Circle Time

I still can’t decide what to call this part of our school day. Will it be circle time (the ps nomenclature), morning basket, family time? I am taking suggestions…

At any rate, I can’t quite remember how I stumbled on this concept, but after reading about it on a few blogs (see links below) and the 4Real forums, I decided to add it to our day. To be more exact, I thought it would be a fantastic way to begin our day each morning. Getting together with the same set activities each morning would be the hook that lured us into our day, provide consistency, and hopefully provide a “container” for those activities I want to do, but are often so small that I forget them (picture study, memorization, etc)

Enter the new family time board and basket with outline. Each day we plan to cover:

• Calendar - Review month name. Place date on calendar. Do Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow cards.
• Weather - Review season card. Change weather wheel.
• Prayer -  Pray for weekly family. Alternate prayers as learned. Use Christmas Cards to create a family prayer file.
• Pledge - Recite
• Singing - Sing weekly song(s). One religious, one secular. Break up songs between other activities.
• Countdown - Remove link for current countdown. Beach trip, pumpkin patch, Dad home, Thanksgiving, Christmas, etc
• Memorize - Recite memory work. Read new and review from memory box.
• Sight Word - Review weekly sight word. Play sight word games.
• Learning - Do activity for this week’s learning. Place value, telling time to the hour, appropriate clothes for weather, sign language ABCs, learn phone number and address
• Picture Study - Point out/discuss picture. Review artist/picture name.
• Young Learners Bible Storybook - Do current day’s activity as per curriculum.
• Sing, Play, Create Activity - - Do current day’s activity as per curriculum.

This looks like tons of stuff, I know, but it will move really quickly. It takes all of two seconds to move the weather wheel and say that it is still summer. The pledge will take all of 15 seconds. Point to our picture study of the week and asking them to name some colors in the artwork will take less than a minute, unless they decide to discuss it more. I have also arranged the activities in such a way that John can drop out of participating about half-way through. The stuff near the end is more for Olivia.

Having put this into practice one day now I can say that it will take some training to make it all happen. We are already implementing Circle Time rules (ie. sit criss-cross applesauce, don’t pull on the board, etc) but that is good because Olivia needs a bit of that to help with other times she needs to sit still and pay attention.

Here is our portable family time board -- helpful for doing this one handed in the living room while nursing a baby ;-).

And on the back, pockets for holding the extra supplies and a velcro attachment for our flag.

And Workbox #1 which includes our binder, memory box, CDs, books and other supplies.

 

I have tried to plan out as much family time as possible here at the beginning of the year. Not getting stuck waiting for me to plan out the next section is a big key to success I believe. I have printed pictures for our art study through next May, I have prayer families chosen through the end of November from last year’s Christmas cards. I have other items printed and ready to go, songs chosen, etc. I do plan on taking December off (unless the kids revolt in which we may do a shortened version). These are all placed in the binder in page protectors with the monthly plans.

Looking at the board I am also beginning to think it needs a puppet friend to conduct one of the sessions, which would seal the success of family time in my house for years. Maybe I will shop for one this weekend. I will keep you posted on how this works!

Resources:

Preschoolers and Peace blog – She offers an e-book, but the blog is a fantastic resource on its own.

Wildflowers and Marbles Morning Basket post.

Pinewood Castle offers her fall circle time plans.

Wayzley Academy – The inspiration for the portable circle time board.

Memory system – Simply Charlotte Mason offers this scripture memory system. This is where our memory work will come from each day. I plan to use if for scripture, prayers, catechism and poetry, though.

September Plans – Here you can see or download our family time plans for the month of September.

Organizing Part 2: The Bookshelves

I “finished” this project a few weeks ago, but other pressing projects have kept me from posting about it until now.  As our little collection of living books grew and grew quickly (thanks in part to my friend Donna’s purging of her own homeschool library – used book sale!), I knew that I would need some way to get a handle on organizing what we had. It does no good to have fantastic living books on squirrels or the five senses or Abraham Lincoln if you don’t remember that you have the book when the time comes to study each subject.

Enter the book organization project, Library Thing, and a helper elf.

Library Thing is an online book organizing system that is even used by some schools and smaller libraries to catalog books. You can enter up to 100 books for free (yeah, who has fewer than 100 books?) but a lifetime membership and the ability to add an endless number of tomes is only $25. I also spent $15 on one of their Cue Cat bar code readers to facilitate my book entry process.

