Why homeschool?

It is one of the most frequently asked questions on homeschooling forums: Why do you choose to homeschool?

The answers from people are hugely varied. It is not the answers that surprise me; it is the question. Homeschooling seemed like such the obvious choice to us that it really never occurred to me to ask others.

At first, we debated public vs. private schools. We saw the main question as a better education offered by the private schools we were considering or more money for enrichment if she went to public school.

We did realize how far ahead Cesca was on the milestones. We knew very young that she was likely gifted. I don't remember exactly when homeschooling changed from being "a" choice to being "the" choice, but I do remember the day she asked me to teach her to read. It was about six weeks before her second birthday. I was getting ready for work and she asked me to read her a Dr. Seuss book. I told her I couldn't because I was busy and she should read it to herself. "Reading to herself" at this time meant looking at the pictures and often reciting the parts of the story she had memorized. She sat down to do this and after a few minutes she again asked me to read it to her. I again answered that I couldn't. She became upset and told me that she didn't want to read it her way, she wanted to "read it the right way". I asked some questions to clarify and she clearly meant that she wanted to be able to read the words herself. I knew that she had no idea of the enormity of the task, but she stayed determined and has worked hard at learning to read since then.

Reading really started tipping the balance for me. Then I decided to do a homeschool curriculum for preschool. Yikes, I really don't want to remember all the curricula I looked through. Problem is, most of them were teaching letter recognition, letter sounds, colors, shapes, numbers, and maybe some pre-writing. Except for the writing, she already knew the stuff in most K4 curricula before she turned 3.

How can I send her to a school knowing that they are not set up to meet her where she is at?

Bathtime Education

Cesca can spend upwards of two hours playing in the bath. Seriously, it is ridiculous! So I've started working on ways to incorporate some of her education right into her bath play. Here's what I've come up with so far:

1. Color mixing - those colored bath tabs are great for teaching secondary colors and some tertiary colors. 
2. Buoyancy - what floats or sinks?
3. Bath crayons. I love the one from Alex Toys!
4. Bath paints - mix shaving cream with a bit of Liquid Watercolors and you have a great, easy-to-clean bath paint!
5. Magnets - magnets work in water the same as they do on dry land. That in itself is worth learning, but you can also do almost any magnet experiment in the tub.
6. Bath letters - I will hear Cesca sounding out words (both real ones and made up ones) that she has spelled on the side of her tub
7. Pretend play - a set of three monster squirt toys and one play penguin and she can spend an hour acting out games with them!
8. Swim practice - ok, so she can't actually swim in the tub, but she can practice putting her face in and blowing bubbles!
9. Ice - floating/sinking, melting, temperature... a bin of ice provides a surprising amount of entertainment.
10. Measuring - I leave a 2 cup plastic liquid measuring cup in the bath for measuring and pouring. As a bonus, I can use it to rinse her hair :)
11. Water flow - in addition to the measuring cup, we always have at least one empty bottle so she can practice pouring from different sized spouts
12. Air pressure and vacuums - turn a cup upside down and push it straight down in the water. Watch how the water does not fill up the cup because it is full of air!
13. Air pressure and vacuums part 2 - fill a cup to the brim with water, place a smooth piece of cardboard over the top so it "seals" at the edge of the cup and make sure there are NO air bubbles inside, then turn the cup upside down while holding the cardboard in place. Slowly take away the hand holding on the cardboard and observe as the cardboard stays in place and the water does not pour out!

If anyone has other ideas, please let me know!

Bob Books with an Impatient Reader

Learning to read was definitely Cesca's idea. And she loves her Bob Books... most of the time. I've read many a blog post from people who spend a week on a Bob Book, delving into the reading rules and making whole lessons around them. That wouldn't work here. Cesca has no patience for repetition of something she has to work for. And she memorizes books after 2-3 readings, so it wouldn't take long before she was reciting the book instead of reading it.

We started Bob Books about 8 months ago. Through fits and starts, Cesca has now read Sets 1 and 2, the Kindergarten Sight Words Set, and the new Rhyming Words Set. She does really well with them, but gets frustrated easily. Set 3 reportedly takes a big leap in difficulty, so we decided not to move on quite yet.

Then the idea came to me - she surely wouldn't remember the stories she'd read once eight months ago, right? So we're starting over with Set 1. She is gaining some confidence and fluency in her reading. We will work our way back through the sets we have and then do either the First Grade Sight Words or Set 3. After that box, we will consider looping back through again. I expect that each loop will go faster than the first time through since she is certainly a stronger reader now than when she started!

Trying Again

I've come back to this blog a couple of times trying to focus on posting. I usually post a few times and then disappear as I'm uninspired. I am now trying to be more organized in educating Cesca, so I'm going to try again.

Over the last year, I've struggled to find an already-out-there preschool curriculum that is a good fit for Cesca. This quest started just before her second birthday, when she asked me to teach her to read. At that time, she knew almost all her letters but few of the letter sounds. I did try out the Letter of the Week curriculum from Confessions of a Homeschooler around Cesca's second birthday. I only did bits and pieces of the curriculum to keep things fresh, and used it to solidify Cesca's grasp on letters and letter sounds - and we flew through it in about three or four months. She had it down.

