Turning Chores into Education

A lot has been written about unschooling, that is, teaching through living life instead of teaching with text books, workbooks and a desk. I believe there is value in both and I do much more teaching through life than “school time” where we read or write or whatever.

For example, we turn our chores into school lessons. My daughter's favorite number is 98. Anytime we see a lot of something, she says, “there must be like 98 of them!” So, looking at our large pile of laundry, she made another such comment. So I said, “Well, let's count them and find out.” We turned doing laundry into a counting activity and that day we had 115 pieces of laundry to sort and fold! I like to have the kids help me fold clothes, either help with sorting, or folding their own clothes, or putting away the kitchen rags or whatever. It gives us an opportunity to work together, for me to teach them life skills, and sometimes we get to talk about stuff. (Of course, there are many days when having kids help is more stressful, trying to keep them on task or keeping them from fighting with each other. So, its not always fun!)

Another chore that children can learn much from, is taking care of a garden or other plants. We don't currently have a garden, but many of our friends do. Children can learn a lot from the hands on activity of gardening. At one time, we had an indoor AeroGarden, where we grew lettuce. We had to add water and nutrients and then when the plants had grown enough, the kids could go pick their own lettuce leaves to go on their tacos. Even with out a garden, kids can learn a lot about earth science from other yard work activity, such as trimming the trees, pulling up weeds, raking leaves, etc. All these activities can lead to discussions about how plants grow, about rain and the weather, about seasons, etc. When I go out to tree some branches with my big cutters, I let the kids have some scissors to cut weeds. We can work together to accomplish something and talk about it while we work.

And I desire to teach them not only life skills and academics but to teach them to enjoy working together. In our world that is so big on multi-tasking, why not do chores and school at the same time? I enjoy accomplishing two things at once!! (Hey, and it keeps the kids out of trouble, making more mess and chores to be done, if they are actually with me, helping me.)

Of course, there are lots of things to do together in the kitchen that lead to good school lessons, but that will have to be for another post....

Dump Trucks to Chrysanthemums

"Dump trucks are good at dump, dump, dumping,

carrying heavy loads, lifting and tipping,

out fall the rocks, CRASH,

rumbling and tumbling,

they can work all day."

These words are stuck in my head! Why? These are the words my three year old chants all the time, from her library book that we read weeks ago. She is especially proud of memorizing these words. It's really her first time to “read” a book to someone, all by herself. She can “read” most of the book, because of its poetic, repetitive nature. (Actually, the day she learned these words, she was very sleepy and asked me to read the page over and over. I read it over and over, more softly and more rhythmic each time until she fell asleep. The next day she was quoting it to me and everyone else.)

So, here I would like to recommend several of my kids favorite books, ones with rhyme and patterns that the kids like and are easy to remember, books that are rhythmic enough to sing.

First, Dig, Dig, Digging. Each page has the same pattern of verbs and descriptions and end with the same phrase. It also lends to discussion about machinery.

Pajama Time – very rhythmic and rhymes, a bed time favorite. Another book by the same author, 15 Animals, actually has a song on their website to sing the book.

Are You Quite Polite? is fun for older kids, singing to tunes of traditional kids songs with different, funny words. Some of the songs were a little gross for my taste, but we did especially like the songs about chewing gum, about quiet in the library and about writing thank yous. The humor in these are probably for older children, but my kids like the singsong value of these poems.

Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? And the book by the same author, Adam, Adam, What Do You See? Have repetition that lend to letting children “read” these books by themselves.

Going Home, has a similar poem structure to the Dig, Dig, Digging book, with a repeated phrase at the end. It has a higher vocabulary than does the dig book, but has great pictures and explains to children the concept of migration.

These few below are not of the same rhythmic, poetic type books, but they have been library book favorites.

Bippity-Bop Barber Shop is a nice story about son getting his first haircut at the barbershop with Dad.

How Many Seeds in a Pumpkin has been one of our favorite library books. It has a nice story, teaches a little about pumpkins, and has some math to it (counting by 2s and 5s and 10s).

Chrysanthemum has been a favorite and it is appropriate to my little girls. Chrysanthemum is her name and she faces teasing because her name is not normal, but she learns to appreciate the meaning of her name and that it is special. (My girls don't all have “normal” names but they are names with meaning.)

I have added all these books to the recommended products, under children's books, so you can view more information about these books. We have found a lot of these books at the library, but some we also own.

