Math and Science: AIMS for Primary Grades
Looking for activities that integrate math and science for your young learner? Look no further than AIMS Education Foundation. Their activities are concrete and hands-on, just right for primary-age learners. They are also good exercises for beginning home school parents who need lots of guidance, while more experienced home educators will find them flexible as well as academically solid.
AIMS is so confident that teachers will like their products that they offer many free lessons on their website. When browsing their activity books, choose the preview option. This provides not only the table of contents for that book, but also a list of the math and science skills addressed within the lessons and one free, complete sample lesson to print or download.
Whether you are looking for math or science lessons, literature connections, equipment, or math manipulatives, AIMS can get you started in the right direction.
The exercises are designed for groups, but they work fine with just a parent and child working as partners. Writing is involved in all of the lessons, sometimes as simple tally marks or X’s, sometimes as a paragraph, summary, or story. Don’t hesitate to take dictation for your child for the latter, allowing your child to freely and easily express ideas without getting hung up on the actually writing.
I recommend the following season-themed books to get you started with your K-2 student:
Fall into Math and Science
Free Lesson: “Apples a Peel to Me”
Glide into Winter with Math and Science
Free Lesson: “Catch Me if You Can”
Spring into Math and Science
Free Lesson: “Floating Fruit”
As you work through these activities in conjunction with daily arithmetic concepts, you will see your child make important connections between math and science studies and the real world.
Getting Started: Your Reasons for Homeschooling
Homeschooling is a marathon, not a sprint. It is a lifestyle choice, not a school choice. It requires time, energy, patience, and much love and forgiveness. With this in mind, a family’s decision to home school should be a thoughtful one, not something whimsical or reactionary.
What exactly are your reasons for home schooling? Take a minute to write them or down right now before you finish reading this post.
Now consider the following reasons that other people choose homeschooling.
Educational: Your child is being given “busy work” at school because he/she finishes assignments quickly and must wait for classmates to finish their work. Your child is struggling in school and needs extra help. You are appalled by the amount of homework your child brings home after spending all day at school. You have been successful in teaching your child many life skills, and you view academics as an extension of that. You love reading to your child and teaching your child new things. You disagree with the philosophy of public schooling. Much time in public school is spent on classroom management instead of academics. Your child’s teacher is swamped with the demands of the classroom and is unable to spend time correcting your child’s errors. You disagree with the school’s policies. You have genuine concerns about the school or teacher which the administration is either unable or unwilling to address.
Academic: You want your child to be taught subjects that your school doesn’t offer. Your school teaches ideas that directly contradict what you have taught or desire to be taught to your children. Children learn best within a small group, not a packed classroom. You want the focus of your young child’s education to be the three R’s. Your child’s school consistently yields low test scores in math, reading, and writing. Your school encourages children to rediscover concepts rather than using direct instruction to impart these concepts to students in an efficient manner. You want to give your older child more freedom to pursue an individualized education.
Social: Your child’s peer group at school disturbs you. Your child is unhappy at school due to bullying, lack of friends, or not fitting in. Your child is being swayed negatively by peer pressure.
Familial: The school’s schedule negatively impacts your family. The school calendar prevents you from taking your child on trips. You don’t like sending your children away for eight hours each day. Your work schedule prevents you from spending much time with your children after school. Your family’s circumstances require frequent moves.
Physical: Your child is handicapped and could use some personal space and privacy during the school day. You are ill or handicapped and have come to realize that time with your child is a precious commodity. You child has medical issues such as diabetes, allergies, seizures, etc. which require frequent doctor visits, daily management, and personal adjustment.
Religious: You believe that God has placed upon parents the responsibility of educating their children. The school curriculum and culture are secular, denying the existence of God and stifling the expression of your child’s faith.
Emotional: Your child needs your love and discipline every day, not just in the evenings and on weekends. You child has experienced a loss or traumatic event that requires your attention.
Reading through this list may have caused you to rethink and refine your reasons for homeschooling. I hope so, because if you have a solid base on which to build your homeschool, the storms of life will be less likely to distract you from your purpose or shift your priorities. If you haven’t already edited the list you wrote at the beginning of this post, you should do that now. Keep it. Refer to it when in doubt of your choice or to answer questioning family members and friends. Use it as a motivator in shaky time.
