Today was not a good day. I only got two-and-a-half math sections done. After dinner, I had to do my reading and writing as well. Nothing else. This happens to me sometimes. One time, I played too much Dragon City, and did not get my work done. Daddy took it away for a week.
But I have it back now, and I am very happy. After that, Daddy told me that I have to go to bed at 10:00PM and wake up at 8:30AM, so that I get my work done earlier in the day. I'm really going to try. It did not work so well today, though! Ashleigh
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This is part two to the post I wrote yesterday. Today, I will focus on the program I followed to educate my eldest daughter. I will likely follow the same steps with Ashleigh, although I will likely have light changes to the regimen due to differences in their personalities. Maddie was a very strong reader at an early age and thus she started writing reports on the classics at a very early age. To give you an idea of her reading abilities, Maddie read Harry Potter at the age of four. Even so, the first classic I gave her to read didn't turn out too well! At the age of seven, I gave Maddie Black Beauty to read. I always thought children loved that story, so I thought it would be a pretty safe way to introduce her to the classics. How wrong I was! She ended up hating the book, and didn't want to read any more classics because of it. The next few books she enjoyed, though, and she quickly learned that not all classics were as droll or boring as Black Beauty. The Wizard of Oz, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and nearly all of the Sherlock Holmes stories were some of her early favorites. Huckleberry Finn was another disaster for Maddie since she had a tough time reading it due to Twain's habit of writing in the vernacular of the South. It wasn't to a few years later when I had her take a college level course on Twain that she learned to appreciate him. Blogging & WritingAs Maddie was growing, we did a number of age-appropriate projects to help her learn. Blogging played a large part in her education. Over the years, Maddie had at least three blogs that were dedicated to learning. Her first, was maddiesthinkathought.blogspot.com. The blog only shows posts going back to 2011, but I think we started the blog in 2008. We started it as a writing exercise for Maddie. Each day she had to write something down. It could be about anything she wanted. After writing on the blog for a few years, it morphed into a poetry blog. One of my proudest achievements in Maddie's education is that I successfully passed on a love for poetry to her. Both Sharon and I wrote poetry, and I love to read poetry as well. If you would like to read some of Madison's early poetry, follow the link above. In 2010, We started a second blog to help Maddie learn about animals. This blog was called Absolute Animals, and it was a site where Maddie wrote a short post on a new animal each day. Although she no longer writes on this blog, her write ups are still there along with pictures of the animals she wrote about. Maddie's Minerals soon followed. This site was a blog where Maddie wrote about all of the elements on the elemental table, as well as about gem stones, since she really found those interesting. I found blogs were a fun way for Maddie to learn, and I often gave her writing assignments that required her to place them on a blog. One creative project I gave her involved the book "Around the World In Eighty Days". After reading the book, I had Maddie start a blog where she had to write a blog post as if she had to go around the world in 80 days. The trick was that she could only travel a few hundred miles per day, and she could not fly. If she took a ship, and reached her travel limit while out in the ocean, she then had to write a post telling what she did on the ship that day! Maddie was determined to not have to write about being stuck on a boat, so she came up with some creative places to go on her journey. You can follow her journey here: 80 Days. The last blog I'll mention here is called The Book Stack. The Book Stack is the blog where I had Maddie post most of her book reports I had her write. Being able to communicate is a very important skill, and my teaching style required Maddie to read a lot and then write reports explaining what she read. Unfortunately, many of the above blogs seem to be erasing some of her older work, or deleting some of the pictures she used. Thus, some of the older posts have blanks where the pictures used to be. If you are looking for ideas on how to home school your children, I think you may want to browse through the different blogs I linked to above. The Great Courses & Coursera
good grasp of the subject. Other times, I would give her topics that I already knew well to make it easier to tell if she was learning. I particularly liked to use the Great Courses for history and math. Some of the courses Maddie studied are in the picture at the top of the page. After researching on the web, I found a second resource to use with Maddie... Coursera. Coursera is an organization that offers online courses from many of the major colleges across the globe online for free. At first, I was a little skeptical that these were real college courses, so I decided to take a class myself to see how tough they were. I enrolled in, and passed a course on the Python programming language from Rice University. I can tell you that these are definitely college-level courses! Soon after, Maddie signed up for, and passed a course in Songwriting from the Berklee College of Music in Boston. Maddie passed her first college course at the age of 12. She has passed eight others since, including courses from Rice University, The Georgia Institute of Technology, SUNY, and Duke University. Although none of these courses gave her college credits, they gave her experience taking challenging courses, and more importantly, the knowledge she gained from taking the courses. VLACsAlthough Madison is still being home schooled, most of her learning is coming from a home-learning program for high schoolers set up by the state of New Hampshire. A friend from karate had told me about VLACs and I looked into it. There were two things that I found very appealing about the program. 1. Maddie could continue to work from home, and would still receive a high school diploma if she successfully completed the required courses. The second point that I liked was that if Madison was accepted into an accelerated college program, she could graduate high school with both a high school diploma and an associates degree from Southern New Hampshire University.
