Oh, Dearest Mother, Sweetest Virgin of Altagracia, our Patroness. You are our Advocate and to you we recommend our needs. You are our Teacher and like disciples we come to learn from the example of your holy life. You are our Mother, and like children, we come to offer you all of the love of our hearts. Receive, dearest Mother, our offerings and listen attentively to our supplications. Amen.



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Subject Topic: FIAR with 9 and 10 yr. old? Post ReplyPost New Topic
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KateinIndy
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Posted: July 19 2008 at 1:35pm | IP Logged Quote KateinIndy

Hi from Indianapolis. My husband and I are just staring to homeschool our 9 and 10 year old daughters. They just finished 3rd and 4th grades at our parish parochial school. Both were adopted from Vietnam. Theresa, 9 came home at 17 months and the 10 year old Mimi came home at 4 yrs. old.

Since Steve and I are both children’s librarians the living book approach is something we really want to use. Each of the girls needs help getting up to a comfort level in different areas. They each feel insecure in a different learning area. For Mimi it is her word decoding skills and reading ability. For Theresa it is most definitely Math. Attending our parochial school since Kdg has not helped them really feel confident in the needed areas. Our short term goals are to help each feel confident in the area where they struggle. Our long term goal is of course to help each of them find joy and excitement in learning. That love of learning and excited curiosity doesn’t seem to have come with their education these first few years.

We could use some help, advice etc.-

I am a very new member who has been reading for a time but just jumped in. We have signed up with Kolbe and will be drawing on their knowledge. In order to follow some really good advice we recently received we want to take this slowly and find a way to jumpstart their love for learning. We have decided to jump in with FIAR basic, not Beyond yet, to get the girls comfortable with looking deeply at books for learning and talking about them. We love a Charlotte Mason approach and this seemed a good intro and focus.

I am posting here because this forum seemed to be a place where folks have posted about using this method. How about using this to get started even for older students? Since we are both children's librarians Steve and I both saw many books in the basic FIAR that can be used beyond the 4 to 8 age level. We would love to hear your ideas.

Thank you so much,
Kate
Mom to 5 ages 28, 25, 16, 10 and 9
now homeschooling the 2 youngest!

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CandaceC
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Posted: July 19 2008 at 8:16pm | IP Logged Quote CandaceC
Hi Kate!

We are a FIAR family and LOVE it. We have made so many wonderful memories - all built around wonderful children's books - with our kids over the last 3 years.

Did you know there is a message board for FIAR users? It is excellent. I have seen a few of these ladies posting over there. The reason I mention that board is that they all use it over there and people can answer your questions specifically about FIAR there.

www.fiveinarow.com -- and go to "message boards"

As for Charlotte Mason, this would be the best place to ask.

What I do is follow the idea of a "literature based unit study" with my children. Alot of the books we use are from FIAR, but some are from HSS - www.homeschoolshare.com - a site of hundreds of FREE unit studies that are made up much like FIAR units, written by homeschooling moms.

I also am using some of the ideas on Elizabeth Foss's Serendipity site for this fall! Fabulous!

AND...last but not least, I add in books from the Charlotte Mason lists on Ambleside Online and Simple Charlotte Mason. Things like Aesop's Fables, the D'Aulaire books, etc.



I hope this helps some!

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Candace - wife to David since 2000...mommy to Hannah (Feb. 2002), Emily (April 2003) and Caleb (March 2005)

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cathhomeschool
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Posted: July 21 2008 at 10:17am | IP Logged Quote cathhomeschool
We used FIAR volumes 1-4 through 6th grade. This year I will use it with my 1st and 2nd graders. My boys always enjoyed FIAR. I never used it as written, though. We read the books a couple of times (daily only if it was a favorite and they requested it) and used them as starting points for 3-6 week unit studies (including chapter books and extra read alouds). I got ideas for the units from the FIAR message board and homeschoolshare that Candace mentions and from searching the archives here. If you expand FIAR, you can use it with any age. We made lapbooks with some units. With others we added their finished work to a unit notebook. Some examples in the Rabbit Trails forum:

Very Last First Time

The Raft

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