Day 172

Well, it is Day 172.... Clearly I've missed a few posts.  Sorry, but the demands of homeschooling and being a mom and wife trump any obligation to post.
I have started to plan for next year. Moriah loved homeschooling at home. I think the stress of maintaining social interactions and her fight/flight reactions were overwhelming and she was glad to avoid them by schooling at home.

We moved - from one county to another during homeschool... Not a good idea. Listing the home, selling it, moving into a hotel for over 3 weeks, moving into a real fixer-upper, surviving the remodel of the basement while living upstairs, learning while the upstairs was being gutted and rebuilt, having a mentally ill big sister come home to live with us... All a really bad idea. I would counsel anyone who is planning on moving to not homeschool - especially if they buy a HUD fixer-upper...

I have started to plan/set up for next year. This next year - 5th grade - is also going to be digital... 5th grade BJU Homesat. For the past few days I have been punching out the Math manipulatives, laminating them and cutting them out. I did that for last year, and it is remarkable how many of the manipulatives got lost (the coins for example) and so I am redoing the manipulatives for his year.... Lots and lots of cutting. But the manipulatives are crucial!

Moriah made a lot of progress in math this last year. She mastered all of her tables. She has her measurements down. She still needs to work on multiplying 3 digit by 2 digit numbers. She really struggled with decimals (first time always is) and fractions, although she has made progress. This year when she stalled on a topic, failed the test, whatever, we also watched and did the problems from the Kahn Academy online to fill in gaps. That really helped her, and we will continue this practice this next year.

5th Grade BJU Math has lots of quizzes (2 per unit) to catch missing information earlier (perhaps they realized that some kids need earlier intervention.) I am excited about that because covering a topic for 2 weeks and then having Moriah come up to the test for that unit and flunk the test even though she was doing alright on the day to day work is rough. I had Moriah doing 2 worksheet pages a day (one from the 2nd edition and one from the 3rd edition) but Moriah still struggled with fractions and decimals. I feel like we will hammer these home in 5th grade, though.

Setting up for 5th grade, I had to pull all the tests and quizzes out of the parent guide packet (along with the answer keys.) I do not need the answer keys to daily work - it is easy enough work for me to grade... and besides that, I feel like it is easier to use a real teacher's edition rather than copies of work text pages with the answers. If I had one suggestion, it would be not to collate the quizzes and tests in the parent guide, but keep them separate. It was drudgery to dig each and every test out!

Well, I need to get back to cutting out manipulatives.  This week I plan to knock out the math and English, viewing the videos, setting up activities, etc.

Homesat Day Four

Day Four,
Wow! What a day.  We started the day out with Bible - and it went fairly well... Moriah happily read her assignment: Psalm 118:1-3. She and I did the worksheet that was for yesterday. We also sang the first stanza again. We moved from their to math - Moriah's choice... and we watched the video and stopped it for her to work each of the word problems.  She did great until her father walked in the room - then she suddenly "forgot" how to create subtraction word problems, started pouting, and I had to send her to her room to cool off.  When she came back, her father was back upstairs at work, and the drama was over. She finished her math sheet and one extra - She new to have her Captain's log when the video started.  We did extra work on place value and expanded form sine she seemed weak.  Moriah consistently missed the 11's addition/subtraction family.  But we are making progress, slowly.
Then we moved to Lesson 4 Reading video. That is where I discovered that Moriah uses "I don't understand/know/can't find/etc." to get the answers from me (or the video teacher.) When I confronted her with this, she told me, "Why should I do the work if someone else knows the answers?"  Sad - we will be working on this attitude this year, I am positive.
Moriah refused to do handwriting - said she would do 2 lessons tomorrow. I do want her to start owning her education, so I allowed this, but I will HAVE to hold her feet to the fire tomorrow if we are going to complete the year.
Finally, we moved on to Spelling - we did Day 3 work and the pretest - she missed the capitalization rule for books of the Bible as well as for Bible, and she accused me of making up that rule. I reminded her that tomorrow she would need to remember this rule, or she would be marked wrong... We opted not to watch the video since we couldn't get it out of my computer... I have since recovered the DVD from my drive - a feat in of itself!
Moriah begged to play the game for Social Studies - we never got to that.  Oh well - another day, another dollar (lol.)