We then moved on to Teach Your Child To Read in 100 Easy Lessons, which is somewhat of a homeschool classic. She was very excited to get started and the incredibly dull layout of the book didn't deter her a bit. She had a lot of fun with the first few lessons. Then we slowed way down. We were only working in the book when she asked to, and around lesson 9 she just stopped asking. Curious, one day I asked her to humor me and we skipped all the repetition and review and concentrated only on the parts asking her to sound out words - and we flew through several lessons in one sitting. I figured out that book was not the right fit for her.

I then discovered Bob Books and we seem to have found the right fit. At least for now. She has completed Sets 1 and 2, the Rhyming Words set, and the Kindergarten Sight Words set. We are now cycling back to Set 1 and working our way back through these before moving on to let her gain some confidence and fluency.

I forget exactly when we ordered RightStart Math Level A, but it was a while ago. I had been planning on buying a big pile of math manipulatives and this curriculum came with much of what I'd been planning on buying and didn't cost much more than the manipulatives themselves added up to. I love how this program teaches, using manipulatives and games to teach. Almost everything is hands-on; there are incredibly few worksheets and since Cesca isn't writing yet we haven't had any issue ignoring the worksheets. The first several lessons start teaching children to think of the number 6-10 as "5+___" (6 is 5+1, 7 is 5+2, etc). Cesca had a hard time with this concept so we put the book aside and focused on this concept on and off for quite a while. We've gotten the book back out and are now on Lesson 21.

We found the Kumon fine motor skill books and she loves these. I bought every one of the First Steps series and we rotate through them, just a few pages a day. We've also added My First Book of Tracing into the mix. Since she is drawn to workbooks, we also added in a few workbooks from the Critical Thinking Company.

I started staying home with Cesca more several months ago and I've been trying to figure out what to do with all that time! I kept looking at curriculum and wanting something to help organize me. But everything that was aimed at her age was teaching letters, shapes, and colors. Everything aimed at her level expected that she be able to write. I tried a few things, but nothing stuck. I have finally decided to keep what is working for us and make up the rest. I'm not good at making things up on the fly, but I am great at planning!

The current plan is to continue with Bob Books, RightStart Math, and the Kumon and Critical Thinking Company workbooks. We're adding a tiny bit of Five in a Row (just a few ideas per book depending on what looks interesting), science ideas from Science in Seconds for Kids, and more planned art activities using Preschool Art by MaryAnn Kohl for inspiration. I work three days a week, so we are "schooling" on the other four.

Potato Soup

Like most children her age, Cesca loves to help in the kitchen! On occasion, her "help" is even actually helpful :)

We made potato soup and I *WISH* I had thought to take a picture of her first-ever attempt at using a potato peeler! So many of the pictures I take are because I think "oh, this is so neat" or "wow, I can't believe she just did that" or "how adorable". This is a picture I want so I could laugh really hard at it when she isn't looking! I had to work so ridiculously hard not to laugh when she proudly exclaimed that she had peeled half the potato. She had gotten frustrated and "peeled" the potato by gouging it repeatedly with the tip of the potato peeler. Half the potato had been peeled, but since at least a third of the potato was also missing, this is less useful than it sounds!

True to form, though, what I took a picture of was her doing very well at working the battery-operated pepper mill to get us a tablespoon of freshly ground pepper.

Color Mixing

Cesca has known her colors for a while, but she's still working on remembering how to mix them. What she does always remember is that when she mixes three different colors instead of just two, she somehow always gets brown. An easy experiment that we repeat with some frequency involves fizzy bath tablets in glasses of water.

We start with one primary color in each of three glasses:

From there, we choose one more primary color to add to each glass:

Until we have created all of the secondary colors:

Clifford Bubble Science

Cesca just turned 3 years old and her aunt gave her this nifty Clifford Bubble Science kit! These kits are made by The Young Scientists Club, which is best known for their Magic School Bus kits. The new Clifford sets are for the 3-5 year old crew.

In this kit there were a couple bottles of bubbles, a plastic tray, a tiny measuring cup, some straws, pipe cleaners, a rubber band, a bubble wand, a tiny funnel, and a little piece of aluminum foil. Okay, so nothing I can't normally find in my house. Most important to me was the little booklet of experiments to remind me what exactly you're supposed to do with bubbles!

Cesca loved the one where you use the aluminum foil as a boat and make it shoot across the water by touching the surface with a bit of soap! We had to dump the water for fresh and perform that one about ten times!

She also loved blowing bubbles in the water with a straw, then putting the end of the straw in a single bubble to further inflate it.

When we got to things that actually had us blowing free-floating bubbles (like with a bubble wand) the kit was a total bust. It finally occurred to me to ditch the bubble solution in the kit and use some of the Gazillion Bubbles solution that we had on hand and suddenly everything worked! Hooray for high quality bubble solution!