View from my cell phone yesterday afternoon:
I was working with the three oldest children on Latin; they are doing a worksheet I wrote up to introduce them to the Latin-English dictionary. (In the foreground you can see the books we worked from for U. S. History earlier. In the background: my kitchen.)
Meanwhile, Hannah had the three emergent readers, who are all getting close to graduating from phonics to more text-based reading instruction. They're all between six and eight.
I know you're going to want to know more about how she teaches phonics to three children at once, and I promise I'll write about that next. I can do it too by following her methods, but she's really good at it. (Short answer: Several lap-sized dry erase boards, and a word list prepared in advance. I can take credit for the word list at least.)
Meanwhile, what were the 5yo and 3yo doing?
Having screen time:
Hey, we're not perfect.
One of the realities of having this many children learning in the house at once has been the judicious use of screen time. I like for screen time during the school day to be at least arguably part of learning time. Sometimes I allow educational candy like the games and videos on pbskids.org or National Geographic Kids, and sometimes Hannah allows the fitness-oriented games on her Nintendo Wii. Most often it's DVDs though -- I keep two separate binders of DVDs for kids, one of which is marked "Educational." Now, mind you, I am of the opinion that everything -- everything -- teaches, but some things teach more of what I want to teach than others. I try to pull from that binder during the school day. And there is always the library. In the photo above, the girls are watching a DVD of a theater production of "Cinderella."
The preschoolers' "together curriculum" is the least-planned. When we really got started co-schooling, we decided not to worry about them too much. We are together twice a week, and a homeschooled preschooler -- even a homeschooled kindergartener -- gets plenty of schooling on a M-W-F schedule. So it's perfectly fine to allow them lots and lots of free play on Tuesdays and Thursdays. And play they do: they are always weaving in and out of our school days in their princess dresses or their rain boots, toting dollies or toy swords as the mood strikes them, having tea parties and playing house.
Still, the little ones need two things from us. They need us to connect with them, to "collect" them, several times during the day. And they need to do work that they know is important and real.
We strike the balance between over-programming them and under-connecting with them by "semi-planning" their work. At the end of last school year, Hannah and I sat down together and went through the big catalogue and picked out several workbooks, curricula, and manipulatives that would be a healthy part of a good pre-K/K curriculum for the five-year-old, and that the three-year-old could also work with. Of course, we also each have a library of good read-alouds and our own collections of learning tools that we've curated over the years.
On any given school day together, we've got three or four different lessons ready that we can give to the little girls on short notice, whenever they come up and announce that they want to "do school." We also try to call them to the table for school at least once every school day together, and we try to gather them up for story time sometime at the beginning of the day. Too, they enjoy joining the older kids at their lessons once in a while; it's good to have extra coloring pages or maps printed for those occasions. (I'm not sure we could do this if we didn't each own a photocopier.) Any of us moms can run a lesson for the girls with little extra preparation, because we always have several things ready to go.
What kinds of lessons and activities work really well for this format?
- Identical workbooks, one for each child, kept as a set. Tear out the same page from each workbook and hand them out. We started with the Kumon workbooks. We choose the level based on what the five-year-old ought to be doing, figuring that the three-year-old can "tag along."
- Charlotte-Mason-style art appreciation. Show the children an art print and simply talk about it. It's surprising the direction the discussion can go. Afterward, they can try to copy the picture if they want. More ideas at Ambleside Online.
- If you're patient for the mess, some play dough is always nice.
- Shape stencils are also good. You can use them as if they were Montessori-style "metal insets."
- Quick "exploring" activities with the older kids' math manipulatives are fun. Pattern blocks, linking cubes, that sort of thing.
- Helping prepare the lunch and snacks, and set the table, is good for this age group.
- We have also bought a preschool music theory curriculum that takes five or ten minutes a lesson.
- Bible stories are a nice lesson to do together; even if your families aren't of the same religious denomination (and we are not), it is not usually hard to find a children's Bible you are both happy with. We like this one for the smallest kids -- it has little questions for narration built right in. Another book we like to use is a good illustrated Aesop, since the stories are short and classic.
- Look for more ideas in books about Montessori lessons. Here's one I have.
The ideal kinds of lesson for this format have this in common: they are relatively ready-to-go out of the box, so to speak; they lend themselves well to improvisation; they don't take a lot of time; they require minimal extra supplies that can be quickly grabbed; and they are easy to clean up. All one of us has to do when she finds herself needing to teach the little girls NOW is grab the supplies, which we try to have ready to go, clear a space on a table and go to it. A few minutes later the little ones are trotting off to something else, pleased as punch that they have "done school" just like the big kids.
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