Chickafinty ~ A Life in the Laundry

Why am I not surprised

When I returned to full time teaching in 2005, schools were abuzz with this new "wonderful" numeracy programme called "Count Me In, Too".  CMIT required specially trained staff members to implement the programme,  and a huge sum of money spent on resources like counting teddies (in three different sizes and four different colours), laminated feet, number cards, ducks, in short, just about anything you could think of.  I remember one staff member from a school I taught in, arriving in the staffroom bleary eyed having sat up past 11pm the previous evening laboriously cutting out and laminating a bucket load of resources for this amazing new programme.  As a relative outsider (I was a casual teacher at the time) it seemed a waste of time, resources and money.

When I tried to implement the programme at my new school I was foxed at every turn.  There weren't enough resources in the resource room, and as I was last in to the school I was also last into the resource room.  You can guess what was left in there.  Yeah, pretty much nothing.  I ended up wasting my own time, money and resources making these amazing new games.  CMIT was all about games.  Games and strategies that would "teach" the kids numeracy skills.  In my experience the kids were very good at playing the games, but as soon as they were presented with real maths, they baulked.  In my opinion CMIT was worse than useless, because all the numeracy time was wasted with playing these ludicrous, resource-ridden games, and none was spent actually teaching the principles of mathematics.  As with any whizz bang new programme, the bright kids picked up on the concepts in spite of the programme and the rest were left floundering.

Which brings me to the article I read on news.com.au this morning.  Apparently, kids in the upper primary years were failing in their numeracy skills...remembering of course that these are the kids raised on a steady diet of CMIT in the lower and middle primary years.  So they introduced a new programme into the schools at enormous cost to help those kids who were failing at upper primary maths (possibly because the counting teddies weren't being used any more).  This programme has turned out to also be a failure.

The programme cost each school between $42K and $52K depending on the number of teachers trained.

The maths textbook that I use with our kids is second to none on training them in maths.  It caters to the very competent, and it helps the ones who need a bit of a push.  The capable kids can work on the book without help from the teacher.  The middle group can work on it with a little help, and the teacher could focus on the strugglers without anybody losing out.  The textbook costs $15.95 and there are two per grade.

For less than $12000 the whole of Years 3-6 (assuming 3 classes of 30 student per grade) could be supplied with a decent maths textbook, no teacher training required and my money says you'd actually get kids leaving Year 6 who could do maths, not just play games with teddies.  Better still, you could get the parents to fork out for half the textbooks and the school could save another $6000.  This textbook requires only base-10 blocks, no other teaching resources are needed.  That's another saving for the school.

I wish schools would stop chasing after the newest shiny penny and get on with the business of teaching kids.

DISCLAIMER: This is not aimed at my teaching colleagues, who are merely pawns in the bureaucratic system that passes for schooling in 2012.  My collegaues work long, thankless, disheartening hours within a system that they have no power to change.  These "brilliant ideas" don't come from those working at the chalkface, they come from higher up, and my bile is raised against those higher-ups, not my professional colleagues.

You can tell it has been a big week

The harder we work on school, the more out of control the house gets.

Just saying.

The Clone Wars

with apologies to Miss Kelton, Miss Rolfe, Mr Ware and Mrs McSweeney.

It's no real secret that Ladybaby is a little clone of her mother.  House too quiet?  She'll be curled up somewhere with her latest book.  Sleeping upside down in her bed?  She's worried the fan will come off its moorings in the night and figures that her legs could withstand the damage better than her face.  Can't sleep at night?  Curl up on Mum and Dad's floor and watch their DVD until she goes off to sleep again.  (It's ok...it's Apollo 13 at the moment so nothing unsuitable.)

Clone of her mother much?  Mmmmm.

If that was all, it'd be fine, but alas, no, it isn't.

In my darlingly precious Ladybaby I have met my mathematical nemesis.  I am being punished in the next generation for the grey hair I inflicted on the last.  There are simply not words to describe how awesomely difficult it is to get mathematical concepts into that beautiful little mind.  A little lady who throws around words like diabolical and succulent, who discusses politics and religion with ease and understands anything to do with language almost instantly cannot remember that when a question contains the word "more" you use addition, and when it contains the word "less" it's a subtraction question.  It has taken us four days to do four pages of almost identical questions based around less and more in her maths workbook.  It takes, on average, half an hour per page or 7.5 minutes per question.  The questions aren't difficult.  Tony has 10 stickers and Sarah has 8 more.  How many stickers does Sarah have? That sort of question. 