Day Two with BJU

So, Today was day two and it took a different turn. Because we had started slowly yesterday, we had a lot  to finish: Reading, Spelling, Bible, Science and History - today, we started the reading, spelling, and completed Bible, and we also did one of the review sheets from the newer math series. So we started with completing the Bible - we reviewed the words, omnipotent, omniscience, and omnipresent, then reviewed the story of Moses' encounter with the burning bush, and then worked on the first stanza of "I Sing he Mighty Power of God"... Moriah happily read the verses she was to read and seemed to enjoy Bible.


Then we did the Reading - Moriah did not like reading out loud, but Moriah clearly has comprehension questions (her reasoning seems faulty) and so for a while we are going to be reading out loud. made it clear that she does not like reading, but she did do extra silent reading for the reading unit challenge, but she feels that she will never win. Since I didn't have the Mom's Minutes, we couldn't make the bookmark or set up the reading challenge.

Moriah disliked the Spelling 4 DVDs - she thought the jester was "stupid" (her words.) But she made a spelling journal and happily di the first pretest. Moriah was unaware that she needed to capitalize books of the Bible, and she couldn't spell Leviticus - but hey, at her age I couldn't either. Moriah wanted to know if she was going to have to take tests every day... hum....

She completed the extra practice for math and I discovered that she did not know about Addition Families, i.e., 5,6,and 11 make four equations: 5+6=11, 6+5=11, 11-5=6, and 11-6=5. I explained it, but I do not necessarily think that Moriah fully understood what I explained.  At this point, Moriah was totally fed up with homeschool.

We also walked 1.75 miles today. If we walk 30 minutes every day, then I don't see how I would need to add any other P.E.

We took a lunch break and I read "Indian Jamboree" out of Little House on the Prairie and we decided that she was done - mostly because Tom's Trust was blowing up my email and my phone. Tonight Moriah told her father that she didn't want to watch more videos tomorrow.  (Tough nuts, Princess - you wanted to homeschool.) But I am going to start praying earnestly that we can turn around that attitude.

First Half of the First Day

Today was the first day of homeschooling Moriah. It isn't as if I haven't homeschooled before - I've homeschooled children from 1993 until 2012. Because of everything that we have gone through, I chose to put Moriah in public school... until now.

And so, today was the first day with Moriah.  It is hard to convince a 4th grader who has been in school for 6 years, that you are now the educational authority in her life, especially a strong-willed child. So, I am using BJU's digital school for her Math, Spelling, Handwriting, and Reading. I am teaching her Bible, History, Science and Language Arts. Another day I will write about these, but I thought it would be good to chronicle my use of DVDs to teach my daughter.

So we started with Bible.  The BJU 4th grade Bible is solid, and I wanted to have the privilege of teaching Moriah what I consider essentials to her faith.  Today we talked about 3 Omni's: Omnipotent, Omnipresent, and Omniscient.  We started the beginnings of Catechism, and focused on how God sees and hears the cries of His people.  We will finish Lesson One tomorrow, but I felt like I was introducing the subject Bible, as well as teaching it today, and I didn't want to overwhelm her.

We went on to do the Math 4 Videos. Moriah loved shouting out the addition drills! She smiled and laughed and told me that she liked it! I was so happy to see her excited about math, and she was more than willing to write things in her "Ship's Log" as well as starting her Math Journal (yes they sound like the same thing, but they are not.)

We finished with the Handwriting Video. Moriah did NOT like the puppets, and she complained bitterly about the words to America The Beautiful were too much.  She has a terrible grip on the pencil and this is going to take every single day to get her to use the correct one.

I stopped after that. I had stayed up way too late waiting for my daughter Jacintha last night, and I was getting a terrible headache.  After I rested for a couple of hours, we sketched our home from memory (the front of he home,) and I read a chapter from Little House on the Prairie. All in all it was a good day. I've set up for tomorrow when we will finish the first day...