One to One Academy – One mother to one daughter homeschool adventures.

Pinocchio

I don’t know how many of you may have read Pinocchio, I just know that my familiarity with the story came from the Disney movie. I was slightly reacquainted with characters while watching the end of the first season of Once Upon A Time (the tv show). I know I had never read the story myself, and I don’t recall anyone ever reading the story to me as a child. My daughter normally has story time with her father. This evening my husband was busy with something else he needed to complete before tomorrow, so I became drafted into reading or telling her a story.

I had recently reformatted a public domain copy of Pinocchio with clean, clear illustrations. My original thoughts when I was working with the book, was that my husband could use it for evening story time. According to her reading preferences he’s often re-reading old favorites, or the Boxcar Children series. All of these she’s well able to read for herself, often she’ll read farther along in the Boxcar Children book while he’s not home or even finish it but still sit and listen to him read it chapter by chapter.

I’m not sure what exactly caused me to start the book with her, perhaps it was her instance that someone read to her no matter what. Perhaps it was the fact that I know our current copy of Pinocchio will most likely have a number of OCR errors what will have to be corrected yet. But what ever the reason, I told her that if I was going to read tonight, I picked the story. My daughter who wants to control all things around her, wanted to know if she didn’t like the story would we still have to read the entire book. We then agreed that she’d have to at least listen to a few chapters before she could say she didn’t like it and stop the reading of the book.

I read her the first chapter tonight, and she seems very interested in the book. She gave me a thumbs up when we were done reading, and said we’ll need to continue the book. So we certainly will continue on.

I’m not sure what it is exactly but for a very long time, I wasn’t interested in reading “the classics”. Often mentioning the classics made want to either hug my pleasure reading books closer or run away and hide. Perhaps it was “the classics” I was asked to read in school. Perhaps I just wasn’t interested in more than reading for my own enjoyment. I’m not sure, I just know that any of the classics I had been asked to read I didn’t enjoy. I seem to remember liking Tom Sawyer, but I also seem to recall choosing to read it on my own.

When she was younger, I was not able to read to my daughter. I read in the neighborhood of 200-250 wpm (words per minute) and when I first tried to read picture books to her I found it extremely difficult to slow down enough to do so. I also found that books that didn’t make sense drove me nuts; which meant it was impossible for me to read Dr. Seuss Books to her. It took years for me to relearn how to slow down enough to read aloud, but I finally did. (Now the only problem I have with story books are different voices for the different characters, still not great with that.)

So having said all that why did I choose Pinocchio? Well, it’s listed in the Ambleside Online Curriculum Year 1 as one of their suggested additional free reads. (There are several others as well, and as time permits I may reformat some of them as well.) After having said all that I will share with you, my illustrated version of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi in either epub or mobi. (Please be assured that I will be correcting any errors I find as I go along, and will be uploading corrected versions when we are finished reading the book.)

Continuing On…

I see it’s been about a week since I last posted. I was trying to be more faithful than that with posts, but apparently I still need to work on that some. (Nothing new, I have been known to be a GREAT procrastinator.)

I haven’t completely ignored the blog, and we have been doing our classes which is good. In the non-class time, I’ve working on reformatting public domain books to make them more usable for us. I have a specific format I like my ebooks in, and I have the tools (and ability) to change ebooks to my preferred format. For some of the books I’ve found it takes a bit more work to find the free illustrated versions and some of the time, I have to add the public domain illustrations back into the book so that I can have an illustrated ebook. But before I create the ebook I like to clean up the aging that will often happen to the illustrations and try to return them to what I believe the original illustration was more like. Basically most older illustrations are either grayed or yellowed and slightly faded so I try to white balance and slightly enhance the saturation of the images.

There are two free tools I use to do these things. One is calibre which is a ebook management system with the ability to create ebooks in various formats. Typically I create a html version of the ebook which has the formatting the way I like. I save the html in .rar to store it in the smallest file size. From there I can create epub or mobi and a few other formats without a problem. As for the images, I use GIMP which is at least as powerful as Photo Shop (if not more) and free. It’s main down side is that it has a pretty steep learning curve to learn how to do everything but there are some great sites that can help. It also works great for digital scrapbooking!

