bearing blog

A lot of what we do, we have figured out as we went along, trying ideas and tweaking them here and there.

Take phonics practice.  For a long time, we all assumed that it really only works well to teach phonics one-on-one.  Of course, we never had any two kids reading at exactly the same level; and reading instruction, done right, requires a parent or teacher to pay close attention to a child's steps and mis-steps, providing feedback exactly as needed.   So for a long time we did reading practice separately — each child with his own parent.

This worked okay for a while, but at one point we got very tired of splitting everyone up all the time.  We were seeking a way to teach, not side-by-side, but together.  And so we tried some different ways of putting the learning readers together. Even though they were not at exactly the same level, and even though we knew that they were each responding very differently to reading instruction, all of them were at the point of learning which sounds were spelled by which graphemes (letter combinations), and all of them could blend words made of the graphemes they already knew. 

We tried sitting them around the same table, each with his or her own sheet of reading.  Then they took turns each reading one line of the sheet.  That worked a little better for keeping everyone feeling together, but the wait between turns was just too long; while one child was painfully sounding out the words and letter combinations on the sheet, the others would start to squirm, and by the time we were back to the first child again, he'd forgotten where he was (if he hadn't managed to escape to the back yard when we weren't looking).

We tried alternating reading with a related language activity, like copywork.  Each of the children would receive a sheet of copywork for handwriting practice.  Then, one would read under our watchful eyes while the others would copy, more or less independently.  When the first child finished reading, she would start on her copywork, and the second child would interrupt his copywork to begin working through his reading sheet with one of us.  And so on.  This went okay, except that we would really rather the children spent more time reading than they did on copywork.  And there would always be sleeve-tugging on the part of the copiers, with one question or another, and so it was hard to pay close attention to the reader.  Still, it was an improvement.

What to do?

Well, understand that each of the children got some form of direct reading instruction on the other days of the week, when they weren't all together.  So what we were doing on co-schooling days didn't have to stand alone as the only reading instruction they got.  It only has to complement it.  So… enter simple word and sentence reading drills.

A few years ago, when I was teaching my first child to read, I compiled a lot of "common word" lists.  Word lists along the line of this: 

• UI spells the sound /oo/: bruise, cruise, fruit, juice, nuisance, pursuit, suit
• UE spells the sound /oo/:  blue, clue, cruel, due, glue, pursue, statue, sue, tissue, true, Tuesday, virtue
• OU spells the sound /oo/: bouquet, cougar, coupon, group, mousse, routine, soup, wound, you, youth…

and so on.  I wasn't starting from scratch, mind you.  I was building on a huge body of work that had already been done by a friend and her husband who are writing a comprehensive reading program.  Anyway, I had already made these word lists in the process of teaching my first child to read, and I had saved them.  Mostly I taught my kids to read one word at a time, drawing from the lists for combinations I had already taught them.

But when Hannah got a hold of them, she looked at the word lists and they turned into sentences, some little stories even. 

The miner climbs into the icy cave.

She cannot make a single error with her ice axe.

I don't know why you are frightened when my wildcat only bites a little.

So she started writing out sentences that  the children could read, many of them very fun sentences.  She wrote them, mostly, on lap-sized dry erase boards.  She has more boards to write on than children to teach.  So one way she does it is this:  each child gets a board with a different sentence on it.  They all read the boards, and don't pay much attention to each other.  Hannah listens and helps them as necessary.  Then when they're all done, hopefully at approximately the same time, they trade boards.   She might give them 6 to 10 sentences in a session.

She mixes it up a bit with single-word drill and practice with flashcards.  Recently she tried something that seemed to work pretty well:  holding up a single long sentence and having the kids take turns reading one word at a time; after the last word is read, the next child in line has to re-read the whole sentence.  That seemed to work great, because they all had to pay attention to the reading so as not to lose their place. 

This group of emergent readers is really almost done with needing intensive phonics drill, and will soon graduate to reading a variety of texts for "reading practice."   We think we'll start phasing out reading and phasing in Latin in the same time slot.  Meanwhile, there's a younger cohort coming up right behind them who, we hope, will reap the benefit of our experience,

View from my cell phone yesterday afternoon:

I was working with the three oldest children on Latin; they are doing a worksheet I wrote up to introduce them to the Latin-English dictionary.  (In the foreground you can see the books we worked from for U. S. History earlier.  In the background:  my kitchen.)

