Homeschooling Report: First Semester Ending
Truth be told my assigning an ending to the first semester is completely based on the fact that Kronk’s students are ending their semester this week, and has nothing to do with anything we have or haven’t done. I haven’t blogged about homeschooling in a good long while. So it’s time for an honest review about how things have gone.
OVERALL:
I am pleased to announce that even moms who barely have it together, who have never homeschooled before, who have passion and dedication to seeing their children learn, can homeschool! It’s not easy. You have to learn stuff, be more diligent and adopt good habits. You have to put other things on the back burner, and some of those things can be hard to deal with. (For example, I’m only now getting to tidying the house on a regular basis. Regular=most days. When I first started homeschooling back in August, the house was tidied more on a weekly basis.)
Biggest perks: The one that shines above all other perks is me being the one to teach Foxx to read. At the beginning of the year he could sound out words like cat, but he’d only try with encouragement. Today he is reading everything in sight, and has confidence in himself. Helping Foxx and Pingu both improve on their handwriting, math, and other literary skills has been an incredible blessing for me. I am so proud of them and me for sticking this out and overcoming challenges. I know my kids so much better now after seven months of helping them in the learning journey. Furthermore, homeschooling has made it so we can keep our lives simpler and calmer. I can’t count the mornings I’ve woken up so thankful I don’t have to get everybody out of bed and out the door. I can let my kids get the sleep they need for their growing bodies. We can go our own pace through the material and totally skip stuff if I sense it’s something they already have a good handle on. We can take a break and drill/review stuff that doesn’t sink in right away. Also, because the kids are home, we’ve been able to do chores and responsibilities and routines a lot easier than if I were saving it all for after school-the late afternoon period when children are more wiggly and do better with laxness or large motor activities.
Biggest challenges: Our number one challenge is Scooby. He is active, climbing everything, and wants to do what the big kids do in theory, but just eats crayons most of the time we let him try to participate. He’s goes through stages where he was obsessed with climbing the chairs and tables whenever they are being used. Thankfully he naps and we can save school for naptime on those monkey days. The other challenge is now that I’ve added regular seatwork for Pingu-it’s distracting for Foxx to hear me working with Pingu on something totally different than he’s working on. He’ll want to leave his work and help Pingu on what he’s doing. Which sounds great in theory but it winds up Foxx actually doing it and Pingu watching. Foxx has a take-charge personality like that. Also, it’s challenging to get food shopped for. This is not due to the time homeschooling takes up, but due to me having four kids 24/7. There’s not enough room in the cart or patience in them or me to get through the two hours of shopping it takes to get enough food for our family for a week. I keep getting stuck in the rut of shopping mid-week, come the weekend when Kronk is here we don’t need any food, but we run out the mid-week again. Finally, I’ve come to realize Foxx is an extrovert and he needs more socialization outside the house. That’s hard to work in with lots of little people who are hard to take places.
Curriculum results:
Hooked on Phonics: This worked well! Although it could have used some teaching of general pronunciation rules which I am doing a different curriculum for, this was super easy to teach from, the stories were fun, and Foxx zoomed through it. He’s now done with all of his Hooked on Phonics and I’m wondering what to do now. We’re checking readers out from the library and the boy is reading everything he can get his hands on. The boy is rather intuitive about reading. He finished levels 4 and 5 in a few days, and I let him skip most of the review pages because he didn’t need them. If I have a kid later that doesn’t grasp things quite as intuitively, I”ll probably have to supplement. But this was perfect to launch Foxx into reading. The HOP program is supposed to go from Kinder to 3rd, and he’s done all of it, so I am not sure if that puts him at third grade level or not. I’m going to be researching to find some placement tests and to see what he should do next.
Singapore: I love this math program, and hope to stick with it for long-term! I love how it teaches concepts in many different ways, emphasizes manipulatives, and it’s straightforward and easy to use. I wasn’t reading the teacher manual and I found out that was a no-no but it doesn’t seem to have done much harm except for me having to take a break from the curriculum to review subtraction facts and emphasize memorizing addition and subtraction under twenty facts. Foxx just finished 1A and is now working on 1B.
Handwriting Without Tears: This is such an amazing program. I would seriously recommend it to anybody who has a kid challenged by writing. I started Pingu and Foxx with reinforcing how to hold a pencil and some fun songs about where to start the letters. It has amazing manipulatives and the attention-to-details foundation work just is marvelous! Pingu did the PreK book and Foxx did the Kindy book, and has now moved on to the 1st grade book. Now that Foxx has a good grip on how the letters are made, we are doing extra careful detail practice, just a little a day, to build a steady foundation for good handwriting. I am going to start Pingu on the Kindy book after I order books again. We don’t use the manipulatives as much anymore, mostly just the notebooks.
Kumon books: These started out as supplemental but when it became clear to me Pingu needed help learning lowercase letters, Kumon books became his main form of learning letters and numbers. They’re ok. I don’t know if I’ll stick with them for Pingu, mostly because I think for 4/5 year olds it’s probably better to stick with reusable manipulatives rather than workbooks. He does love doing them, though. The money books have been perfect to teach Foxx how to count change (and we’re moving on to dollars now). Foxx finished his grade 1 reading workbook and is in his grade 2 workbook. He’s bored by it, as he already knows how to read all the words, and he doesn’t like writing all the answers, but he does it.
Salsa videos: These have been a fun introduction to basic Spanish words. Since they are free I have absolutely nothing to complain about! They are fun. I watch them with the kids and occasionally translate. We practice Spanish words throughout the day. It’s a great refresher course for me, and I hope to follow up with a different curriculum as soon as I pick one out.
Goals for our ‘second semester’:
1. Start using All About Spelling
2. Find a weekly daytime socialization outlet. Awana is ok, but it’s at night and rough on Mommy and all the kids. Perhaps 4-H.
3. Start Pingu on HWT Kindy
4. Find a placement test for Foxx for reading and another reading curriculum.
5. Weekly library tests to let Foxx and Pingu explore subjects of interest. This has been great to learn about science stuff. So we need to make it a more regular thing.
6. Incorporate family Bible verse memorization. Post verse by table and say the verse before every meal.









