Homeschool Report Card, Spring Trimester 2011

At the end of the traditional school year,  the first for "officially" homeschooling Jasper, I like to take the time to look back on what we've accomplished.  With traditional school, a child receives a report card with their final grades; a judgment of the child and their worth.  Homeschooling is much more about assessing the teaching and deciding what is working and what needs to be changed.  I have decided to continue our lessons through the summer, on the same relaxed schedule we usually use, and divide the year into trimesters- fall/winter, winter/spring, and summer.

Most of us don't remember the vast majority of the lessons we had in school; the facts we memorized, the worksheets we completed, the textbooks we read.  We do remember the basic skills that prove useful in everyday life, which get reinforced just by living.  And we remember experiences. I try very hard to give Jasper as many first hand learning experiences as possible. Before the start of every month, I spend about three days compiling an extensive list of first hand learning opportunities in the area (which I always share on this blog).  I use what I hope will be the best of these as a starting point to plan our month.  I also plan to do as many things with our homeschool group as we can, which often means sharing learning opportunities with friends.  So many of our learning opportunities are purely serendipitous. Next, if there is a specific subject that fascinates Jasper, or that I believe he should learn about, I first try to brainstorm the possible ways to learn about it first hand.

This trimester, from January 1 to June 10. 2011, here are some of the things we did:

• 5 live theatre performances.
• 3 live music performances.  This is an area I'd hoped to improve this trimester.  This summer, with the many chances to see free outdoor concerts, I hope we will do better.
• 2 service learning opportunities.  We need to find a good fit, which may not happen until Jasper is older, but I will continue to look for more.  One great place to search for age-appropriate service learning opportunities is http://www.solv.org/, which has environmental service opportunities such as litter removal, planting trees and native plants, and invasive weed pulling.  Most are very kid friendly.  Gardening gloves are usually provided, but they don't have kid sizes, so picking up some ahead of time is a good idea.  Another great place to check is http://www.handsonportland.org/.  Their website includes service learning opportunities for many Portland-area organizations, conveniently in one place.  Their website was recently redesigned and is much easier to use.  With just a few clicks, you can bring up a list of all kid-friendly events, organized by proximity to a zip code you provide, with the age limit right in the title.
• 3 living history demonstrations. We found a few fantastic ones, but there aren't tons available.  Jasper is not much interested in history for its own sake.  I have found that I can often hook him into learning about history through good historical fiction, usually beginning with audiobooks we listen to in the car.  I then follow that up with nonfiction books and documentary films on the same historical period.  I recently found this awesome page of links to many lists of great historical fiction for kids:  http://librarybooklists.org/fiction/children/jhistorical.htm   Not all of the links are still currently working, but the ones that are working are fantastic.
• 23 science classes.  Science is Jasper's favorite subject.  I have found that I can take Jasper to many adult focused lectures on science related topics, and he is thoroughly engaged.  I also enrolled him in Mad Science's homeschool classes, which he absolutely loved.  
• 15 art experiences.  Jasper spends part of every day drawing, painting, making crazy sculptures out of pipe cleaners, etc.  I really want to encourage him to think creatively and to find new ways to make things.  I also want him to see what others have to communicate with their art.  So he took a lot of classes in new mediums and went to see art as well. 
• 23 miscellaneous field trips.  It's hard to say which was the best one this trimester, but Jasper really loved his birthday trip to the Oregon Coast Aquarium. 
• 44 nature walks.  Yes, really!  Actually, we are just trying to take advantage of the best the Portland area has to offer, and we've really got some truly spectacular nature here.
• 43 purely social events.  Many of the above learning opportunities are ones we did with other homeschool friends, but here I am counting only the events that were strictly for fun.  I guess most of them would also count as "Phys Ed", since he was rollerskating, or running around a playground or indoor play space, or playing crazy outdoor games, but the whole point was to spend time with some terrific families.

We are continuing to use Progressive Phonics for reading.  This website has free, downloadable books and activity sheets for systematically teaching reading through phonics.  And the books are really goofy! Jasper loves them and doesn't mind the hard work that comes with slogging through them. They make it easy by starting with a list of phonetic words that appear throughout the text in red.  The teacher reads the rest of the sentence.  Except now I am making Jasper read more than just the red words, adding sight words which are not phonetic but are very commonly used, and words which use other phonics rules he knows, including long vowel sounds.

A good friend of mine recently offered me a workbook she didn't need, which was intended to reinforce sight words.  The format of the workbook was largely fill-in-the-blank.  There would be  a paragraph in which a specific word was replaced by a blank line, for the child to write the word over and over as it was needed in the text.  I knew Jasper would never want to do this, because he tends to rebel when he's not allowed to be as creative as he wants to be.  But writing a word over and over is not a bad way to memorize it.  So I tried an experiment.  I told him to narrate his own paragraph, with the only stipulation that I wanted him to use a specific sight word over and over.  I would write down his paragraph and leave spaces for him to write the sight word himself.  He loves this and comes up with some crazy stories.

This summer Jasper is enrolled in our library's summer reading program, and is working hard to complete it. This is greatly helping my reluctant reader to get started, because the option he chose was to be rewarded for reading for every 15 minutes of reading, as opposed to reading through individual books.  As a side bonus, it is reinforcing all our time telling lessons!  I am very concerned that he keep up to grade level in reading, and he has some particular challenges.  If he doesn't seem to be rapidly increasing his fluency at the end of the summer, we will look into other options.

For math, we are using a mishmash of sources.  One is Singapore Math.  They are textbooks and workbooks that are heavy on illustrating the math concepts with pictures and stories in creative ways.  For some reason, addition, subtraction, and place value makes more sense to Jasper with money.   He has lots of realistic play money, and enjoys money addition worksheets which are easy to download free from the internet from dozens of sources.  He can also use an abacus or Cuisenaire Rods to help him find the answer.  In addition, we use lots of "living math" books.  The idea is to illustrate a math concept with a story, which makes the math lesson more fun and also emphasizes the practicality of math at the same time.  There are extensive lists of good ones at http://www.livingmath.net/, but I mainly use two different strategies for finding them.  One is to search the library catalog for whatever concept we are working on ("addition", "multiplication", "place value"), and the other is to look on the shelf under the Dewey Decimal number that library has chosen (this seems to vary by library).

We are transitioning from Jasper taking weekly Hindi classes with other children, to summer lessons that I am coming up with myself.  I am planning to meet with a proficient Hindi speaker on a regular basis to doublecheck my vocabulary.  I do have quite a few resources for our family to learn Hindi together, but definitely could use encouragement and support more than anything!  I am planning to try to use tactile and kinetic methods for teaching vocabulary as much as possible.  Learning a language is definitely more fun for Jasper with running, jumping, and clowning around incorporated into the lesson.

I am pleased with Jasper's progress.  He is struggling with reading more than I would like, but still has a very positive attitude towards learning and endless enthusiasm for books.  He is doing well at math and is beginning to apply what he has learned more and more in daily life.  And he has a good foundation in Hindi on which to build.  His real passion is definitely science.  One of the most encouraging things about this trimester is seeing the evidence that he is maturing enough to sit through adult level presentations on the subjects that really interest him, and ask relevant questions.  And I am really thrilled to see his love of nature flourishing to new heights.