The following links are good discussions about repetitive books. These articles actually both mention some of our favorite books, too!

Repetitive Books: An Effective Therapeutic Tool...

http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/2056-reading-out-loud

Teaching Bible

He Established a Testimony

We have begun using this Bible curriculum for the past several weeks. It is a coloring book with a picture for every story in the Old Testament. On the page next to the the picture, is the Scripture reference and key themes that a child should learn. There are few questions or comments to guide discussion of the Bible with your children.

This curriculum has been developed by Bethlehem Baptist Church, pastored by John Piper. Several years ago, I used this curriculum to teach Sunday school to 4 and 5 year olds. I was very impressed with the introduction of the teaching manual. It encouraged teachers to study the Scripture passage for themselves and strive to teach the Bible in context. It gave a list of themes and truths that run through the Old Testament and then each lesson has one or more of these truths that need to be presented. For example, truths include: man is in need of God, God is powerful, God is loving, God is just, God is creator, sin deserves punishment, etc.  The curriculum stresses the need to teach what the text is teaching in context.  For example, when Jesus feeds 5000 people with fish and loaves from a little boy, traditional Sunday school material may teach that the boy was generous and so young children can learn to share also.  If this is all that is taught, we miss talking about the power and authority of Jesus and His nature and our lessons just become moralistic. 

While I have been challenged by the high standards of teaching the Bible as written, in context, with an eye on the character of God, I admit that this was a hard curriculum to teach in a Sunday school setting where I was expected to fill an hour and a half and all they gave me to go on was the Bible truth/theme sheet, the picture to color and the Bible reference. But I have found it very useful in an at-home setting, where we can go at our own pace and just spend 15 minutes talking about the Bible while the kids color the picture. On my more creative days, we add something to our coloring sheet that gives us more opportunity to talk about the lesson and the Bible truths for that day. For example, we drew and cut out a snake and added to the picture of Adam and Eve with the fruit in the garden and we talked about the conversation that went on there, that they were questioning God and his command. Or, we did star stamps and stickers on the picture of Abraham looking up at the sky, hearing the promise of God that the number of his descendents would be as numerous as the stars in the sky.

So far, our Bible study time has been going well. The kids look forward to it. We can look back at the pictures and discuss the lessons from previous days. I like the chronological building of the lessons and I hope that it gives them a foundation of how things fit together in the Old Testament. It gives us something structured to go through, as well as a visual reminder of the story. This also doesn't skip stories and hard lessons that many children's Bibles skip.

So, check out He Established a Testimony. The coloring books are not that expensive and you can even just buy a digital copy to print yourself. I do recommend the teacher manual for its insight on teaching the Bible in context, but it is more pricey, if you are not using it in a church setting. You may also want to check out some of the other curriculum from Bethlehem Baptist Church – other foundational teachings, those on the New Testament and the ABCs of God.

Spell to Write and Read

Spell to Write and Read: A Step by Step Guide to Foundational Language Arts

This book fasicinates me as a linguist. I have a background in teaching ESL (English as a Second Language) and this book is everything I wished I would have learned in my college courses. It gives details of all of our spelling rules in the English language that we take for granted, that we may not have even learned well ourselves. This book goes beyond the normal phonetics and actually teaches multiple sounds for each letter. Students learn that 'a' actually makes three sounds and 's' makes the 'z' sound in addition to the 's' sound. It also teaches when spelling rules are broken, that is, when foreign words are added to the English vocabulary, like tortilla or ski. The book encourages students to sound out words based on spelling rules and then to write them.  Reading comes naturally after knowing words through spelling and writing.

I have not started using this curriculum yet, but my sister-in-law Rebekah has used it with her children. She started her children with the 100 Easy Lessons to Teach your Child to Read, in order to build up decoding skills as well as general confidence in reading. Then, she has moved on to Spell to Write and Read to focus more on spelling and handwriting and to give her children a good foundation on all areas of reading skills.

Rebekah has developed a system of flashcards to incorporate the 200 most common words in the English language and grouped them by spelling rules. These flashcards are not directly related to the book, but this book inspired her development of the flashcard system.

This curriculum does encourage a lot of writing, and she has learned to not push too hard on writing too early and to also incorporate all the types of learning more in to her teaching of spelling (that is auditory – hear the word and the spelling, visual – seeing the word, hands on – actually writing the word).

