The hardest part has definitely been schooling with a baby who has turned into a toddler all of a sudden! A toddler who loves to be the center of attention, of course, and does not appreciate us working at the table without her. She is very cute as you can see... Especially in her pigtails...
But man, is she a distraction. The older girls are very easily distracted by her cuteness, her loudness, her naughtiness, etc. as am I and it has become my biggest challenge. I recently read of another wise homeschooling mom who said that she needed to stop viewing her babies/toddlers as a detriment to their homeschool but instead include them as much as possible. As I read it, I was thinking, "yeah right...not possible." But I have come to see that she is right and I need to include J as best I know how. Anyways, ask me at the end of the year how that went ... Not now.
In other news, we have made a few changes to our curriculum and I think it is really going to help. Ambleside Online (our Charlotte Mason curriculum) has us read a certain book (Parables of Nature-- I'm sure it's a great book!!!) for Louisa's year but it was becoming laborious and neither of us enjoyed reading it or looked forward to muddling through it. I'm sure it's a great read for many, just not for us. So, I substituted it with this book:
Among the Farmyard People, by Clara D. Pierson. It is so much better and already I love it. It is part of a series so I am looking forward to getting more in the series, too.
The changes for Kailyn were cutting out Plutarch this term because there just wasn't time for me to go over it in a thoughtful, quiet (key word here is quiet) sitting and we were already five weeks behind from when we cut it out for December/Christmas school.
Another thing... Charlotte Mason was a huge proponent of careful study and dictation. Dictation is the method of studying a selected passage (usually a paragraph) for punctuation and spelling, and then copying it down (after hearing it) in neat copy work fashion. Her ideals are reasonable, I do believe, in terms of dictation, but it just simply doesn't work for this daughter of mine. She can study a passage for 10 minutes and still spell incorrectly. She usually gets the punctuation correct but I think she is more of a hands on learner and seeing words spelled correctly or incorrectly does nothing for her. She is a very advanced reader and a very quick reader and sees words all the time, so it is more of an attention issue.
So we are back to spelling lists but done in a kinesthetic way. I am having her jump rope and spell out loud her spelling words. I am also having her tell me how many syllables a word has, and have her think of spelling in syllables. Another idea I came across is having her spell out the word with Scrabble tiles. I have also considered having her form the words in play dough and if she would do this and stay on task, I would be all for it but she is also an artist and will get distracted and want to created beautiful letters or ornate letters out of the play dough. Another one is passing a beanbag all the way around her body as she spells the word aloud. I hear this helps the brain work both sides of the brain and so better retains information.
I found a great website that I will be using for these spelling lists that incorporates Fry's 1000 most used words into grades 1-5. It's free and developed by a teacher. It also has dictation sentences that use the spelling list words for practical understanding. It's called K12Reader.com.
