Testy yet trying: July 2013

Tuesday, July 30, 2013

Homeschool Circle Time

Creating a Homeschool Circle Time Board (with links to free or inexpensive resources)

We begin our homeschooling day with circle time. To be honest, initially I planned a circle time just because it seemed "everyone does it". I thought it would be a light way to come together and transition from informal being at home to the structured schooling part of our day. I have completely upgraded my opinion of circle time. We cover a LOT of territory during circle time and I log the time as half math and half language arts. We spend 20-30 minutes in our circle.

Our circle time area is in a corner of our school room right next to a window. We sit on a small, soft, purple rug I grabbed at Wal-mart a while back. We got a 4'x3' magnetic dry erase board for a steal at a local office depot. I honestly think it was a price mistake, since it was over half off the price I'd seen for similar boards everywhere else, but they insisted it was priced correctly. My husband hung it and then I got started. I found the lovely borders and the slightly less lovely, but functional calendar at the Teacher Storehouse. Their shipping was super quick and everything was packaged well and arrived in great shape.

I wanted to be able to pin up several pages at once, so I found some great neodymium pushpin magnets on Amazon. They are tiny, yet powerful and so they work perfectly. They are also bright and cheerful and I couldn't be happier with them for this purpose. Of course, as with any powerful magnets, make sure they aren't around kids still putting things in their mouths.

Homeschool Circle Time Routine

Introduction ( <1 min )

We begin with a welcome song that I made up ages ago. If you promise not to laugh or snicker I will share the lyrics with you:

We are here together
for a day of work and play.
We smile and show respect
as we share our day today.
Let's try something new,
and grow a little stronger.
Let's stretch our mind,
and be kind,
here with family.

1. Calendar (approx. 5 minutes)

This calendar is a hybrid of a typical teacher's blank calendar that I bought and some numbers/holiday cards that I printed myself, laminated, and stuck magnets on the back. We do a lot during calendar time:

Sing the days of the week song. (Scroll down for lots of days of the week song choices and choose the one you like best.) When we sing our song, we're holding jingle sticks. The children must listen for the day of the week that is the current day, and they can only shake the jingle stick when we sing that day. This encourages active listening and practices self control.
Sing the months of the year song. Again, we hold the jingle sticks. This time each person shakes their stick when we sing the month of their birthday. We all shake our sticks on the current month. This continues to encourage active listening and self control, but also teaches them their birth month.
Next we put away our jingle sticks and update the calendar. We add in the new day and practice saying yesterday's date, today's date, and tomorrow's date. We briefly discuss any upcoming holidays or other special days.
On the first school day of each month we break down the old calendar and begin a new one changing the season card if necessary.

2. Weather Graph (approx. 3 minutes)

We fill in our weather graph. We've agreed that we're charting weather during circle time. We don't go back and change the chart's data if the weather changes later in the day. We look out the window and make a judgement about the weather. If it's sunny I fill in a rectangle in the sunny column with a yellow highlighter. If it's partly cloudy we go with blue highlighter. Cloudy is a grey colored pencil, rainy is purple highlighter, and thunderstorm gets black highlighter with a highlighter yellow bolt of lightening (my son's suggested embellishment). We jot down the temperature by looking at the outdoor thermometer and move on. At the end of the month, we do some extended work here filling in the mean, median, and mode temperature and writing a summary description of the weather for that month.

I've seen similar graphs everywhere. Teacher Storehouse had one. Confessions of a Homeschooler has a free printable one. I wanted to add in a little more math to mine, so I made one where there's a spot for putting in the temperature and we figure out the mean, median, and mode temperature at the end of the month. There's also a space at the top to add in an overall description of that month's weather. Here's a copy if you've been looking for a more complex version of the weather graph (I did leave out a windy column. I needed the space.)

3. Poem, Nursery Rhyme, Fingerplay, or Short Story (approx. 5-10 minutes)

Next we do a poem, nursery rhyme, short story, fingerplay, etc. I print a bunch of these at once double sided and pin up as many as will stick with my heavy duty magnets. That way, I can get through a week or more before I need to take the time to put up a new set. First I used the sight word poems from the ebook version of this Sight Word Poems Flip Chart. Right now it is $29.99, but I grabbed it in one of the Scholastic Teacher Express dollar sales for $1. Wait for the next sale and cross your fingers that it'll be offered again. It is pretty great. Ava was working on the sight words and Michael could read the poems. We'd go back through the ones we already know and eventually they had all of them memorized.

Once we finished all the poems in the flip chart (at a rate of one new one per school day, I went looking for something a little more complex. I found a great free children's anthology originally published in 1912. Click on the link and choose your format of choice (html, epub, kindle...). I printed a bunch of the fingerplays. I thought the children would enjoy them, it would let them practice the art of performance and connecting motions with words, and it would help their fine motor skills in their hands. They are loving the fingerplays. After the fingerplays, the book has familiar and unfamiliar nursery rhymes, short stories for young children, and more. And all for free! Once we work our way through the things I like best in that book I'm moving to a another book of poems I grabbed in a Scholastic Teacher Express sale.