So, I look to use this book after we complete our first reading curriculum. However, the curriculum can be started without already knowing decoding skills, but it is helpful for the child to have enough fine motor skills to be able to write without too much frustration.

I'm thankful to have a sister to give me ideas and pass on her curriculum to me and I can learn from what worked for her and what didn't work.  Thanks, Rebekah for the recommendation!

Charlotte Mason Help

I have recently come across a website called “Charlotte Mason Help.” This site is written by a homeschooling mom who has recently been attending my church. I couldn't help but be impressed with her articulate teenage daughters. In fact, the daughters were the ones who pointed me to the website and told me what a passion their mom has for helping younger mothers get started with homeschooling.

So that night I checked out the website: charlottemasonhelp.com and immediately found some inspiration for teaching my own children and for ways to approach to discipline. I was particularly interested in the section on copywork.

I have recently been fighting battles with handwriting practice, with my daughter hating to write. This article emphasized quality work over quantity. It also helped me realize I may be pushing my daughter a little too hard.

Over the course of the last week, we have had great improvements in our handwriting, both in quality of work and in attitude. We are focusing now on having just a few letters done right over more letters done haphazardly and I am learning to give more focused time on helping with the handwriting and giving more immediate feedback. (And the focus part can be difficult with little ones in the house!!)

Anyway, I plan to continue to read some more articles from this website to get inspired, encouraged and to get some ideas from a mom who has much more experience.

Guerilla Learning

Guerrilla Learning: How to Give your Kids a Real Education with or without School

I enjoyed and recommend this book for several reasons. First, this book is written to all kinds of parents. It is not just a homeschooling book, but it is a book about parents being involved in their children's education, whether that be at home or in school or in any number of learning situations.

Second, this book encourages us to think beyond traditional education methods and challenges the assumption that teaching=learning. Just because something is being taught in the classroom (or at home) does not mean that the children are learning anything or that the information will be later retained.* It encourages much of education to be directed by curiosity and student interest rather than on grades. This book explains the five keys to Guerilla Learning (opportunity, timing, interest, freedom, and support) and also gives practical examples of how to use these keys to stimilate true learning.

*This is not a new idea to me. It was first introduced to me in a book called Why Nobody Learns Much of Anything at Church and How to Fix It, which is a book about teaching and learning within the church. 

Llewellyn, Grace and Amy Silver. Guerrilla Learning: How to Give your Kids a Real Education with or without School. John Wiley & Sons, Inc: New York, 2001. 

New Thinking about Children

While reading Nurture Shock:New Thinking about Children, I found several chapters relevant to children and education. In parallel to another book I have been reading (The Hurried Child), these authors give evidence that more and earlier is not always better. This book contains many insightful thoughts (backed up by research) on child development and how these findings sometimes go against what is popular or mainstream thinking. Well, worth the read.

Several chapters that stood out to me:
1. “Can Self-Control Be Taught?” describes Tools of the Mind program for pre-K and kindergarden students. I have used some of the ideas in teaching my young children at home. I particularly like the suggestions for teaching handwriting. Students are asked to mark which letters are best on the other students papers. Students learn what quality work looks like, distinguishing well-formed letters with the sloppy letters. I encourage my daughter to put stickers next to her best letters during our handwriting practice.

Another idea for working with young kids is to have children write out their play plan and then to stay on task with it. Children learn to focus and they have a say in how they will spend their time.

2. “Why Hannah Talks and Alyssa Doesn't?” In this chapter, the authors discuss the complex process of language acquisition. One of the most determining factors of how quickly children learn to talk is parental attentiveness. This makes sense with my own children. My first child learned to talk much earlier than my other children have, I think, in part, because she had my full attention. But even now, I can see how applying this chapter to my 15 month baby has helped her in learning to speak. It is a very simple technique – repeat words for whatever your child is looking at or touching – their language acquisition is based on their interst, not on parents' interests. When children do attempt to speak, acknowledge and encourage it. These two simple steps go a long way in encouraging a child to speak, much farther than exposing them to electronic learning toys.

This book also contains information on topics ranging from children lying to rebelliousness and risk taking among teens, to teaching children to get along well with each other. There are chapters on the caveats of the self-esteem movement and on the myth of the supertrait.

http://www.nurtureshock.com/

Bronson, PO and Ashley Merryman.  Nurture Shock: New Thinking about Children.  Hatchette Book Group: New York, 2009.