The Handwriting Debate
An idea floating about our culture is that cursive handwriting is just one method of making marks on paper and that the method doesn’t matter. I think that is simplistic and erroneous.
Making marks on paper via a pencil creates neural pathways that help connect the task to the thought. The shaping of the letters helps children to connect phonics to the words being formed. The creation of capital letters and lower case letters helps to teach the proper capitalization because it requires thought and effort to create the different shapes and sizes. Add cursive to the mix and you have the opportunity to further these advantages.
Many educators claim that cursive handwriting is outdated in this digital age, but I wonder if the effort involved in teaching proper, legible, beautiful handwriting is the real issue, because that requires significant time and one-on-one interaction with the writer. After all, computer programs to teach keyboarding require very little teacher involvement—the programs are self-correcting and provide copious flashes of lights, cute sounds, and bright colors to keep children interested in the task. Educators also claim that cursive is low on their list of daily priorities and that there isn’t time during the day even if they were so inclined to teach it.
The final product of penmanship is a personal creation unlike anyone else’s, even when a group of children have all written the exact same words. On the other hand, a computer-generated and printed word document containing that same text will typically have the same appearance whether created by a child or an adult since readers have a narrow range of acceptable font styles and sizes for documents.
In addition to cognitive and artistic benefits to cursive handwriting, remember that in order to read cursive writing well, one needs to write it. Personal notes from friends and family, journals, letters, lists, recipes, nad other family and historical documents documents fill our lives. Our country’s founding documents were written in beautiful cursive for all to read, and American citizens should be able to read these for themselves rather than depend upon someone else’s transcription of them into print.
The debate on this won’t end any time soon. In the meanwhile, you can read other people’s opinions here at CBS News and the Washington Post.
Science: A General Guide
It’s summer, so I’m thinking about science. Myriad animals – mice to moose –are out and about. Breezes carry scents of metabolizing plants. Storms and stars catch our imaginations. Cave, rocks, and mountains beckon. Our world is an amazing place, so when it comes to science, let that wonder and excitement be front and center whether it’s summer or not.
Actively involve your child in the world and develop process skills such as observing, categorizing, measuring, gathering and recording data, interpreting data, inferring and predicting, and, of course, “publishing” findings.
Keep interesting pets. Grow houseplants and gardens. Watch meteor showers. Hike. Use field guides to identify anything and everything. Feed birds. Visit zoos, museums, gardens, planetariums, and aquariums. Study different methods of marking the passage of time. Pan for gold. Hatch chicks. Keep a personal growth chart including height, weight, hands, and feet. Experiment in the kitchen. Use simple tools. Collect plants and leaves using a plant press. Make things that fly and float and glide. Build snow and ice structures. Document changes from season to season with photos, sketches, and calendars. Grow crystals. Make models, displays, and collections. Borrow or buy a microscope with prepared slides and blanks. Create rainbows with crystal prisms. Experiment with lenses and mirrors, vibrations and music. Follow websites such as the USGS volcano observatory and UAF’s aurora forecast. Build outdoor fires and cook in the flames and coals. Explore tide pools, ponds, swamps, and creeks. Record weather, temperatures, and sunrise/sunset each day for a month. Soak your sandbox and build castles.
Your child is immersed in a world just waiting to be explored. Who knows what you might discover when you explore it together.
Getting Started: Know your State’s Laws
Some states require that parents notify the local school district of intent to homeschool; some do not. Some require an outline of coursework to be used; others do not. Some states are homeschool-friendly; others make homeschooling more difficult. Whatever the case, every parent contemplating homeschooling must know the laws that apply in their particular state of residence.
The best resource that I’ve found for understanding homeschooling laws is the Home School Legal Defense Association which is located in Purcellville, Virginia. If you aren’t already familiar with this organization, you need to bookmark their website, hslda.org, and make it a regular stopping point for legislative news. This group is an “advocacy organization established to defend and advance the constitutional right of parents to direct the education of their children and to protect family freedoms.” How neat is that!
