Heart of the Matter

Recently, as I was planning some school time with my daughter, I decided it would be fun to bring back The Year of the Dollhouse. Perhaps some of you know about my blogging friend Lynn and her idea to play and make a homemade dollhouse with her daughter everyday for a year a few years ago now. My daughter was 7 then and we did make some renovations to her house and did some playing, but it faded away. As I thought about what would make this school year special, I asked her if she thought doing another Year of the Dollhouse might sound fun. Now that she’s 10 my plan is to teach some home making skills through our creating and playing at the dollhouse. I pulled out a journal and began some dialogue with her. The journal is for us to plan and talk about our activities with the dollhouse and she loves it. Grammar correction is off limits in our journal allowing her to be free to communicate with me without a critique.

After hearing about the journal and the time I was going to spend with my daughter, my 8yo son wanted in on it too. Only I convinced him that maybe the dollhouse adventure wasn’t for him. Instead I suggested, the Year of the Adventure. His first question was, “Do I get to keep an Adventure Log?” And that is how journal time with him has begun. He and I will be reading Treasure Island and some of his favorite Jules Verne books and trying out our own adventures together. He loves his compass and binoculars and is an all American Adventure Boy.

Of course I wanted to find a way to have an adventure with each of my children. I gulped hard and offered to adventure and journal College Football with my 11yo son. He is a HUGE college football fan and I thought this would be a great way to connect with him throughout the season and I could give him challenges as we chat about team rosters and the National Championship front runners. Of course his absolute loyalty to the Virginia Tech Hokies would be prominent.

But, he surprised me by asking for a Redwall adventure instead. So, he and I will be discussing all things Redwall. He has in mind to make meals and write to the author Brian Jacques. I think he is secretly hoping that once this year ends, I’ll have enough planned to teach a Redwall co-op class.

And finally, my 5yo son requested some stories and after further probing, it turns out he’d like to draw pictures and tell me stories that I will write for him and read back to him. What a great idea for my Kindergartner who is too young to journal otherwise. He and I will enjoy time together and he tells a great story!

These, of course, are a version of the Adventure Boxes I shared with you all last summer. I had wondered then if doing adventure boxes and following a passion right during the school year rather than waiting for summer would be a fun idea. The kids won’t be totally immersed in an adventure at the expense of everything else, but it will allow them time to focus on something special they enjoy while getting extra time from my husband and me through journaling and activities.

I’m certain that we will look back with fondness at the memories we’ll make through our Journaling Adventures. What about you? Are you ready to make some memories with a Journaling Adventure?

Heather is a homeschooling mom of four kids ranging from middle school to preschool and wife to a handsome chemical engineer. Before raising a family, she taught middle school science (with a BS in biological sciences) and has a masters degree in curriculum and instruction secondary education. Now teaching at home means the chance to provide the extraordinary for her children. She’s been homeschooling five years and you can read about those adventures on her blog, Blog She Wrote.

If anyone had suggested to me when my son was younger that I would someday be writing an article on how to teach creative writing, I would have been incredulous. My son was a classic reluctant writer. He had plenty of ideas and loved to draw pictures. But when I asked him to actually write words and sentences he acted like the very pencil he had been happily doodling with moments before now burned his hand as if it was covered with acid. He acted as if he could barely remember how to grasp a pencil, yet alone use it functionally. Let me share with you what I tried that worked as well as what didn’t work so that you can hopefully avoid some of the potholes I hit on the road to teaching creative writing.

If the actual act of writing is challenging, observe your child and see if fine motor skills need to develop a bit more.

A child who struggles with the physical coordination needed for writing may get bogged down as he attempts to get his thoughts down on paper. Be sure your child is grasping the pencil correctly. Sometimes a simple pencil grip placed on the writing utensil makes writing physically easier for the child and thus frees the child to concentrate on developing his ideas rather than wrestling with his pencil and the mechanics of writing.

My son, Josh, was diagnosed with AD/HD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) and he matured at a slower rate than his typically-developing peers. It was hard for him to sit still for long and his fine motor skills and general coordination were not as developed as his cognitive skills. In other words, he had the ability to come up with ideas but lacked the focus and skill to sit down and write his ideas on paper. I still had him do some of the writing so he could practice and develop those skills. Some of the time, however, I let him dictate his ideas to me and I did the act of writing. Seeing and hearing his own stories read back to him was very motivating.

Another way to encourage the creative juices is to get some paper that is blank at the top and lined on the lower half.

