goals that are not so much academic as geared toward learning to learn and be in a mode totally different from that of school. Some time spent doing what may look to you like nothing (having all day to work on his own art project, for example) may very well be a wise investment in later learning. I can't tell you how or why that formula works, but in my experience, it does.
Outside classes are a lot of fun, though. My oldest only began to like being homeschooled after doing a zoo class in the winter of her first year. Making new friends and learning to enjoy not being in the world of traditional school are excellent first-year goals.
On another note, friends of ours have used STAA for years and really, really like how they work with you to customize a program for your child. I think I would wait until at least second semester of next year to invest in anything like a full program, even if it is that highly customized, just to see where you are with things. But I did want to say that I know families who have had very good experiences with that particular program.
I hope all these ruminations are helpful. I have been through the experience of pulling an older-elementary child out of school, and I also appreciate how hard it is to juggle the needs of a high-schooler with those of a younger child. And although you've been homeschooling for a while now, I just want to encourage you not to worry too much about "losing" a year with your younger son while you figure things out. My own first year was fraught with worry, and I'm not immune to it even now, but in the long run things have kind of come out in the wash . . .
Sally
eta: I'm typing this on my son's old computer, which has big black blotches all over the screen, which are making it hard both to see what I'm writing and to think straight! I'll be glad when my computer comes back from the store with a new battery . . .
Anyway, on rereading your posts (and remembering that your older son has special needs and isn't, in many ways, a "typical" high-schooler),what I'm thinking is that you may find yourself in something of a paradigm shift with both boys. Your 6th grader is going to need you as much as your 15-year-old does, and there's no good way around that. It just may not be that realistic to expect a kid that age, especially with the temperament you describe, to come off the experience of school, with its social stimuli and structured learning environment, and settle down readily to self-directed independent learning at home, while you're focused on his brother. I don't *know* this -- I don't know you or your children, obviously! -- but I do suspect that this model might be difficult to implement. It may actually create *more* disruption, rather than less.
Are there ways that you could combine the two boys for some of your school time? If the 15-year-old is working at a grade level not that far off from his brother's, can they share a series of read-alouds for history, for example? Or do some hands-on science together? I don't know how well your older son would cope with having his brother in the mix directly, but it seems to me that if one of your goals was to foster a better relationship between the two boys (not that I think it's bad now, or anything, but they do have to get used to being in the house together all day, as they haven't been before), that could perhaps direct some of your planning, so that instead of thinking how to keep your younger son busy while you work with the older, your mode becomes oriented towards helping them to be together, and using some learning experiences to help foster that. Does that make sense? It just seems to me that one of the great gifts of homeschooling is sibling friendship, though even without any special needs that's often fraught and tempestuous in my house! But it does seem to me that *possibly* this could be a helpful focus for your planning?
It may be that your older son has, in some ways, a very different and "deschooling"-oriented year as well, as you all acclimate to being at home together. Again, I'm not really proposing a formula or a plan,or telling you that you have to do things this certain way -- just suggesting that being open to the reality that having your younger son home *will* change the entire chemistry of your homeschool may actually open the door to a fruitful and exciting vision for the challenges of the coming year.
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setonmom
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| Posted: April 23 2014 at 2:54pm | IP Logged
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One thing I have found effective when I need a younger child to be "on his own": while I do something else is to first give one on one attention to that child. That way they are less likely to interrupt me 400 times trying to get that attention. So my suggestion would be to work with the 6th grader one on one for while before starting to work with the teenager.
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4Real Forums : Living Learning
Topic: Curriculum for 6th grader?
