Hi all! I have
answered C.D.’s call for some guest posts. I have been an avid
reader of The Canadian Doomer blog almost from the beginning and am a
huge admirer of how CD and Mr. D are living their life and raising
their family. I hope someday to accomplish half of what she does.
I thought
I would write about our first day of school. For many of you this
involves registration and bank-breaking trips to the stores, swirled
together and capped off with a crowbar to get the kids out of bed,
lunches made and out to school buses, cars, bikes or a walk to get to
school. In our house, we have some medical issues that mean our
local school board is not interested. It is not that they won’t
accept Monkey, just that they are going to make it as difficult and
unpleasant as possible and even then they say they can’t protect
him, so we homeschool. Our Board has made the process very easy and I
am grateful to all of those who came before who fought for it to be
this way. I am lucky in that I have met several times in past years
with the women who would have been his teachers to ensure that we
are, at the very least, covering all the materials they are in the
public school. I also have a number of friends who are retired
teachers who come and spend days with us and then give us a formal
written assessment for his file. We have encouraged the local school
to send a representative to visit us – they haven’t yet but we
hope that they will this year. I believe that a good relationship
with the school will make things easier if or when we want to
integrate Monkey back into the system.
Our
school year starts in August when we order the curriculum from the
secular school in the US that we have used for the past two years.
We chose a secular school as Monkey gets enough religious teaching in
Sunday School and through the church youth group. Calvert has been
producing homeschooling curriculums for more than 100 years and is
contracted to produce them for the US military and foreign services
department. They also have their highly regarded bricks and mortar
school in Baltimore and their program is the basis of a number of
charter schools across the US. It is not a perfect and we do
supplement, but it as we really wanted a secular program. Anyways,
it takes about two weeks for the box to arrive and there is great
excitement when it does. I always look at the teaching manuals first
(and panic slightly) and Monkey always takes the math books to see
how much he already knows.
We keep the same school
hours as his friends and today, we started Grade 2. Our first day’s
schedule is:
Sing Oh Canada,
God Save the Queen and say The Lord’s Prayer.
9am-9:30am Math – 4 pages review addition, greater than/ lesser
than, number before/ between/ after up to 100.
9:30am-10am Review/Write – Days of the Week, Months of the Year,
Seasons
10am 15 minute break (race out and ride bikes)
10:15am Geography Review – Provinces, Oceans around Canada, Great
Lakes, principal Rivers and Islands (i.e. Mackenzie River, Gwaii
Haanas, Ellesmere Island, the Red River)
10:45am Social Studies/Geography Study Unit – Beringia, Paleo
Indians, Native Americans (this will run through Canadian
Thanksgiving):
- Look at map of Beringia – identify Siberia, Alaska, Yukon, NWT, Nunavut, BC
- Look at images of the High Arctic
- Art project: draw a picture of what you think Beringia looked like
11:30am Lunch
11:45am Read the next chapter in the family story – currently we
are reading Farley Mowat’s Lost in the Barrens – then we
discuss
12:15pm Biking and
general racing about
12:45pm Science: watch Bill Nye the Science Guy video on the Sun
then discuss the sun’s role in our solar system and on our planet.
Discuss why we can’t go to the Sun the way you can go to the moon
or send the rover to Mars.
1:45pm Reading: Ferocious Wild Beasts by Chris Wormell –
Monkey reads this to me and then has to discuss the characters, story
line and the message of the story.
We finish
up about 2:30pm and then usually do Creative Play. This can be Snap
Circuitry, Lego or Mechano construction or it can be on-going science
projects, but for Day One back at it, we are just going to let him
run.
During
Creative Play, while I prepare for the next day. With a focus on
Northern Canada and the Native communities, we are looking for
literature to support that. Tomorrow our reading is the Robert
Service poem The Cremation of Sam McGee. Our geography review
will continue with the Provincial and Territorial capitals and then
we will start with Our Trip across Canada. Because we are studying
Beringia, we will start in the Yukon – and this will be tied in
with Lake LaBarge and the Yukon River. I also have to “Canadianize”
the Social Studies package that come from the US school.
Every day
is a challenge – I wish sometimes it was a different challenge.
Teaching your child(ren) is a challenge. Monkey has the attention
span of a flea. Somedays are nothing more than exhaustion and
frustration. I have more admiration for school teachers now than I
ever did before. There are days when teaching one can be a nightmare
–my hat is off to them for dealing with 25 kids! But I love doing
it. Watching the light bulb turn on when he gets a concept is
incredible. Watching him pull concepts together and ask questions is
like getting a gift. Some days run so smoothly that you would swear
there was a changeling in the house but you accept it as a gift and
try to get more done.
Twice a
week, Monkey goes to the Boys & Girls Club for their after school
program. Once a week, he takes group piano lessons there as well.
He also is involved in their sports programming and once a week plays
sports - this fall it is ball hockey and basketball. He is also in
our church youth group and goes to Sunday School. So he is busy and
active with a wide circle of friends and they ride bikes and play at
each other’s homes regularly. I am blessed that he is a social
child.
For many,
homeschooling is a scary prospect. They feel that there is an
implied slight about how they are choosing to educate their children.
It makes them defensive. Sometimes their concerns are justified.
There are kids out there who are not being well served by the choice
their parents made, but these children exist in the public system
too. The challenge is in using homeschooling to expand what your
child learns, not to limit it. There is a lot of work involved even
if you purchase a curriculum – most are produced for the American
market and have to be adapted. You have to purchase supplemental
materials (thank God for dollar stores!) and you have to be creative
in ways that might not be easy. Additionally, you have to brace
yourself for continued judgemental and occasionally nasty comments by
friends, family and strangers. You have to be prepared for them to
call the police, truancy officers and children’s aid. Even within
the homeschooling community, you have to deal with people who
question the style of schooling you are doing. Still there was
nothing quite as wonderful as sitting down with Monkey this morning
and watching him whip through the reviews of Grade 1 and exclaiming
“This is easy!”
Off to prepare for
tomorrow…
Thanks for reading! Please leave a comment - positive or negative - and let me know your thoughts.
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