Meanwhile, Hannah had the three emergent readers, who are all getting close to graduating from phonics to more text-based reading instruction.  They're all between six and eight.

I know you're going to want to know more about how she teaches phonics to three children at once, and I promise I'll write about that next.  I can do it too by following her methods, but she's really good at it.  (Short answer:  Several lap-sized dry erase boards, and a word list prepared in advance.  I can take credit for the word list at least.)

Meanwhile, what were the 5yo and 3yo doing?

Having screen time:

Hey, we're not perfect.

One of the realities of having this many children learning in the house at once has been the judicious use of screen time.   I like for screen time during the school day to be at least arguably part of learning time.  Sometimes I allow educational candy like the games and videos on pbskids.org or National Geographic Kids, and sometimes Hannah allows the fitness-oriented games on her Nintendo Wii.  Most often it's DVDs though — I keep two separate binders of DVDs for kids, one of which is marked "Educational."  Now, mind you, I am of the opinion that everything — everything — teaches, but some things teach more of what I want to teach than others.  I try to pull from that binder during the school day.  And there is always the library.  In the photo above, the girls are watching a DVD of a theater production of "Cinderella."

The preschoolers' "together curriculum" is the least-planned.   When we really got started co-schooling, we decided not to worry about them too much.  We are together twice a week, and a homeschooled preschooler — even a homeschooled kindergartener — gets plenty of schooling on a M-W-F schedule.  So it's perfectly fine to allow them lots and lots of free play on Tuesdays and Thursdays.  And play they do:  they are always weaving in and out of our school days in their princess dresses or their rain boots, toting dollies or toy swords as the mood strikes them, having tea parties and playing house.

Still, the little ones need two things from us.  They need us to connect with them, to "collect" them, several times during the day.  And they need to do work that they know is important and real. 

We strike the balance between over-programming them and under-connecting with them by "semi-planning" their work.  At the end of last school year, Hannah and I sat down together and went through the big catalogue and picked out several workbooks, curricula, and manipulatives that would be a healthy part of a good pre-K/K curriculum for the five-year-old, and that the three-year-old could also work with.  Of course, we also each have a library of good read-alouds and our own collections of learning tools that we've curated over the years.

On any given school day together, we've got three or four different lessons ready that we can give to the little girls on short notice, whenever they come up and announce that they want to "do school."  We also try to call them to the table for school at least once every school day together, and we try to gather them up for story time sometime at the beginning of the day.  Too, they enjoy joining the older kids at their lessons once in a while; it's good to have extra coloring pages or maps printed for those occasions.  (I'm not sure we could do this if we didn't each own a photocopier.)  Any of us moms can run a lesson for the girls with little extra preparation, because we always have several things ready to go.

What kinds of lessons and activities work really well for this format?

• Identical workbooks, one for each child, kept as a set.  Tear out the same page from each workbook and hand them out.  We started with the Kumon workbooks.   We choose the level based on what the five-year-old ought to be doing, figuring that the three-year-old can "tag along."
• Charlotte-Mason-style art appreciation.  Show the children an art print and simply talk about it.  It's surprising the direction the discussion can go.  Afterward, they can try to copy the picture if they want.  More ideas at Ambleside Online.
• If you're patient for the mess, some play dough is always nice.  
• Shape stencils are also good.  You can use them as if they were Montessori-style "metal insets."
• Quick "exploring" activities with the older kids' math manipulatives are fun.  Pattern blocks, linking cubes, that sort of thing.
• Helping prepare the lunch and snacks, and set the table, is good for this age group.
• We have also bought a preschool music theory curriculum that takes five or ten minutes a lesson.
• Bible stories are a nice lesson to do together; even if your families aren't of the same religious denomination (and we are not), it is not usually hard to find a children's Bible you are both happy with.  We like this one for the smallest kids — it has little questions for narration built right in.  Another book we like to use is a good illustrated Aesop, since the stories are short and classic.  
• Look for more ideas in books about Montessori lessons.  Here's one I have.

The ideal kinds of lesson for this format have this in common:  they are relatively ready-to-go out of the box, so to speak; they lend themselves well to improvisation; they don't take a lot of time; they require minimal extra supplies that can be quickly grabbed; and they are easy to clean up.    All one of us has to do when she finds herself needing to teach the little girls NOW is grab the supplies, which we try to have ready to go, clear a space on a table and go to it.  A few minutes later the little ones are trotting off to something else, pleased as punch that they have "done school" just like the big kids.