4. Independent Early Reading Practice (approx. 3 minutes)

When I was looking for a new source of daily poems I stumbled across some free, printable, one page early reader stories on clarkness.com. A former special education teacher wrote an entire series of short, one-page early reader texts in gradually increasing difficulty. They're all available to download, print, and use for free. I grabbed the series and started mid-way through. Michael reads one to us each morning during circle time. Again, I print them double sided and pin a week's worth up to the board at a time so that each morning all I have to do is flip a page over to get to the new one. Ava likes listening to her brother read and he's proud to lead a little part of circle.

5. Song of the Day (approx. 5 minutes)

Next we sing our learning song of the day. I printed the songs from 50 Learning Songs Sung to Your Favorite Tunes two per page double sided. This is another resource I grabbed during a Teacher Express Dollar Sale. I pin up a week's worth or more, and we sing a new one each day.

6. Word of the Day (approx. 3 minutes)

Then we learn a word of the day. Another find from a Scholastic Teacher Express Dollar Sale was Daily Vocabulary Boosters. Half the words have illustrations and half do not. I printed the half that had illustrations and have been using them for our word of the day.

7. Telling Time (approx. 5 minutes)

Finally we do our time worksheet. We review some basic time facts. We fill in the current time on an analog clock and write the time. Then we practice three more times of the day. I laminated the worksheet using this inexpensive and tiny home laminator, and we fill it out each day with a dry erase marker. Again, I was inspired by the "What Time Is It?" printable from Confessions of a Homeschooler, but made an expanded version for myself. Here is the expanded version if you would like to use it:

And that is probably way more detail than you ever wanted to know about how we do circle time around here. I hope you find at least some of the resources useful and many of these resources would also be useful in a traditional school classroom, or a speech room as well.

Friday, July 26, 2013

It's the small things...

I'm beginning, bit by bit, to get the schoolroom decorated. As I mentioned, we're working on handwriting and after researching I chose the Steck-Vaughn style for our print style. I loved the free printable 5x7 alphabet flashcards available on the Confessions of a Homeschooler website that can be printed and used as an alphabet border on a classroom wall. I wanted my own version for several reasons. First, I wanted the handwriting font to match. Second, I wanted the pictures on the cards to represent all of the phonemes that are represented by each letter in English because that is how the letters are being taught in our reading program. (So, for example, "a" needed an axe, acorn, and avocado.) Finally, I wanted the letter rules to have a blue skyline, and a highlighted bottom section because my littles need a little help with visually discriminating the different portion of the rules in order to properly form their letters.

So, in my usual way, I made my own. I carefully designed them so that the pages don't need to be trimmed or anything, I just needed to place the edges of each sheet together and they would look evenly spaced. I was also lucky in that the wall I wanted them on was the perfect lenth for 14 landscape pieces of paper (26 letters on 13 sheets and 6 digraphs on an additional sheet of paper). I recruited my husband to help me hang them. Of course, then we discovered that the wall space was not an evenly spaced. There were curves where there shouldn't have been, and our entire house apparently leans downward to the west. Delightful. We fudged a straight line, used the double sided tape I had bought specifically for the purpose and set to hanging. It looked beautiful. We both stepped away and gazed up in satisfaction. Then we heard the distinctive sound of tape peeling away from the wall. The double sided tape wasn't sticking. My husband crawled back up on the chair and I handed him strips of regular tape while we essentially redid the entire job. However, one week later it is still hanging and I am delighted. They suit our purpose beautifully, they cheer up the room, and Michael has spontaneously referred to the border as a resource multiple times.

Take a look:

Tuesday, July 23, 2013

Sorting by Category: Free Speech Therapy Picture Cards

If you like this free card set, you might want to check out the premium speech therapy kits now available in the Testy Shop. Kits include expanded speech sound card sets, illustrated minimal pairs, homework sheets and more in a single download.

Sorting by Category Card Set

To download click on the image to open it full size. Then right click on the image, choose "save as" and save the page to your computer.

I recommend you print on cardstock or laminate for durability.

Description

This speech therapy picture card set includes 30 picture cards. There are five cards in each of six categories: animals, transportation, toys, food, body parts, and clothing.

Permissions

I give permission to copy, print, or distribute this card set provided that:

Each copy makes clear that I am the document's author.
No copies are altered without my express consent.
No one makes a profit from these copies.
Electronic copies contain a live link back to my original and print copies not for merely personal use contain the URL of my original.

Looking for Feedback

I would love to hear back from anyone who uses this card set. Let me know if you find errors or there is anything you would change. Comment on this page, or send me an email at testyyettrying(at)gmail(dot)com.

Where can I find more?