We signed Maddie up for freshman year in high school last year, even though she technically should have been starting eighth grade. They allowed her to start as a ninth-grade student and the lowest grade she had in her first year was a B+. Maddie has started her sophomore year now, and has signed up for her first official college course. Although I am no longer teaching her, I do keep in touch with her teachers and monitor her progress. She also continues to write on our family blog daily. To me, nothing I have done in my life has been more rewarding than teaching my daughters. I sometimes miss the discussions Maddie and I used to have about the books I assigned to her. The look on her face when she first discovered that there were layers of meaning in some stories (The Swimmer by John Cheever) will be etched in my memory forever! I will also cherish some of the interpretations of poetry that she did. I am happy that we both share a love for the poetry of Robert Frost as well as for Shakespeare's sonnets. I look forward to teaching these subjects to Ashleigh as well. When I was younger, I often wondered what the meaning of life really was. Sometimes, I still wonder. Other times, I think that the meaning of our lives can be found in the meaning that we make for ourselves. And for me, a large part of that meaning is to find how I can best help my daughters to find that meaning for themselves. I think the best way I can do that is to teach them how to think for themselves in a logical manner. I hope that the education that I have given them... am giving them goes a long way towards achieving that. Before I start, I just want to apologize for not posting much over the past week or two. I am a stock analyst and I research companies and write reports about the prospects for the equities of the companies I cover. I had thirteen stocks due on Tuesday, and they were going to press this week. Next week I will be a bit less busy, and I should be able to write blog posts regularly again. Usually, once people find out that I home school my daughters I get asked a lot of questions about how I do it. In today's post, I will try to explain the process I use to teach my girls. This post, I will focus on Ashleigh, and the early years of education. Next post I will focus on Maddie and how I interact with her to help her learn. To start, I just want to say that I only loosely follow a set curriculum. After researching a number of programs, I thought that the Robinson curriculum would work best for me. The Robinson curriculum is very heavy into math, and stresses a lot of free time for reading so that the children learn through their spare time as well. ReadingThe biggest challenge, I find, is actually teaching the children how to read. With both of my daughters, we started by using Hooked on Phonics. I like the flash cards that help to show the children which sounds come from which letters. Although Ashleigh now knows how to read, I still go back to asking her what sound a particular letter or set of letters combinations make to help her figure out what a word is when she gets stuck. The second stage I used for Ashleigh was to have her write down very simple words, repetitively. I would give her a set of about six to 12 words and have her write them down ten times each in a row. On trickier words, I would have her say them out loud as well. I had her do this every day for weeks on end. As she began to recognize words, I started having her copy short sentences too. After a few weeks I began having her try to read some of her story books to me. Since she was very young, My Mom and I have always read little stories to Ashleigh. As she progresses, we began having her read them to us! Unfortunately, many of the Disney books are not geared towards young children reading them themselves. I found that too many words were there for adults to read them to the children. I solved this problem by finding an old McGuffey Reader online. For many weeks, I had Ashleigh read passages from the reader to me. I then wrote down sentences based on the words she read in the passages and had her write them in a notebook. We have gone through a number of notebooks that way. The exercise helped to improve her reading AND writing abilities. Next, I began to have Ashleigh write a short blog post each day for this website. Her topics are simple, but it helps her to learn to write out her thoughts. Me or my Mom will usually help her with spelling for some of the larger words, and I do read it with her and help her to fix punctuation mistakes. Ashleigh has to read out loud each day and when she finishes reading a book she has to write a book report for it as well. She publishes these reports on this blog, as well as on a site set up strictly for her reports. You can find that web