The child can draw a picture to help illustrate their stories. Another advantage to this type of paper is that children who are overwhelmed at the thought of writing to fill an entire page view a half page as much more manageable. More manageable means less reluctance to write, and a relaxed writer has an easier time coming up with creative ideas to write about. This could also be a multi-age project, with a younger sibling helping to illustrate or contribute to a story with an older sibling. An older sibling can show the picture as she reads to the younger children. Having an appreciate audience for what’s been written is great motivation to write some more.

Do not make a big deal over spelling errors.

One mistake I made was to have Josh correct all his spelling errors. Since Josh was a very poor speller, having to make all the corrections was discouraging to him. Josh was a laborious writer with a pencil and paper in the first place, and to have to go back and fix all his errors was disheartening. Being a bright boy, Josh changed a few things about his writing at that point. First, he began to limit his writing to words he knew how to spell. This was not conducive to creative writing, and his topics were severely restricted. The second thing Josh did was to revert to simple noun verb sentences because, you guessed it, I was also the punctuation police for his writing. In essence, Josh taught me about teaching creative writing by pointing out what I did wrong that inadvertently was crushing his creativity.

If your child has only occasional misspelled words, give them the “underline option”. This means that if you are writing and use a word that you think may be misspelled, underline it and keep on writing. Later, you can go back and check the spelling of the underlined words by looking them up in a dictionary. If you have a speller like Josh who will have many spelling errors, teach him the underline option as well but don’t ask him to look up all those words in the dictionary. Usually the child knows what the word means as they write, they just are unsure about the spelling. If you ask a poor speller to look up all the misspelled words she may begin to use small words that are easier to spell and faster to correct. More advanced vocabulary words will not be found in a children’s dictionary, leaving the student who has difficulty spelling trying to find a word in a thick, small-print dictionary when he doesn’t know how to spell it in the first place.

Instead, invest about $20.00 in a Franklin Spelling Ace or similar device and teach your child how to use it. About the size of a calculator, the Spelling Ace is designed so that you can type in a word the way you think it is spelled and then see a display of possible words. Often a child can identify the word they were attempting once they see it, even though they could not generate the correct spelling on their own. This is a much faster way for a poor speller to find what they need than to have him looking up words in a dictionary. Teach dictionary skills, sure, but don’t overuse them when a simple spell check is all that is needed.

As for Josh, when he transitioned to keyboarding (hurray for spell check!) his creative writing really took off. After graduating from high school in 2006, he began pursuing creative writing with a passion. At the present time Josh has written three science fiction novels and has 47 novels started or in progress.

Melinda Boring has been married to Scott for 25 years and has three homeschooled children. Her 22 yr. old son and 21 yr. old daughter graduated from home school in 2006, leaving Melinda an “empty desker” of two along with her 17 year old daughter who will graduate in 2011. Two of her children and her husband have been diagnosed with AD/HD. The children also deal with auditory processing disorders and sensory processing challenges. The name “Boring” just doesn’t fit this family, and Melinda shares many humorous moments in her speaking and writing endeavors. Melinda is the author of Heads Up Helping and has been a contributing author to multiple publications. She is a workshop presenter with a passion for helping struggling learners and providing practical strategies, compassion, and understanding for those with special needs. Melinda is also a speech/language pathologist with over 25 years experience and the owner of Heads Up, a company with products for those who learn differently. You can find her blog at the Heads Up website, where she writes as “Heads Up Mom”.

I was inspired recently to write this post while playing for several hours with my five year old and some Unifix Cubes. He and I had a grand time making patterns, counting, and measuring. It made me realize again how much math we can do while we play and how important playful math is to young, aspiring mathematicians.

Generally speaking there are some widely accepted categories of concepts our children need to have in order to begin a solid foundation in math. They are Numbers & Number Sense, Patterns & Classification, Computation, Measurement, and Geometry.

You can play at any one of those concepts with a good set of counters. Another name widely used for counters is manipulatives. I really like the Unifix Cubes because they attach to each other nicely in only one direction. However, any counter will do- pennies, buttons, bears, legos, duplos (we used to use these a lot). So, if your budget is limited, dig in to the toys already in your house and see what there is to play math.

So, you have your counters and you have your young student, but you aren’t sure about how to play? Here are a few ideas:

Numbers and Number Sense: this category includes counting and one to one correspondence along with identifying sets of numbers. I like to use puzzles to teach counting- either the number match kind or the number train type. Almost all of my kids learned to count to twenty with our number train puzzle. There are so many opportunities for asking questions and counting with a good puzzle. Board games are another way to help kids learn counting. Chutes and Ladders, Candyland, and the Eric Carle games are good games to start with. Dominoes are a great tool for identifying sets of numbers and number matching. Kids love to play games and count.

