Valerie, who has more kids than I do, has a nice post up in which I learn a new buzz phrase:
I've hit upon something with multi-level teaching, in which I try to cover as many topics as I can with as many kids as I can. In other words, much of our learning takes place as a family, with essentially math and language arts being taught individually (for the most part).
I only have the one school-ager and then an up-and-coming pre-schooler, but this approach is already making a lot of sense to me. When I made out my daily schedule for this year I broke the instructional day up into three chunks:
- working intensively with my second-grader while the preschooler is busy with a video or a project;
- working intensively with my preschooler while the second-grader is doing independent work;
- "family learning," in which we all enjoy the same thing, although often in different ways.
"Family learning" is surprisingly broad. It can include listening to Spanish or Latin audio materials, most of the stuff that I read aloud, art appreciation, nature study, and timeline/map work. It also includes the morning chores we all do together, and sometimes cooking.
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