We are having a great year! Adventures has been a lot of fun. We are in a good rhythm with Sam. Charlotte is adding to the mix well.
One of my goals this year was to get the kids working together side by side during school. Obviously, we have been successful!
This last quarter I was still searching for an English program that works for Sam. We had tried PLL with limited success and some frustration. LLATL with limited success and some frustration.
After a little deliberating I decided to go back and retry FLL and guess what....success. He is a very happy camper using FLL. He has memorized list of helping verbs and can easily pick out the helping verbs in a sentence. I'm not entirely sold that this is a necessary skill for a 8yo but after dealing with the frustrations of other programs, I am completely happy that he is frustration free! So we will stick with FLL.
So---finally----after several years we have finally found curricula that seems to be doing the trick for Sam! Yeah for us!
For anyone out there that follows this blog the winners are:
Math U See
All About Spelling
First Language Lessons
Writing with Ease
My Father's World
Whew. I sure was stubborn about using some of these products. Ultimately, you use what works and get over yourself! The general gameplan now for Sam is to work through these individual product's sequence over the next few years.
So now what do we do? Well, we might start Latin next year so I get to do a little research about Latin curriculum. It's exciting that there is more out there than Latina Christina.
I also have this 5yo girl who is coming up in the school ranks and we get to do the whole process over again. buwahahhaha! Actually, no we aren't. I'll just stick with the MUS/AAS/WWE/FLL/MFW line up with her since I already own the products and just start folding her into the rhythm of our day.
Currently for Charlotte her day goes something like this....
---- work through the phonics portion of MFW K.
---- do a calendar activity and a MUS page.
---- do a page in Handwriting without Tears.
----hang out in the school room and participate as able with Sam's studies.
This has worked pretty well. She typically does the Bible portion, state study or history reading, science and listens to the read aloud of Adventures. When Sam is working on LA or Math she works at the little table doing crafts or painting. Sometimes she gets bored or makes too much noise and I send her into another room to have a tea party with her stuff animals. As the year has progressed, she has gradually spent more time participating and less time in the other room with her toys. Her Kindegarten year is a little different than Sam's even though we still do many of the same types of activities. We still go outdoors, do nature study and have a lot of free time for imaginative play. All in all, it has been a good year for her.
She doesn't have Sam's speech motor problem so we don't have that particular issue to work around. She is ACTIVE. I have put the big exercise ball to use with her when she is especially active. This usually gets us a few more minutes of attention and quiet if she is bouncing or rolling around on the ball.
She enjoys the phonics portion of MFW K. There is a lot of cutting and glueing which seems to be her specialty. We did have to slow down the phonics for her because she was getting frustrated when the lessons started getting longer. She is just now 5 1/2 years old so this isn't a great concern. Day 4 seemed to be especially long and we had to break that day's lesson into 2 days. So, here we are with a 5 1/2 year old on lesson 15 of MFW K and wondering where do we want to be when she is 6.
I already know that I plan on using the AAS/FLL/WWE combo that works well for Sam. It seems logical to just start her out with these products this next year. So I only need a phonics program.
Do I spend the $50 on MFW 1 student pages when I only need a phonics program? hmmmm.
So I break out MFW 1 and take a good look at it. I didn't teach Sam to read with MFW 1, we used it to re-inforce phonics. MFW 1 worked great for this purpose. So I took a good hard look at it, thinking about Charlotte. I came to the conclusion that there was no possible way I could make this work for her next year. That's probably too harsh....I could make it work if I was willing to spend a great deal of time tweaking and adjusting it. Do I really want to spend $50 knowing I'm going to really have to tweak it significantly and omit large portions of it?
Bottom line, I don't feel confident that I can teach my active child to read with the phonics of MFW 1. I do think that I can use it to re-inforce phonics but not as a stand alone program.
So the question becomes....what do I use? and do I go ahead and make the switch now?
