Despite echoing some of the frustration I have with the Daddio, this dream wasn't about him. It was about choosing to focus in homeschooling.
I recently have been considering locking up the hours of eight to three, every weekday, as exclusively for schooly business. Parents of children in traditional settings do it, of course. It would mean skipping activities planned during the day, grocery shopping when the stores are packed, competing with other parents for afternoon dentist appointments. Is it worth it?
As if to emphasize to my brain that I do it with more focus than other homeschoolers, I have been receiving a lot of "what about grammar, vocab, spelling?" messages from colleagues looking over my school plans for the next year. I don't formally teach those things. The kids pick them up, between writing and Latin.
I have this mission. I need to get it done. There's a time limit to it. Perhaps tunnel vision would suit us for a year or eleven.
I would likely make it 8 to 1 instead of 8 to 3. You know, homeschool is SO much more efficient than brick and mortar school. And a lot of lit reading can take place at bedtime or meal time.
ReplyDeleteI have a schedule posted on our white board like this: Start at 8:30, Recess at 10 (15 min), Lunch at 11:30, Start at 12:30, Recess at 1:45 (15 min), Finish at 3. This is to enforce to the students that the teacher leaves at 3, and to encourage them that prolonged schoolwork will be interrupted by breaks. It's rare for them to not be finished before the second recess though. Also, they rarely make it all the way to 11:30 before "starving".
Are you still using WP's LA? We're using SWB's WWS & WWE, and I find it takes as much time as I schedule and threatens to burst the boundaries. Perhaps I am doing something wrong. Does your oldest write well?
ReplyDeleteAha, you are using BJU. When did you switch and why? How's it going? How long does it take? How much does Joshua write?
ReplyDelete"Well"... that's such a subjective term. We use BJU English for writing and grammar. We switched for fourth grade because WP's LA wasn't giving Joshua a strong enough foundation for creative writing. He had numerous unfinished writing projects because they'd be assigned, but there wasn't a lot of scripted follow through. I needed the discipline of a lesson for revising, a lesson for editing, and a lesson for publishing. BJU provides that.
ReplyDeleteI started doing dictation (Dictation Day By Day by Kate Wagenen, free on books.google.com) for Joshua in fourth grade as well, instead of spelling, because spelling workbooks seemed like busywork. That has helped in the writing arena, too.
He is currently producing a half page notebooking "report" for history once a week. He did a comparison and contrast essay for BJU this week, which consisted of four paragraphs of 5-10 sentences. Is that "well"??? for a fifth grader? Time spent on BJU English varies wildly depending on what we are doing--- anywhere from 10 minutes for an easy grammar exercise to 45 minutes if he's drafting an essay.
As I said on the WTM forum, I'm really starting to wonder about comprehension. Your description of WWE sounds fabulous, so I expect I will peruse that a bit more.
Certain terms like simile, metaphor, personification, point of view, fact and opinion: these are the concepts that are giving me pause at the moment. I'd also like to see his summarization skills improve, so I really do need to check into WWE more thoroughly.