You might be thinking, “I can get the same information from my state’s Department of Education or the local school district.” That would be convenient, and should be the case, but it isn’t necessarily true. Most school administrators and teachers I have met are unfamiliar with the laws, and the website for your state may post incomplete or inaccurate information pertaining to homeschooling. For example, I compared HSLDA’s summary of Alaska’s laws with what is posted on the Internet for the State of Alaska. Alaska’s law is clear that a family may homeschool with great freedom, completely independent of any school district, yet the website gives the impression that all homeschoolers in the state affiliate themselves with one of the many districts that offer “homeschool” or “correspondence” programs. You may see these for yourself at the following web addresses:
- HSLDA’s Legal Analysis – http://www.hslda.org/laws/analysis/Alaska.pdf
- State of Alaska website – http://education.alaska.gov/parents.html
Be informed. Trust the staff of HSLDA. They are committed to homeschooling and will give you the legal facts you need.
Dictionary of Home Schooling
Home Scholar
-noun
A student who conducts most of his or her formal studies at home rather than in a public or private school; a home-taught pupil
“The home scholar quickly shelved his penmanship journal and reached for the new math project he’d been anticipating.”
* * * * *
Secondary Home Scholar
-noun
The home educator who suddenly understands a myriad of concepts somehow missed during his or her own K-12 education
“Despite having earned a Master’s of Education at the state university, Mom just learned that essential phonics rule of ‘c followed by e, i, or y makes the soft s sound’ as in cent, city, and cynic.”
Why Home School?
As I listened to Dr. Raymond Moore on the radio in 1985 so many thoughts zoomed through my head. By the end of the interview, I was convinced by his well-reasoned and supported arguments that home schooling was The Way to go. His most persuasive statement was that home schooling allows a child to learn in a way that is best suited for him or her. Formal education, especially learning to read, could wait until the child was developmentally ready. Our modern grouping of all children into grade levels based solely on their ages didn’t take into account variations in readiness and personality. Better Late Than Early became my secret motto as I encountered children who struggled unnecessarily in a classroom environment. So, as a young, 23 year old, beginning public school teacher, I chose home schooling as the future for my future children.
As the years passed, other reasons for home education became obvious. Home schoolers choose their own curriculum. They focus their children on family and learning rather than a peer group. Parents control not only what is taught but how, when, and who does it. Bullying, teasing, and peer pressure are minimized. The family is not held hostage by the public school schedule or calendar. Special talents can be nurtured. Medical issues can be privately and effectively managed.
At one point in our home schooling I realized that we had moved to four different towns in four years. Our lives were in an upheaval because of a medical diagnosis that required me to be close to doctors, but the moves barely effected our elementary age children. Our family was the center of their lives, not children from the local school. In those four years, we continued our studies as normal and explored our new surroundings, finding excitement and adventure everywhere, but having a relatively constant, calm, and peaceful home and learning environment. Had the children been in public schools, they would have had to pull up roots from each and then brave the new classrooms of strangers over and over.
When our oldest child was four years old, I visited kindergarten to observed for myself the content of the classes: tooth brushing, free play, read aloud, penmanship/coloring, beginning reading/phonics/whole language, lunch, beginning mathematics, more free play, enrichment activities, music/gym, and rest. If I had had any doubts or second thoughts about home schooling, these observations drove them away. Not only could I do all of what these teachers did, but I could do it much more efficiently while genuinely loving my child in the process.
Sadly, other important reasons for home schooling also exist. Home education allows children to avoid school violence, drugs, political correctness in the classroom, immersion in inappropriate music/language/ books/ movies, and eight hours away from home each day.
Evaluating home school from a strictly academic standpoint reveals a superior opportunity for learning. Children learn quickly with direct instruction from a parent or tutor in very small groups or one-on-one. Very little time is wasted at home, and an entire day’s worth of lessons can be completed in a fraction of the time that a classroom must spend. Also, your child’s work can be quickly evaluated so mistakes can be corrected immediately.
Our reasons for home schooling have certainly changed since we first began. Twenty years ago, I would have told any curious person that we chose home schooling because we want our children to love learning, reading, and math. Now I might answer that we home school so that our children will be wise enough to know that socialism is a failed economic system, words mean things, ideas have consequences, and vague promises of “hope and change” aren’t nearly enough to earn someone a vote for President.
The Home Scholar 