When I have a few more of the public domain books cleaned up, etc I’ll share them in another post.

Keeping Track

One if my biggest concerns this year so far, has been how to keep track of the what, when, why and how of her classes. I started this year by adding her classes after the fact to a Google calendar. The downfalls of this solution was that I would have to remember to actually find the time to put the classes into the Google calendar along with approximately how long we spent on each subject. Or I’d have to go back a few days later and try to remember what, when and how long and any other notes I might find useful later. I did this for about a two weeks and found that it just didn’t work as well as I hoped.

Next was scheduling the classes in Google Calender. With this though I often found myself changing when something was done and it was extra work to edit the event to put in notes. The syllabus was also a work in progress didn’t seem to fit, because each subject was done individually and typically ended up with a LOT of moving things around if I didn’t get to something on the day I had intended. The more I planned ahead the more adjustment I would end of making if things went off schedule. So not really much better and in some ways worse.

Next I spend some time designing a spreadsheet for Google docs. What I liked was that I could look an entire week (with the way I designed it), I could color code or highlight this or that. I had a column for notes next to each of the classes for the day. I could easily add field trips, or our things like swim lessons or park/open gym days. I had made each week a separate sheet, so I could plug in a weeks in advance in the from the Ambleside Online Syllabus. The classes that I do daily with her (or try to) I wouldn’t fill in more than the current week because they were most likely to need rescheduling. Then with the week overview see what I hadn’t yet done, so switch around classes as I needed. I found that I was leaving things on their scheduled day, and just writing in the notes as we did the class. I was ending up with it not being an accurate record of our various days (or attendance) and would still need to change the syllabus or at least update it weekly.

Then I found HomesSchool SkedTrack. Which is what I’m currently using. What I like: online, free, no due dates for assignments (so they will automatically move to the next day for that class if not completed), you can select what days you have what class on, keeps track of the number of hours and what we’ve done, has a feature for field trips, crafts, and grading. It also shows a list of what’s scheduled that day, which you check off items when they’re done. List your activities by course and then you just do them in the order in which you have them listed. It can do grading for the courses as well. You can load classes and/or activities from a csv file. Which can be helpful if you’ve already started the year and want to log everything into the program. It will do reports as well. It doesn’t really have notes

It might not be perfect for what I want, but I often have an unrealistically high list of wants: free, online, android app available, weekly as well as daily schedule views, automatically updating assignments, field trips, projects or crafts, grading, attendance, tracking of hours/days of classes, reports and to me it’s important to be able to view or update from multiple devices. One of the more difficult of my wants is the free I know, but I like many others I don’t have a lot of extra money just sitting around. While I might say it doesn’t have to be free, I need it to be extremely reasonable since I only have 1 child I’m keeping records for.

One other quick note about grading. For the most part I don’t grade my daughter’s work. But when I have her do worksheet’s I’d like to be able to keep track of the number correct out of the total possible rather than only the percentage correct. For example if she is doing a worksheet (or even the questions in Life Of Fred) she may only have 5-10 to answer. Say the particular worksheet has 5 questions but she only had 4 right so 4/5 which is 80% easy enough. But say her next worksheet had 15 problems she did correctly. By going by percentage grades her average would now be 90%, but she’s had 19/20 over all which is 95%

Natural Science

We are currently using Burgess Bird Book for Children for one of her school books. The book has a wonderfully informative story format that is easy to read to my daughter. They keep her attention well, so having her narrate from it is fairly easy. I was noticing though that she was doing more about the interaction of the characters or what they were doing, then picking out the descriptions or some of the other differences. I realized that perhaps if I wanted her to focus more on the bird, and perhaps learn the way to tell them apart I’d need to take a slightly different approach.

I should mention that Burgess Bird Book for Children is a public domain book, that does have illustrations, even if the version on Gutenberg does not have them included. I was able to find the public domain illustrations online as well, and have created/edited the book to include color illustrations and better ereader formatting (a functional Table of Contents). If you are interested you may download the epub or mobi freely. I did some editing on the images as well, mainly some white balancing or color adjustments to compensate for the graying that usually occurs in older books.