Today, bless them, the book people decided to make a slightly more complicated question to challenge the maths brainiacs that use the book.  Someone's got this number of ribbons.  X are red ribbons, some number more are blue ribbons.  There are y fewer green ribbons than red ribbons and all the rest are yellow.  How many yellow ribbons does she have?

Oh, spare me.  It took 15 minutes to laboriously tease out the answer.  Fifteen long, long, long minutes.  I should be getting the dinner right now, but I have to debrief first.  My psyche is a bit fragile right now.

The one thing she does have going for her is something I didn't acquire until much later in life and that is the ability to remember a few immutable mathematical facts, to wit 10-1=9, and 5+3=8 and so on.  She's memorised quite a few of these number facts and they do reduce the stress levels a bit, but OH, MY, GOODNESS...my match, met it is.

It's just like teaching me and it's very, very scary.

Making lists

Yesterday's post about homeschooling got me thinking.  I tend to forget that learning takes place outside of seat-work.  Seventeen years in public education will do that to you.

This morning school began with a listing activity.  Both kids got a whiteboard marker and got busy making lists for Saturday's party.  We're having a 40th for Yours Truly, just for the immediate family, and so we needed to construct a guest list and a party food list.  Chickabid did the guests and the Duchess did the food. 

Now this is a pretty bog-standard undertaking when planning a party, but think of the teaching/learning opportunities involved.  There was:

* spelling

* handwriting

* maths (counting guests and dishes)

* creative arts (laying out the writing in an attractive way)

* food and nutrition (balancing the quantities of savoury and sweet foods)

* time management (running through the food list and working out what can be prepared ahead of time and what needs to be done right before serving)

* HSIE Celebrations (in context in the natural environment)

Tomorrow we will create a decorations list and then head off on a field trip to source and buy what we need for the party.  The kids will have a clipboard with the party needs on a worksheet and then we'll price all the stuff and Mr. Mathematics will add it up for us.  (Can I just say it is so useful having a mathematics genius on shopping trips.  He's better than a calculator!  Remind me to tell you about him and 3 level subtraction some time.)  We'll also do the grocery shopping and some necessary health and beauty stuff - read for that that I need a haircut!

Birthdays are, as always, non-school days.  We have a cardinal rule: no school on birthdays (don't you LOVE homeschooling) and usually Mister Bear takes a day's annual leave and we spend the day together as a family.  As he's just had a week's annual leave we felt it would be greedy to ask for another day off, so he won't be home tomorrow :(  But the kids and I will get busy on the business end of party preparations.  No school doesn't equal no learning and we will squeeze everything we can out of it.

Subject order

I've come to realise just how important subject order is in homeschooling.  At school subject order is pretty much predetermined: english in the morning session, maths straight after recess and the rest of the day sort of divided up between the other KLAs. 

Homeschooling is different.  There's no bell governing the start and finish of sessions (thank goodness) but there's also no external signal that says "It's time to work".

Subject order is therefore essential in determing the pattern (and success) of the day.  I seem to have hit on a subject order that works for us.

Read aloud - at the moment it is James and the Giant Peach, next in line is Wind in the Willows.

Biblical Studies - we're just about to begin the story of Moses and the flight of the Israelites out of Egypt (we've just looked at Egypt, pharoahs and pyramids in History so the kids will have some background knowledge)

Writing - combination of handwriting, comprehension and self-generated text (Writing Lessons for the Well-Trained Mind)

Mentals - Maths Plus Mentals Year 1 and Year 3

Mathematics - Test Your Maths Year 3, Easy Learn Maths 1B

Morning Break

Phonics

Spelling

Grammar

Handwriting

Comprehension

History

Lunch Break

Science

Social Studies

Art/Craft

Extra

This order seens to work really well.  The kids stay focussed and each piece of works feeds nicely into the next.

Just another valuable lesson that homeschooling has taught me.

Thick as two short planks

It has plagued me for going on 14 months.  How do I record what the kids are doing for school each day?  They work almost every day and we have all the books etc to show for it, but how to record on a daily basis was something that has completed eluded me.  Being a perfectionist I tried the diary appraoch as suggested, but that ended up being 4 A4 pages per day with every itty bitty detail in it and before the end of the first week I was already behind in writing it up.  I tried proformas, I tried custom made charts, I tried timetable format and nothing worked.

Yesterday while the kids were working I was mulling this over and the light dawned.  The diary record doesn't have to be detailed.  It's not for anyone but me to keep track of and it is meant as a checkpoint to see that we are working through everything that we are supposed to be wokring through.

Duh.

I grabbed my 2010 diary and just started in.  Two lines per subject; one for him, one for her; page number completed, quick note about what was easy or hard and done!

Not the sharpest knife in the drawer sometimes.

