Sharla Kostelyk

Music

The kids have a fantastic piano teacher who comes to the house Tuesday mornings to teach them piano and theory. They have a recital coming up next week. They really enjoy their piano lessons (although practising is another story for some of them!).

Having a teacher come into our home works for so many reasons. I can homeschool the other kids while lessons are going on with each one. There is no travel time. The kids feel most comfortable at home and are able to relax. We have tailored the lessons (both the content and the length) to each of the kids and their individual needs.

Music Appreciation

For music appreciation, we are using the Zeezok Music Appreciation Program. It studies individual composers and their music. We are currently learning about Haydn. We also in the past have used Color the Classics in which the kids color pictures pertaining to a particular composer and his life while listening to that composer’s music. Both of these programs work well with my kids because they use a variety of senses, are easy to adapt and we can set our own pace.

Art

Art is not my gift. I enjoy scrapbooking and crafting but can’t sketch beyond a stick man. I was always afraid to teach art so for all these years, my kids have taken Homeschool Art Classes through our local Recreation department. This year, one of the instructors had to recuse herself and the classes for three of my kids were cancelled. I consider art to be important so I mustered up the courage to give art lessons at home a try thanks to the Simple Start in Chalk Pastels tutorials. I shared how I used the Christmas Chalk Pastels tutorials to finally accomplish effective art lessons taught by yours truly last month. I have since started using one of the other books to continue their art lessons.

I love how easy they are to teach and the finished products are gorgeous! What I like the best though is that there is something about us sitting at the table and doing chalk pastels together that seems to calm the kids. It’s a great way to start the day so we usually do it first thing in the morning and it seems to work on chaos days to settle things down a bit if we pull them out in the afternoon.

 

Art Appreciation

I use mainly books to teach the kids art appreciation. We have several, including M is for Masterpiece, Famous Paintings, and the Usborne Introduction to Art. 

We also have visited art galleries and art exhibits and discussed different art periods and influences throughout history.

Drama

The kids have taken homeschool drama classes over the years and some of them have attended one day or one week drama workshops. We haven’t had the opportunity to take them to many live theatre events but sometimes are able to attend one put on by a local high school. It is also sometimes possible to get very inexpensive tickets for dress rehearsals for major productions.

Fine arts are something that I do consider important to learn but even more critical is that some of my special needs children seem to have an aptitude for creativity. I want to give them a chance to explore and improve on those talents.

Miss Optimism has always loved fashion and may just become a fashion designer one day. We got her a sewing machine for Christmas/her birthday and she will start taking lessons soon (though lack of teaching has not stopped her from sewing a housecoat, cell phone snuggies, purses, and a quilt!).

I should start off by saying that Math is not my forte. In fact, I barely passed high school math and I am scared of it. Yes, I have a fear of math. For the most part, my kids have inherited my math skills and it is a weak point for them, with the exception of Snuggle Puppy and Dancing Queen. Dancing Queen has cognitive delays and is functioning at a preK level in everything else, but she is doing exceptionally well in her third grade math!

Math is the thing about homeschooling that I am the least confident about and probably worry about the most. For this reason, it is also the thing that I am the least eclectic about, in that I use a set curriculum for most of it. We started way back then using Abeka and then switched to Math U See. Math U See served us well for a number of years because of the teacher on the DVD, the manipulatives and the slow pace but then we hit a plateau and no one seemed to be progressing.

If there is one thing that I have learned by homeschooling, it is that if something doesn’t work, change it. Also, what works for one family, will not necessarily work for another and you may even have to use one curriculum with one child and another for your other children. I knew going into this year that we were going to have to find something new.

In my quest to find a math curriculum that would be a good fit for us, I compiled a list of different reviews and opinions. I researched and second guessed and finally settled on Teaching Textbooks. So far, it’s been a really good fit for all of the kids except Einstein. I would have predicted that he would like it the most since it is on the computer but it has been like pulling teeth to get him to do his math. I may have to give him the option of buckling down with Teaching Textbooks or going back to Math U See.

For the other kids, Teaching Textbooks has been wonderful. They have enjoyed being able to do it on the computer, the immediate feedback it offers, listening to the instructions and that it is not full of busy work. I like that it includes things like days of the week and months of the year and that it goes over old concepts and mixes them in with the new so that there is ample practise and review opportunities.

The other reason it works so well for us is that the kids all have their own usernames and passwords and it saves their information to the disk so they can move at their own pace.

We also use Take it to Your Seat Math Centers in their workboxes, math printables and hands-on activities in their workboxes, multiplication flash cards, money and time flashcards, the Multiplication Rap CD, the Math U See Skip Counting CD, and unit studies.