Patterns & Classification: This category includes collecting like items, sorting, and patterning. I like to have my kids sort buttons into muffin tins. You can sort by color, size or texture and older kids can do more complicated sorting. Establishing patterns is important and you can do this using more formal products or you can make your own. With the Unifix Cubes or duplos you can establish a pattern and see if your student can repeat it. Funtastic Frogs have patterning cards and we’ve all seen bears or dinosaurs with patterning cards.

Computation: The beginnings of math equations- addition and subtraction is in this category. Counters that connect are a fun way to talk about adding and taking away items.

Measurement: Here we are talking about length, volume, time, etc. You can introduce measuring tools and use non-standard forms of measurement with young children. We used long towers of Unifix cubes to do some measuring and we counted the squares for quantifying our answers.  Tape measures are a great way to practice counting and measuring themselves against other objects helps for comparison.

Geometry: shape math is what geometry is all about. Identifying and classifying shapes with puzzles, pictures, and shape hunts is always fun.

For readers who don’t want to go it on their own, here is a list of resources you can use with your young math students.

• Family Math for Young Children from the Lawrence Hall of Science
• Family Math from the Lawrence Hall of Science
• Math Play by Williamson Little Hands Series
• Play and Find Out about Math by Janice VanCleave
• Games for Math by Peggy Kaye
• Games for Learning by Peggy Kaye

No matter what you choose to use for math with young children or how you want to go about it, the most important thing is to get down and play! You’d be surprised how much fun preschool and Kindergarten math can be without a workbook and it helps to get kids off to a good start in math skills through play.

Heather is a homeschooling mom of four kids ranging from middle school to preschool and wife to a handsome chemical engineer. Before raising a family, she taught middle school science (with a BS in biological sciences) and has a masters degree in curriculum and instruction secondary education. Now teaching at home means the chance to provide the extraordinary for her children. She’s been homeschooling five years and you can read about those adventures on her blog, Blog She Wrote.

Logic games are a strange breed of toy. Some kids love ‘em; some hate ‘em. Actually, the same thing could be said for parents (not that some kids love ‘em and some hate ‘em!). Some parents can’t wait to see what new logic toys they can find, and some parents’ skin begins to crawl just thinking about them! The essence of whether or not you like or loathe logic games likely has much to do with your spatial abilities. If you rock Tetris, can’t wait to introduce Tangrams to your homeschoolers, and constantly try to fit things together (not figuratively, but literally!), you probably like logic games. If, however, you break into a cold sweat at the thought of a question like, “if you flip and then rotate shape A, will it end up in the position of shape B, C, or D?” (I’m hyperventilating just typing that, by the way, so you know what kind of person I am!), then you will probably not jump for joy at this post. Read on, however, because your children just might!

It’s only the beginning of July, and I’m already having a hard time keeping N, my gifted 7 (as of July 4th!) year-old entertained. When the days get long and hot, and in Houston that means a heat index of 105-110 routinely, it is essential that I find some way to keep his mind engaged so that his hands don’t proceed to strip the wallpaper or peel the paint. Like many parents, I walk a fine line between providing my children with a challenge and giving them toys or activities that are too difficult for them. *Especially* for a child like N, an activity that is too difficult is a recipe for a tantrum and for a digging-in of heels. He won’t admit it’s too hard and he won’t quit, but he doesn’t have the emotional maturity to cope with something that is too far above him. Hence, it falls on me to choose things that hit at just the right level. Gee, that’s not too hard.

Fortunately, however, there are many wonderful toys for children just like my N and, I’m sure just like the ones that you have at home with you. These toys are leveled in such a way that they begin easily (although, for a spatially-challenged individual like myself, that is definitely a relative term!), and then progress to greater and greater levels of difficulty. Thus, a child masters the simpler levels before progressing. The best example I know of a logic game that meets this criteria is Kanoodle. As the manufacturer states, “Using combinations of colored connected beads, players complete colorful puzzles in two unique formats: tricky 2D puzzles and twisted 3D pyramids.” Kanoodle comes with a 48-page booklet which shows you the puzzle you are to replicate. There are hundreds of possible combinations of the 12 puzzle pieces, but only correct combination to solve the puzzle. I can’t even lay out the puzzle pieces correctly to close the small convenient carrying case, but my 7 and 8 year-old kids can now solve the hardest of the 3D pyramids. However, when they first got the game, my oldest was only 6 and had to work up from the simplest puzzle. Solving the logic games (since that’s what, in essence, they are) in this manner built her confidence and didn’t cause her to become discouraged or angry along the way. That’s quite a lot of payoff for a $10.99 game!

