So that didn’t go as well as I hoped

We jumped back into school last week, and immediately we were floundering. Day one it was obvious that fitting eight subjects into the day, especially if one was an hour long online, was not going to work.  So I took my carefully crafted lesson plans and I tried to figure out what to cut.

I debate cutting classes, reducing workload, or just restructuring classes. Mostly I stared at all my hard work which was beginning to feel like a waste.

Then I looked a little closer at how the day had gone and what else we could change. A huge draw on our time was just switching classes, eight times we got out book and put away book. So I thought back to my high school years and “block scheduling.” 

Last week we tried it for two of the days, we doubled up on three classes (and had two regular classes) rather than doing all eight. The next day we doubled up on the three classes we had missed (and had our two regular classes.) That went great. She even finished early one of the days. Then we had all eight classes again on Friday. But knowing it was going to be a long day going into it helped the day’s flow. It didn’t have the same overwhelming effect that our first day had had.

So we will try block scheduling for the rest of the month at least. Some of Merry’s classes will need done everyday, Latin and History. The other six we will alternate with Chemistry, Writing, and Art on Mondays and Wednesdays, and Trigonometry, Literature, and Programing on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Then Fridays she’ll have all her classes. 

We can’t call it a success yet, but being willing to adjust is important both for my student and for me. So at least we are succeeding in flexibility.

Curriculum Review: Math

Hopefully this will be a series were I look back at our previous curriculum choices and see how we got to where we are. Starting with Mathematics since for Merry it’s been a constant.

We first started Life of Fred in September of 2011, in fact I even made a blog post about it. (https://caytw.blogspot.com/2011/09/happiness-is-new-math-book.html?m=0)

In the beginning we supplemented with a lot of math practice tools, like flash cards, dollar store workbooks, and various math games.  Now that she is in high school math it is much harder to find extras that we can add on and it is less of a necessity. Math starts with a lot of facts to memorize, addition tables, multiplication tables, and orders of operation being prime examples. But in higher levels it is less about memorizing and more about a way of thinking, the logic behind it.

Life of Fred emphasizes that way of thinking even in the lower level book, which since I love mathematics appealed to me. Merry also would rather think about one problem for ten minutes than do ten problems in one minute, so the curriculum has been a good fit.

That’s not to say that we don’t supplement a little, even now. I discovered math vocabulary posters from Virginia’s state government page. (https://www.doe.virginia.gov/instruction/mathematics/resources/vocab_cards/index.shtml) And we have been using these as part of our “morning time” for the past 4 years. Math can be like a foreign language, so knowing how to express yourself and what you are thinking is important.

This next year we will also be using YouTube, https://youtube.com/user/numberphile, and learning about various American mathematicians using Wikipedia and Google. 

While I’m excited for Merry to move forward with Trigonometry, I also want her to have a better understanding of math in the real world and how mathematicians have made impacts.