Everything you ever wanted to know about...SPACE

• the planets are Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune Chickabid
• Pluto is a dwarf planet Chickabid
• Mercury is the second hottest planet even though Mercury is closer to the sun than Venus Chickabid
• Venus is hotter because its atmosphere is very thick.  The thick atmosphere makes Venus hotter because it stops the heat escaping Chickabid
• the sun is much bigger than our planet, Earth The Duchess
• Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars are rock planetsChickabid
• Jupiter and Saturn are gas planets Chickabid
• Uranus, Neptune and Pluto are ice planets Chickabid
• all the planets are very far away from each other Chickabid
• Saturn and Uranus and Neptune have ice rings that go around them Chickabid
• there was a man who walked on the moon and his name was Neil Armstrong The Duchess
• the moon is smaller than the earth The Duchess
• the orange fuel tank on the space shuttle wasn't always orange The Duchess
• the first two space shuttles had a white fuel tank The Duchess
• they stopped painting it white because it was less heavy when it was orange The Duchess
• Neptune is closer to Pluto than all the other planets The Duchess
• the Moon is a very cold place at night, and really hot during the day Chickabid
• twelve people have walked on the moon...Chickabid
• there were seven moon missions, but only six of them got to land on the moon's surface Chickabid

more information coming soon along with some videos that we have found and pictures of our lapbooks about Space.

 

 

Trade offs

When we began this new Homeschooling life, we knew that it would involve some compromises. I would no longer be able to work outside the home and we'd be completely dependent upon one income. We knew that we wouldn't have a lot of things and we knew that time generally would be a commodity thin on the ground.
There were things that we thought would be easier...the morning rush hour immediately springs to mind. We knew that some things would be harder like making ends meet.
But there were other things that we couldn't have known. I didn't realise that my Monday night drive to GFS would be one of the most treasured pleasures of the week. It's a ten minute block of time in each direction in which no one is clamouring for my attention. It's complete silence and Iove it.
I didn't realise that parents and kids could have so much fun together. When they are babies they're so needy. As toddlers and especially three year olds they can be abominable. But just ad they turn into something approximating pleasant to be around, we pack them off to school and to the endless round of after school activities. If we have 15 minutes to spend with them doing nothing but 'being' with them we're doing well.
I guess what I am trying to say is that being with the kids 24/7 is pretty hard and full on and unrelenting, but the trade off is that I get to spend a lot of time getting to know my kids and discovering how they think, what makes them laugh, what makes them angry and what makes them the fabulous little people that I love. Nothing beats that.

Proud Mama

We got Chickabid's NAPLAN results this week.

He got into Band 4 for Reading, Spelling and Numeracy and Band 5 for Grammar and Punctuation.

We were thrilled to bits :) :)

He scored righton the average for Reading, a bit below average for spelling, above average for Grammar/Punctuation and abover average for Numeracy.

We couldn't be happier :)

Well done, little man.

Progress report

Well.

It's the end of Semester One and the traditional reporting season has arrived.  Our homeschooling experience is 6 months old and it would seem appropriate to look back on the last six months and look at how far we've all come.

DESCHOOLING

At school, everything fits neatly into a box.  We've only got five hours of classroom time a day, so there has to be a definable purpose in everything that we do.  It has to fall under one of the key learning areas, it has to be outcomes based, it has to be assessable, preferably immediately or at least by the end of the week or the end of the unit.  Literacy takes first place and absorbs the first two hours of the day.  Maths takes up another hour and the remaining two hours are divvied up amongst the other four KLAs, or those two hours are devoted to the lastest thought bubble from the Board of Studies...the COGs unit.

Homeschooling is NOT like that.  Homeschooling is more about home than school.  It's about learning through life.  A large percentage of learning doesn't fit neatly into a box and it's really hard to quantify and record. 

The academic part of the day is relatively easy to report on.  We spend the morning doing maths, phonics, spelling, grammar, reading, copywork and writing.  We watch For the Juniors and write reports.  We draw, sing, use the computer, write narrations, cook, garden (or just dig!), and we talk.  We talk lots.  I answer questions all day long.  Easy questions like how do you draw a map of Tasmania freehand, to difficult questions like how does the space shuttle get into space...questions that stretch my (considerable) general knowledge to its fullest extent...questions that require a "I don't know.  Lets' find out!" answer.  A lot - and a mean a LOT - of learning is incidental and culmulative.  It's jolly difficult to record this kind of learning.  At school we're constrained by timetables, by delivering curricula to a large number of children with hugely differing abilities.

Where homeschooling is concerned, deschooling has been my biggest difficulty.

(more coming)