When I was locating the images I found out that the same person who had done the illustrations had a number of coloring pages of most of the birds. It occurred to me that having her color the birds as I described them would help her remember the appearance of the various birds. Foolishly I appear to have misplaced the link I had originally found to the drawings (for coloring) so I had to do another search for them. This time while I was looking for them I came across another wonderful site for all sorts of coloring pages. This site has thousands of different coloring pages from basic to detailed so if you’re looking for a way to tie things together try: Super Coloring. You can also “color” the picture online and save the image if you prefer.

Today we tried this here, and it worked as well as I hoped it would. It has the added benefit of that she was listening specifically for what the birds looked like so she could color them. I will admit though since she can be a bit of a perfectionist I also pulled up computer images (after reading the descriptions to her and having her get started on them) to assist in her coloring. I’ve determined that currently this is the way I plan to handle the rest of the book with her. I also know her well enough to know that asking her to draw me a bird (of any sort) would not work well here. She doesn’t feel comfortable with her drawing and I don’t feel confident in mine either so I can’t teach her this. I do need to find a way to teach her drawing, and I think she’d be better for it, but I haven’t found a good inexpensive way yet.

Life of Fred

Several months ago I started looking for something to use to teach my daughter math. I wasn’t sure what to use, and most of the options I was seeing were expensive. Since I only have one child, it’s not as if I could justify a very expensive math program by saying well I can reuse it with “each” of the children. So I needed something reasonable priced, I didn’t want dry facts or drills. Somehow I found my way to Queen’s Homeschool. There I found a rather new math program that seemed to be less drill and a more interesting way to learn math: Life of Fred. There are currently 10 books in the elementary series and then three books in the intermediate series before the Fractions (or the Pre-Algebra) series. (It’s not recommended normally to start Fractions until 10 years old or 5th grade on their website.) Its all in story format, told from the point of view of 5 year old Fred who is a Math Professor at Kitten’s University. It’s not dry facts, but everything is presented as Fred uses the concept. It’s not abstract but useful to Fred.

What I found was intriguing, I also liked the price compared to the other math curricula I was seeing. I decided that it couldn’t hurt to try it at least it. So with that in mind I ordered the first two books. Once they arrived we managed to wait until the next morning before starting them. Then we read the first two chapters, and my daughter loved it. She wanted to read more, and I could see that she’s be happy to read the entire book in a day or two if I let her. I had to set some rules, remember I only had purchased two of them so far. The first book has 18 chapters, with each chapter being a fairly quick, easy read. With only 13 books and 4 years to cover I figured I had to find a way to slow her down a bit. So we do a chapter 3 times a week, and then she has worksheets the other two days. The work sheets currently are time, money and addition based, which I print from Worksheet Works. All the things I want to her know with a glance rather than need to take extra time to figure out.

Why do worksheets if I want a Charlotte Mason style education and living books? Well, the Life of Fred books are “designed to my your child THINK! and learn on their own” but also “Dr. Schmidt believes that basic math facts can be taught in an informal way using games and flashcards” (which means the books teach you the concepts, not the dull memorization). Personally I don’t know what game will teach my daughter to read an analog clock at a glace, and flashcards never seemed to work for me. I know my daughter is not me and could have a different learning style, where flashcards could help, but they didn’t seem to help as much with her learning sight words. Also I find it easier to give her her maybe 10 – 20 problems total to solve in the form of a worksheet. We both seem to be happy with the results of that, and it’s good for her to practice writing her numbers. It allows me to see where her strengths in math are and what needs a bit more work yet. When I’m comfortable that she can answer all the questions quickly and correctly, I move on to more difficult problems and we’ll be moving to written subtraction problems in due time. (She can answer oral subtraction problems already especially in the “story” format.)

Our 1st Grade Curriculum

My daughter is currently six. I’ve decided to use first grade curriculum with her instead of kindergarten. Mainly because her reading level is at the equivalent of fourth grade or more, and from what I can tell her math skills are at least first grade level. Last year was very informal for us, she was mainly allowed to follow her interests and play with occasional reading from mom. That makes this year our first planned year, even though the state we live doesn’t require us to register until the fall after she turns seven.