More sets are on my Download/Print Free Speech Articulation Materials page. Other card sets include /p, b, t, d, m, n, h, f, v, k, g, w, j, s, z, l, r, th, ch, sh, ʤ, s-blends, and l-blends/ and more sets are being added regularly.

What kinds of activities can I do with this cardset?

Tuesday, July 16, 2013

Verbs: Free Speech Therapy Picture Cards

If you like this free card set, you might want to check out the premium speech therapy kits now available in the Testy Shop. Kits include expanded card sets, illustrated minimal pairs, homework sheets and more in a single download.

Verbs Card Set

Description

This speech therapy picture card set includes 30 verbs paired with picture stimuli.

Permissions

I give permission to copy, print, or distribute this card set provided that:

Each copy makes clear that I am the document's author.
No copies are altered without my express consent.
No one makes a profit from these copies.
Electronic copies contain a live link back to my original and print copies not for merely personal use contain the URL of my original.

Looking for Feedback

Where can I find more?

What kinds of activities can I do with this cardset?

Monday, July 15, 2013

The End of Conveniently Scheduled Work Time

Gymnastics Camp is done. It was a lovely week of three hours to myself every morning. On the other hand, our homeschooling time was reduced by 80% so it's all trade offs I suppose. It will be nice to get back to doing all of our wonderful homeschooling activities this week.

I've enjoyed getting back to blogging somewhat and will try to post at least once or twice a week somehow. I have a couple of things I worked on last week queued up that I haven't had a chance to post yet. I'll try to get a set of verb picture cards I made put up tomorrow. I'm also almost done with a set of sorting/categories cards as well and I'll try to get that up later this week or next week.

I hope you all have a great week too!

Friday, July 12, 2013

Creating Custom Handwriting / Writing Journals for Young Children

Ok. If you follow here regularly you might have noticed that I'm somewhat... detail oriented. (That sounds much better than "Type A Obsessive" right?) I knew that I wanted to include formal handwriting instruction and writing in our homeschooling curriculum. I searched online for something I could just print and use, but didn't find anything just right for our needs, so I designed something myself.

First, I found Educational Fontware. For $49.95 you get the licence to use 33 handwriting font families and some specialty and decorative fonts. You can print most of the fonts with dots, outlines, arrows, rules and so on. It was a great investment. I compared all the print fonts and chose the one I liked best for teaching the children. I made a chart so I could clearly see the differences between the different fonts.

I ended up choosing Steck Vaughn. That was simply the one I liked best for a variety of reasons. Then I dove in to actually creating the pages for our writing journal.

Each day the children complete a two-page spread. On the left is a handwriting practice page and on the right there is a writing journal page. I began with uppercase letters although if I were to do it again I would have chosen lowercase first. I wanted the handwriting page to include both tracing the letter and writing the letter. I wanted them to practice it alone and in a word. I also wanted to include a visual discrimination section. I also prompt them to go back and circle their best letter to encourage self-assessment. I include pictures of things that use all the sounds that the letter can make. Here are a few examples of our handwriting pages. Later I began having the children write the entire word in the "Practice in a word" section to facilitate review. The lower half of the rules is highlighted to help them discriminate between the part of the letter that goes in the top half of the rule and the part of the letter that goes in the bottom half of the rule.

For the writing journal pages on the right-hand side of their journals I wanted them to write their name and the date. Then there is a written prompt inside a box followed by blank handwriting rules. The rules are sized to match the handwriting practice on the opposite page. They are instructed to use at least three colors in their picture to encourage them to spend some time on their picture and to add a little complexity. After they finish their picture, Ava dictates a sentence to me. I write it in pencil on the bottom of her page and then she traces over it. If Michael's sentence is short, I write it on a dry erase board and he copies it into his journal himself. If his sentence is longer and I'm worried he won't be able to fit it all, I write it in the journal in pencil and he copies over it. In the second half of the writing journal I moved from two lines to four because the children constantly needed more space than they had for their thoughts. I also plan to have Michael move to using invented spelling and writing his thoughts himself rather than using a dictation method, but we haven't started that yet.

Here are some examples of our writing journal pages. I began with very simple prompts and moved to more imaginative, open-ended prompts later.

Here are a couple of writing journal pages complete. The name and dates have been cropped out to protect the anonymity of the author-artists.

Our first handwriting/writing journal consists of a handwriting sheet for each of the uppercase letters and a few practice sheets with words at the end and the facing writing journal pages. When we finish the first book, I will make another one with the lowercase letters and new writing prompts.

So far the children love writing journal time. They enjoy working in their journals and showing off their work to anyone who will sit down and look through the journal with them. We typically spend 30-45 minutes per session working on the lesson.

Later, I'd like to expand our writing curriculum to include a weekly "storywriting" activity where I sit down at the computer and take dictation of a story created by the children. Then I'll print it out and let them illustrate the story. It will allow them to experience writing longer stories than they can currently create in their journals without being held back by their current fine motor/handwriting slowness.