The old teacher hat is coming back out…

I’ve been spending quite a bit of time getting Gevan ready to start school back up on August 17th. It is his seventh grade year already. I’ve been extremely excited about how well he is doing with reading but I gotta tell you, the math is giving me ulcers.

We basically had to start teaching him from scratch about two years ago when he was diagnosed with 20/800 vision. Prior to that we weren’t aware that he was going blind in one eye and this happened during a time when he would have been learning all of his basic math and phonics skills. But he didn’t learn it. While the one eye was losing sight the other eye was trying to over compensate and adjust and he started losing muscle control over it. By the time we got a diagnosis and finished his therapy he was at the end of his fourth grade year. We spent the next two years catching him up. He caught on quickly with the reading and excelled in no time but the math was a different story. No matter how many times I showed him something he wasn’t grasping it and for the life of me I couldn’t figure out why he just didn’t “get it.” I was nearly ready to throw in the towel.

Then, last week I had the privilege of speaking at Curr-Click’s open house night and it was there that I learned of Mr. Patrick and his tutoring service: Math Tools. While listening to him speak it became quite obvious to me what Gevan’s problem was – it was the way I was teaching him.

I’m a mental math kind of person. I look at problems and can quickly come up with the answer but I do this strange bout of adding and subtracting to get it. I’m almost always right too. I remember always having points deducted in school for not “showing my work.” I did it all in my head. For example, 60×25 would be figured out something like this: 6×25 is 150 so add a 0 the add 25 more to account for the one so the answer is 1525. Or 36+55 quickly becomes 30+50 is 80 plus 11 equals 91. Don’t get me started on division. I can string it out in seconds flat and come up with the answer. Confusing? Just think of how my poor child felt.

I quickly sent Mr. Math Tools an email inquiring about his services and it obviously screamed panic because he quickly emailed me back and assured me that I had not messed up my child and that he’d be happy to help him. This made me happy because us moms don’t like to mess up our children.

We did on online diagnostic test yesterday and once the results are analyzed we’ll figure out what to do from there. Gevan was trying to do all of it in his head. I knew it wasn’t good when he tried to find the answer to 47×43 by adding 43, 47 times! So, we’ll be tutoring this year and focusing on mastering these concepts by going back through his Teaching Textbooks curriculum from last year and a new approach to math called Life of Fred. I am encouraged though. He is a quick learner. He has done amazingly well considering all he has gone through.

As for the rest of his curriculum, and he is acing all other subjects, we will be using the following:

Our history core will be Sonlight Core 5 Eastern Hemisphere – We began this the second half of last year but because I feel it is such an important core – and a long one – we decided to stretch it out. This core focuses on Geography and cultures. We’ll get to read all of these books:

src="http://www.sonlight.com/images/products/5R58-s.jpg" alt="5R58" title="5R58" border="0" height="60" />

We will also be using the following for Language Arts:

Sequential Spelling, Analytical Grammar, and we will supplement with Teach Editing and Writing Core Skills.

This year we are studying the human body so alongside the books from Sonlight we will also be using God’s Design for the Human Body. My friend Marsha sent this to me last year and we love it. It works perfectly with the Sonlight Science literature.

While we are at it we are going to continue to tackle Latin and throw in some economics. The word has been thrown around so much in the news that I find it would be beneficial to him to learn about it. Speaking of news, we love integrating God’s World News into our curriculum. If you’ve never used it then you should definitely check it out. It reminds me of the weekly readers we used to get in school except these have a Christian world view.

For bible studies we simply use the bible. I have yet to find a bible program that I am happy with. I am open to suggestions. We will also be using Stormie Omartian’s Power of a Praying Teen and some lessons from Remembering God’s Awesome Acts.

We will utilize the workbox system again this year too since it worked out so well the end of last year. It has really boosted morale around here. It is amazing what a few shoe boxes can do!

Getting the other two ready for school is a whole other post so I’ll write about that later. In the meantime, if you are a homeschooler, tell me what your plans are!

Print PDF

Tagged as: Homeschooling