There are many wonderful things about Library Thing. First, your catalog is stored off-site and you can access it from anywhere. The technically savvy could even pull it up on their iPhone or Blackberry while in the bookstore to avoid duplicate purchases.  You can also share libraries with others. If there is someone local to you whom you share books with this would be a great way to see what they have on hand (hint, hint local gals). Library Thing also includes a link to WorldCat which will allow you to search for titles and will tell you the closest libraries to your zip code which carry those titles. Love this feature. Finally, the best feature of Library Thing are the unlimited number of tags you can add to a book to help you categorize your home library.

Organizing a home library is not an easy process. In fact, I was quite daunted by it and put it off for a while. One day, though, I called in my Helper Elf (pre-teen from homeschool group out to make some spending money) and decided it could be put off no longer. Since you know I have to do before and after shots, when we started the bookshelves in the school room looked like this:

Umm, yeah, not looking so good, and the likelihood of finding anything was pretty small. So here are the steps we took to remedy the situation:

Step 1: Clear all the shelves and stack books by topic.  I had decided to organize the books by subject and then alphabetically by author. Each subject would get its own colored dot on the spine and be stored together. My subjects included: science and nature, math, language arts (includes literature and reading), social studies (includes history, geography, and civics), the arts, activity books, religion, and educational reference/homeschooling.

Step 2: Add the dots. Once we had huge stacks of books all about the room, Helper Elf stuck the colored dots on the spine of each book.

Step 3: Enter data into Library Thing. I would then take a stack of labeled books and scan the bar code or type in the ISBN or title to enter the book into Library Thing.  Once a books was entered, I would then tag it with the subject (science, math), the color of the dot (peach, green, blue), and then the topics covered in the book (farm, squirrels, American History, Civil War, etc). One note: the barcode scanner worked okay. Honestly it was probably just a quick to type in the ISBN number from the rear of the book, so if you want to save the $15 don’t feel like the scanner is a must. I will say the scanner automatically put the book in your library. Typing the number pulled up a “list” of books (often the only book on the “list” was the one you were after). It then took an extra mouse click to add the book to your library. On the other hand, at least half the time I had to swipe a book more than once to get the bar code to scan, so time saved on the extra click is a toss-up. Also, I had a small stack of books by private publishers that were not in the Library Thing catalog. I was able to enter the information for those books manually to put them in my library.

Step 4: Alphabetize and store. Once an entire section of colored dots were completed, we would alphabetize the section by author and add them to the shelves.

What does this mean for me?

Searching by Theme: Now when I want a book on a particular topic I can click on the descriptive tag (i.e. farm) and see every book I own and where it is stored. Some farm-themed books may be under math, activity, science, or literature, but Library Thing helps me to find them all.

Searching by Subject: I can also simply click on a subject tag like math or science and see my entire library for that subject. Since we are in the younger grades I might as well teach on the topics we already have books for instead of buying new ones and this helps with that process.

Not to mention, my shelves now look much better:

As you can see, I now have room for even more books! My Library Thing Library only has just over 400 right now. (Only homeschool books are entered. I am not even planning on entering personal reading books at this point.)

My next big plans for Library Thing are to add in all the ebooks that I own and to catalog my audio books as well. Most of those will have to be added manually, but it is so important as right now they are just a list of computer files, and I would be hard pressed to find anything relevant to a subject when I wanted it. Once they are sorted and tagged, though, it will be info at my fingertips. Of course I also have to maintain my catalog and I am tagging, entering, and filing new books as they come in to the house.

More info coming soon in other posts about shopping for books and how Library Thing can help you organize the books you don’t own (yes, I really said that).

Organizing Part 1

The school room has been in desperate need of some organization. Now that I am done with work, I am taking advantage of the time my sitter is here to get some of that done. Today’s chore was to tackle the arts and crafts closet.

I meant to take a “before” photo before I got started, but forgot. I think you can get the gist of how bad it was from these two photos – one of the partially unloaded closet and one of the partially loaded table.

And now for the “after”:

We don’t have tons of stuff yet (and I should note that I have many more mostly adult-type craft items on shelves in my master bedroom closet). I do think there is room for expansion.  What is good right now is that I don’t have to stack many boxes. I am much more likely to put things back in their place if I don’t have to dig into stacks to do it.

The thing I hate about organizing things like this is that it is hard to group like-things together. I ended up with a box that held velcro and magnets and another that held feathers, ribbons, some craft kits, doilies, and wiggle eyes. Fortunately most are open baskets so easy to see into. To help solve this I may get a couple of over the door shoe organizers with clear pockets to hold the small, odd packs of things that just seem to multiply. I can hang them on the backs of the doors. I also think a paper towel holder to hang on the wall in there would free up that shelf space. The closet is pretty deep so might as well use that side wall space.

My next job is to tackle the book shelves and book organization.

Workboxes are Awesome!