Rush Hour is a similarly conceptualized game, although it is more visually appealing to my son than Kanoodle. The premise of Rush Hour is simple. 40 cards are included in the game. A player sets up cars and buses on a 6″x6″ road grid according to the pattern on the card. One of the cars is a red one. The goal of the game is to get the red car safely out of traffic — while obeying all traffic laws! There are four levels of difficulty, so, again, a child can incrementally work up through the levels, all the while gaining competency and confidence. Best of all is the fact that there are several expansion packs available for this game. If your kids are anything like mine, you’ll need them! Like Kanoodle, Rush Hour is very compact, extremely portable, and requires intense concentration – all reasons to love it! The suggested age is 8+, but my son was able to solve the easier puzzles at 5. Like many of these logic-oriented games, Rush Hour is tailor-made for a gifted young child. Perhaps that is one reason it received a national award from Mensa.

The logic games I’ve highlighted thus far are the spatial variety, the kind at which my kids run rings around me. Perhaps other moms join me in a love of a different kind of logical endeavor – the written logic puzzle. I speak now of the kind of logic puzzle found in, among others, Dell puzzle magazines. A written scenario is introduced, followed by five or six clues. Using that information and a helpful grid of some kind, the solver ends up with a final pronouncement: “It was Professor Plum in the library with the candlestick!” or something of that nature. Seriously, though, this kind of logic problem doesn’t, to the best of my knowledge, use the spatial centers of the brain (and I say that because I’m actually good at these!), but it is certainly and fundamentally a logic problem. If your older child isn’t as much into the physical logic games, then, see if she might like to try one of these puzzles. You can find many of them online, and, as is important when introducing any new type of logic problem, you can start them as easy as you need to. One great source for these problems is edHelper. (disclaimer: I create educational materials for edHelper, but in no way get paid for referrals).

Hopefully if you, like me, are running into some mid-summer roadbumps with your overly-energetic and mentally active children, some of the suggestions here may be of help to you. If you need more suggestions, anything by Think Fun is almost guaranteed to be a logically good time. So, apart from school, how are you keeping your kids mentally engaged this summer? I’m sure I’ll be needing more suggestions soon!

Laura Delgado has been married to her husband, Henry, for 14 years. She gave birth to four children in exactly 40 months, but cheated since the last two were twins. She now happily homeschools her 8,6, and two 4 year-olds. She earned a Ph.D. in Political Science from Rice University, but finds that she uses her undergraduate Great Books education far more in her homeschooling pursuits. In addition to writing for various homeschooling publications, she creates educational materials for edHelper. For homeschooling helps and curriculum reviews, please visit her blogs at Living as Martha and Salve Regina Homeschool.

I’ve taken surveys of all my homeschooling friends, shrugged off the comments from ones whose children taught themselves to read at age three, and have persevered these last three years that we’ve been teaching our second child how to read.

If I hadn’t successfully taught one child how to read, I probably would have flunked myself out of homeschooling by now, but with the encouragement of friends who have walked this road before me (and lived to tell about it) here’s what I’ve been learning:

1.) Take everything to God in prayer.
Phonics lessons, readers, reading games – none of these are too small a care or concern for my heavenly Father. He created my son’s brilliant math brain and knows which resources will help strengthen his reading skills.

2.) Variety is the spice of reading life.
With a child that easily gets discouraged when he realizes he’s repeating the same phonics lessons that he has been working on for what seems like forever, variety throws some fun and change into the game plan. Check out books from the library on phonics games. We like ones by Scholastic like this one.

3.) Read aloud.
We’re certain our reading challenged child loves the written word because he loves to be read to and will peruse books on his subject of interest for long periods of time.

4.) Get your child a library card.
As soon as he could finish a simple three letter word reader, the big excitement in our home was the trip to the library for a library card. Painstakingly our seven year old filled out the paperwork himself and was handed his yellow card. There was no mistaking the pride beaming from his face. He had earned that card!

5.) Finally, don’t become weary in well-doing.
Have or find at least one supportive parent whose been in shoes similar to yours. Ask advice, pray it over, implement as needed. Sometimes just having a sounding wall to bounce thoughts off of is the greatest encouragement!

Now it’s your turn! Do you have any great tips for me and my learning reader?

Hannah Hagarty is a relaxed homeschooling mama of five. Her and her family are big on the outdoors, big on family days, and big on making memories in everyday small ways. She loves handcrafts, iced lattes, re-arranging furniture and counts falling into bed exhausted a sign of a really great day. She and her husband make a home in upstate New York with their energetic children and a menagerie of animals. Hannah blogs at Cultivating Home.