While I still have more to learn about Charlotte Mason’s philosophies and teaching method, I am trying to follow her style. Which is part of why I was so informal last year. I had tried to plan a bit of curriculum last year but it ended up falling to the wayside. This year when I needed to become more serious (particularly with my husband’s urging), I again tried to plan a curriculum but quickly felt overwhelmed with the variety of choices. And that was just following Charlotte Mason’s philosophies. Simply Charlotte Mason is a wonderful site with huge lists of ‘living books’ which can be search by subject and suggest grade levels. Unfortunately there were so many choices I was getting lost. Time was drawing near to when I should start classes, and I hadn’t picked anything more then the math books.

For our first few weeks I tried planning on my own, but quickly realized I needed something more concrete. While I was driving myself crazy, I found a very helpful post on Jimmie’s Collage site. It lists several different curricula based on living books. It’s a great post and lists many options, which I greatly appreciated. We needed something that wasn’t a complete single grade level, allowed me some flexibility without leaving me adrift, and something within our limited budget. With these things in mind I started looking at the listings of free curriculum based on public domain books. I was looking for something with a plan, that I could follow, and I ended up choosing Ambleside Online. I should mention not all the books in the booklist for Year 1 are public domain, but those that aren’t I have been able to find easily in our local library.

We are Homeschooling

As shown by the title of this blog, I’m homeschooling my daughter. Why? Well there is a whole list of reasons, one is bullying. I believe that bullying is far too prevalent in schools; I know it certainly was when I was in school and from everything I’ve hard it’s only become a bigger issue. Then there is the question of safety. I remember the winter of 2012 when all over the news was the Sandy Hook Elementary School incident, and realizing that was children there were my daughter’s age or just slightly older. I find the need for a police presence in schools to be horrifying as a parent. As well as metal detectors, locked doors, guards, and other “safety” measures. They must reassure some parents, but to me it’s scary as well as a sad commentary on modern life.

Another issue is class size, with homeschool I can give her individual attention and move as quickly or as slowly as we need to in every subject, a teacher with even five children in the class can’t do that, and most public school have between 25-30+ (at least last I knew). Which since she’s been reading since she before she was 4 1/2 and doing math story problems almost as long is very important. I can’t see putting her in a class with with children barely learning to read and her not being bored. Such boredom can only lead to bad things, either a severe dislike of school or only doing the minimum necessary to pass. Only thing worse would be for both options to apply.

I’ve researched for several years, and learned what I best like what Charlotte Mason had to say and her philosophies. Most of what I’ve read of her ideas I agree with completely, but not all. With that in mind I’m trying to give my daughter a Charlotte Mason style of education, with living books, broad subjects, short classes, lots of free time, and following my heart with the rest. Last year with her kindergarten year, I tried not to push things since CM (Charlotte Mason) preferred to waiting until they were 6 which I’ve always thought of as 1st grade age.

Now I said my daughter has been reading since she was 4 1/2 and doing math problems also. This is not because I’ve pushed her into reading or math. Reading came along because she was reciting the books back to us around age 4 or so, and if you turned back pages and pointed to a word on the page she’d tell you what it was. So I took her queues and started more formal reading lessons. For me the book Teach a Child to Read using Children’s Books was just what we needed. And my daughter LOVES to read which is why in less than a year she was reading at least at a 3 grade level. For math she played games with pennies, and during her evening story time with her father, they do math story problems with several additions or addition and subtraction in the problem.

Since she’s now in what I consider 1st Grade (though the public school system would put her in kindergarten because she didn’t go to public school last year) we’re being more formal with her education. The wide variety of options available with using Charlotte Mason were a bit daunting for me, so we’re currently using the free Ambleside Online syllabus. Most of the texts used are Public Domain which can be found online for free, and I’ve been able to find the other books in the local library. Personally I love the Public Domain books. I am able to get copies for my kindle and read from right from there at wherever we want.