I stumbled across the idea of workboxes weekend before last while cruising some of the homeschool message boards. Check out the concept on Leslie's blog here and on the official website here.  As you can see from that information, workboxes are a great system to manage time with multiple students and promote independent work in all ages.

While it won't be long before encouraging independence is something we want to do, at first I thought that workboxes might be too rigid of a system to work well for us. The moms on the homeschooling forums were so excited I was drawn into the threads, and the phrase that kept catching my attention was that the system kept THEM accountable and allowed them to be more organized. That really resonated with me. I have long been a planner of great plans, but have often fallen short on execution. I can do a set of lesson plans the beginning of the week, and never be able to execute those plans as the week goes on. For some reason, things just don't get done.

One ebook download and one trip to Target later and enter the workboxes.

I think what makes the system work is that there is a place to put everything I need to execute my plans. I have a large basket where I keep all the resources for the week. On Sunday I sat down with a planning grid and filled in what I wanted to put in each box, each day -- or what activities we were going to complete each day.

Now, all I have to do each evening is check the grid for the activity, grab what I need to complete the activity, and put it in the box. The next day we work through the boxes one by one. When we finish the activity, the resource goes back into the main box to be used again next time.

If we are doing an art project I can put the supplies needed in the box (I still have to be careful what I leave out with John running around). I can throw in a puzzle, CD, activity bag, game, book to read, etc.

The photo above shows our boxes for tomorrow (we have gymnastics and errands in the morning, so I planned a light day). Here is what we have planned.

1. Reading about the baptism of Jesus from our children's Bible.
2. Sing "Go to the Zoo" and practice the signs from our ASL sign book -- Pick Me Up.
3. Read portions of Animal Homes (a go-along with our Before Five in a Row book for this week -- Katy No-Pocket).
4. A page from What Your Preschooler Needs to Know Activity Book.
5. A go-along activity with A Pair of Socks our math reader for the week.
6. A Jazz for Kids CD -- we will sing, dance, and play instruments to a few songs.

So you see, workboxes can be used with a very relaxed style of preschooling, yet still help keep mom going in the right direction. Each of the activities will take less than ten minutes, most about five, so we are talking less than an hour of "school" with many activities being very non-schoolish.

Look for more posts coming soon about our current plans and how we are using workboxes to accomplish those plans.

Habits and Routines

“’Habit is ten natures.’ If that be true, strong as nature is, habit is not only as strong, but tenfold as strong. Here, then have we a stronger than he, able to overcome this strong man armed.” – Charlotte Mason

Charlotte Mason believed strongly in the power of the habit. In fact, discipline (or the formation of good habits) was one of her three definitions of education. Her thought was that children will develop habits regardless of what we do as parents. Do nothing, and poor habits may develop. But if you train and work with the child you can foster the development of good habits. In fact, the number one thing she encouraged mothers of the under six set work on was habit training.

So that is where we are. We are going to focus on the idea of habits and training for good ones as well as changing any bad ones that we have developed. And I am not talking the royal “we” here. Miss Mason firmly believed, and rightly so, that adults can not expect their children to have good habits of their own if the parents are exhibiting bad ones. So in addition to working on my children, I also have to work on myself.

We are starting with daily routines. We are focusing on the morning routine of getting up, dressed, and completing chores before becoming distracted by entertainments or having to rush out the door for activity. To that end I have created a routine checklist for Olivia to use in the morning and evening. This not only facilitates the formation of the morning routine, but I hope in time, it will give Olivia cause to be more independent in these tasks. Right now I am standing there and working through with her, but in time I will loosen the strings and have her complete more and more on her own.

The idea for and the graphics for these charts came from one of the nice moms on the Ambleside Year0 Yahoo Group. I modified her list into a chart with a space to add a check-off (in our case a smiley face). I knew this touch would be something Olivia would appreciate. She likes to check the list just like mama does. I printed these on cardstock, laminatd them,  and use velcro dots to attach the faces. We take the faces off in the morning and right before the evening routines and put them in a basket. After completing each task Olivia goes to the basket, retrieves a face, and puts it in the proper position before moving on to the next task.

As I said, today was only our second day so I am still standing by to walk her through, but over the next couple of weeks I plan on sending her in there to work through herself more and more. She has been very excited by this and anxious to complete the list and put on the faces. We do need to lay clothes out the night before, and I will still have to help with hair brushing and the bed, but I want her to take the impetus to get it done even if she needs my assistance.

If you would like a copy of the routines, you can get a PDF version of both sets of routines.  A Word version is available if you would like to change the order or items to suit your family. I am not

• PDF of both sets of routines
• Morning Routines in Word
• Evening Routines in Word