We did a unit study earlier this year on telling time and I have one planned for later this year on money. As my kids need a lot of repetition, practise, hands-on, and practical application practise, I am have a lot of hands-on activities planned for the money unit and am going to set up a mock store at home with a cash register and pretend money for them to practise with.

We also play A LOT of cards and board games so the kids pick up math skills very naturally that way. Some of the board games are designed to teach math skills specifically while others reinforce those skills in a less obvious way. (Update: I’ve created a more specific list of math board games because of the questions about this. You can read the full list and details of how we use games for math here or by clicking the picture below.)

 

I have probably the world’s most eclectic program put together for our language arts homeschool program. I have tweaked it over the years and am always looking at ways to add to it that would be effective with my kids or take things out that are no longer working well.

Workboxes

Workboxes are a big part of our homeschool days. I find it an easier way to organize our day and the kids respond very well. There are so many benefits to this system including small things like the fact that the kids have to get up out of their desks in between each activity and that physical change is good for them. Our son Einstein who has Aspergers likes that with the workbox system lets him know exactly when the work will be done. I have written an in-depth explanation of how we use our workboxes if you would like more details in how to implement this in your classroom.

There are several language arts activities put into the weekly workbox rotation. These change from week to week but include audio books for them to listen to at the listening station, file folder games, Take It to Your Seat Centers from Evan Moor (we have all levels and all types), and printables from different websites.

Most of the printables I find at:

Free Homeschool Deals
Confessions of a Homeschooler
This Reading Mama (some excellent language arts resources here)
3 Dinosaurs
1+1+1=1.

Spelling

I have in the past used actual programs such as All About Spelling which is a really great program and helped a lot but what works for us right now is a very unstructured made by me program based on the book A Measuring Scale for Ability in Spelling. This little gem of a book is one that I have had since one of my sisters-in law gave it to me in about my first year of homeschooling (for the record, that is over a dozen years ago at least!).

It contains a list of the 1,000 most common words, in the order of their frequency in the English language. I sometimes use this list to choose sight words for the kids to learn. It just makes sense to me that teaching them the most commonly used words would be the most useful.

The words are then divided into groupings based on determining spelling at grade level. I also find this tool useful and these lists are what I use for impromptu spelling tests. For me, the grade level bit isn’t as relevant as with the kids’ special needs, my expectations are adjusted but it helps give me an idea of where they are at.

Phonics/Reading

As with everything, I have found that hands-on works the best for most of our kids in learning phonics. We use letter cubes for blends and sentence building tiles.

We always have one or two chapter books on the go that are read-aloud and each day, we also read at least one or two other read-alouds. These are some of our favourites.

We also do activities to accompany the books we read. We expand the learning using food, sensory bins, crafts, writing, and notebooking.

I do one-on-one reading with my early readers. This is a bonding time as well as a learning one.

Grammar

I love Daily Grams! I have been using it for many years and I like that it’s not busy work. It doesn’t make the kids do 25 of the same thing over and over on a page. It teaches letter writing, punctuation, plurals, capitalization, dictionary skills, sentence combining, synonyms and antonyms, contractions, and more.

Handwriting

We have been using A Reason for Handwriting for a number of years. It allows the kids to go at their own pace.

Poetry 

We haven’t done a lot of work on poetry except for a brief study of Haikus, but each week the kids work on memorizing a poem. Sometimes it’s just a goofy poem like something from Shel Silverstein while other times it is a short poem by Frost or Blake. Right now, they are memorizing The Cremation of Sam McGee which is a lot longer than I remembered and we may stop halfway because it’s also more morbid than I remembered (!) but they enjoy memorizing poems and it is giving them a foundation in poetry appreciation.

Poems are also a place that we find a lot of our vocabulary words to discuss.

Sentence Writing

I have written about how I teach strong sentence writing which includes a homemade mad-libs type of game and a brainstorming technique found in the book Write a Super Sentence.

Board Games

Our family really enjoys board games and they are such an easy and fun way for kids to learn. Games such as 5 Second Rule (Spit it Out!), Scrabble Junior, Boggle Junior, and Apples to Apples get pulled out on almost a daily basis around here.

Our made up game of dictionary wars which means racing against each other to locate a word in the dictionary.

Pop for Sight Words (we have the first and the second one) have been excellent for our early readers and the way that the game works, it can be played by all different skill levels at the same time with everyone having a chance to win.

Other

Language Arts gets incorporated in many other areas of our homeschooling. The kids gets the opportunity to practise their writing in unit studies, notebooking, science, history, and Bible. The kids enjoy writing most when it is for practical applications such as letter writing or list making.