site here. MathematicsAnother area that is very important to my curriculum is mathematics. I started teaching Ashleigh basic math at an early age. There are two things that I do to teach math. First, I give her a page or two of hand written math problems each day. I started her with very basic adding and subtracting problems, and then moved her up to larger and larger numbers. At the same time, I started her on IXL. IXL is a computer-based math tutoring program that follows the state standards for math knowledge. If you are interested, you can find it at www.ixl.com. Ashleigh has completed the program through level C math and is currently about 50 completed segments into level D math. Each day she covers about five segments, so they add up quickly. The program is good because when she gets an answer wrong, it sets back her progress in that area and she then needs to answer more problems correctly before she is allowed to graduate out from that segment. I have found her math skills have really improved since she has started that program. Recently, I have also started to give her the times table to copy down and learn. Although I have taught her the basics of multiplication, she still views it as a derivation of addition, so her progress has been slow. We still work on it weekly and she has started to be able to answer some of the smaller multiplication problems in her head. When I was teaching Madison. we used the same programs, however we also used the Saxon math books. These helped to broaden her understanding to some degree. Once Ashleigh can read better, I will likely use the same books with her as well. Physical EducationPhysical education is one of my favorite subjects for the girls! Each of my girls started training in karate when they were three years old. Currently, Maddie is a second degree black belt and 2015 Grands sparring champion. Ashleigh is currently a purple belt with a black stripe, and will be testing for her blue belt in two weeks. Both of my girls have won invitations to the Grands tournament in November. Maddie will be competing in sparring and weapons, while Ashleigh will be competing in sparring and forms. Recently, Ashleigh was honored to have her picture featured on a flyer that was sent out to all of the students in the New Ipswich school system advertising a new after-school karate program. The picture is below. Although karate is a great physical activity, the girls gain so much more from it than they would a regular gym class. The most important thing to me is that they are learning to defend themselves. As a Dad, I worry about their safety, and I wanted to make certain that they have every chance available to them if they ever have to defend themselves.
Karate is much more than a sport. It is a life style. Our dojo has five rules: effort, etiquette, sincerity, character, and self-control. We also practice peace over power. In other words, we are trained to not use our skills to start fights, but to finish them. We are only to use our skills in self defense. I like that my daughters will be bale to train in karate throughout there lives. So many of the sports I played as a child are no longer played by me or my friends. Even so, at 50 I still train three times a week. I picked up karate late in life. I started training at the age of 42. I started to train because we reached a point in Maddie's training where I could no longer help her because I did not know the material. I started to train to help her, but ended up continuing because I enjoyed it so much as well! We like to say "A family that kicks together, sticks together!" Both of my girls love karate and it is a major part of their lives. Even so, I made a rule early on that neither of them could date until they had a black belt. Maddie got hers at ten, so the rule did not impact her dating life at all. At her current pace, it also looks like the rule won't have an impact on Ashleigh's dating life. Although the rule was made half jokingly. It makes me feel better to know that the girls are trained to take advantage of weaknesses in anatomy if the need ever arises. A second way that my girls get exercise is by having a love of the great outdoors. I try to take the girls hiking regularly, and they both seem to enjoy it. We all take pictures while we are out, and many of them end up gracing many of the blog posts on this site. Madison also has an instagram account, where she posts many of her pics. Well this post is running a little long, so I will end this post here. On my next post, I will tell you how Maddie's education differs from Ashleigh's since she is older, and I will also touch upon how I teach science and history. Here are four more pics of my girls through out their karate careers! |
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