If you’ve followed this blog for any length of time, you are probably aware that my firstborn, Little Bug is the energizer bunny that bounces from one thing to the next without stopping for much. The only thing that keeps her attention for any long length of time is Read Alouds. She loves to be read to. I love reading to her, so this works out perfectly. However, getting her to focus on a math lesson in particular is quite challenging. Lessons need to be short; 15 minutes of focus time is about what I can get from her. Our Horizons Math K curriculum has been a wonderful fit for her. We started this math program last year, at the beginning of her Kindergarten year. Once Sarge was born and entered our family very unexpectedly, homeschooling had to be put on the back burner while we dealt with his health.

God taught our family so much during that season including preparing our hearts for moving towards classically educating our children. I had to be okay with not moving forward in our beautifully planned curriculum last year when my focus had to be on getting my son well. Little Bug did not suffer for it in the least little bit. In fact, I think she is better off because of it. Having a very lax Kindergarten year was absolutely best for her because, developmentally, Little Bug is just not ready for academics in the way our society is pushing them on very young children.

Since we homeschool, I have freedom to educate her in the ways I see fit her personality and development best. Through our journey with our son last year, God has been gently preparing my heart to receive the way of Classical Education to educate my own children. I recently wrote about the simplicity of Classical Education in the early elementary years. Simplicity is what our homeschool needs. With three small children to educate, I don’t need the demands public school is placing on teachers and their students. I need simplicity and my children simply need to learn the basics. There is a time and place for all the rest when they are developmentally ready to receive more.

We have completed our first two weeks of school and, overall, we had a very successful beginning to this school year! My plan had been to continue schooling through the summer, but after our vacation in early June, when we started to get back to the books, Little Bug was resisting especially when we were trying to do a math lesson. So I asked her if she needed a “Summer Break”. I decided from that point to put all formal schooling aside and give us a 4-week break. When we picked back up with Horizon’s Math K when we started this school year, I was again met with resistance from Little Bug towards math.

I began to contemplate why the change of attitude because, for the most part, she has willingly done her math lessons and seemed to enjoy them (although she would never admit that). She seemed to be grasping the concepts taught so far, with the exception of some of the harder and more abstract concepts like time and place value. I wasn’t too concerned because of Horizon’s spiral approach to teaching math concepts. I figured as we continued to review these concepts as they would appear again and again in later lessons, she would catch on better.

It wasn’t until the Friday of our second week when a bell went off in my head and I knew what the problem was. She had done some addition problems and gotten over half wrong. Addition problems like 56+3=59. It dawned on me that Little Bug is struggling with these because she doesn’t have the basic addition facts memorized! If she could look at a problem like this and automatically know 6+3=9 so 56+3 is 59, she would be MUCH better off.

See? It all goes back to the basics!!! I could continue to push her forward in this math curriculum, because, after all, we are behind (or are we?) because this is the Kindergarten curriculum and she is in 1st Grade now! But I am not held to that pressure thanks to the freedoms that come with homeschooling. So what if she is doing K curriculum in 1st Grade!

I have the power to give my 1st Grader the benefit of learning basic, foundational knowledge to all higher education, so why would I NOT give her this gift?! I began to think about setting aside Horizons Math K and working with Little Bug to memorize her basic addition and subtraction facts first before moving on her math book.

I will admit I was scared when I realized this because I knew in my heart what I needed to do. However, it went against everything I had learned about being a teacher. And everything in me wants to finish this K curriculum quickly so we can move on to where we are “suppose to be”!

So I emailed our Classical Conversations support director. I went to her Informational Meeting about CC back in March and it was there that I really began to think more and more about Classical Education through the profound words she used to describe how a classical education can be achieved through Classical Conversations. I became intrigued and left that meeting determined to learn more about Classical Education and in particular, Classical Conversations.

I emailed her telling about my concerns with Little Bug’s math and told her of my idea to work on memorizing basic math facts before moving forward in the curriculum. I told her that I wanted to talk to someone I trust in the classical community before making a decision to move forward in this direction.

She emailed me back promptly saying, “What a joy to read your email! You are SO on the right track, and I’m so glad to hear that you are going to relax and enjoy your babies while they are young! I think you are absolutely right in your observations and plans for math. Kids really need to get the basics down before they move on, especially when you’re dealing with short attention spans and short fuses.”

That was the confidence and encouragement I needed to move forward and here is our new math plan for Little Bug:

1. Focus on memorizing basic addition and subtraction facts through fun games and flashcards. I had already found on-line several printable games and organized them to be used as supplemental material this year, but now they will be Little Bug’s math focus for a while until her addition and subtraction math facts are memorized! She will play Gumball Math where she covers all the gumballs that have a sum of four. She will also do some Domino Addition where she will choose a domino and use the dots to make an addition problem and then solve it. We will start by memorizing the 0’s and 1’s addition facts. I bought this Minute Math game where she can practice her basic facts under timed pressure so she will have motivation to memorize them. xtramath.org is a FREE website that Little Bug has been working on for a few weeks now. It drills her on her math facts. This is what Little Bug will see when she opens her workboxes this week:

2. Periodically review math concepts already taught through “stick and sand” method. There are several math concepts that Little Bug has learned well through the Horizon’s Math K curriculum. Some of these skills include: Number before, after, between, ordinal numbers, skip counting, even and odd numbers and pictographs. I want to keep these skills up. Using the “stick and sand” method, I plan to review several of these concepts with her via our dry erase board (sand) and dry erase markers (stick). We also love playing and learning with math manipulatives so we will continue working on number sense, skip counting, place value and money concepts with our manipulatives.

3. Return to Horizon’s Math K when I know she is ready. We’ve completed 109 lessons out of 160 so far. This change in plans has nothing to do with Horizon’s Math K. I still love this curriculum and as far as I can see right now, we will return to this workbook at some point. This is solid math curriculum and I like the spiral approach. The amount of work per day seems to be a perfect fit for Little Bug. There is a daily front and back workbook page to complete with a new concept taught first and then 3 concepts to review.

4. Focus on Math Memory Work from Classical Conversations. I’m not expecting my girls to memorize all of the memory work from Classical Conversations. This will be our first year and I want them exposed to the material this year. We will mainly listen to the Cycle 1 CDs at meal times and while in the car. However, I do want to put focus on the Math Memory work because the majority of it is skip counting! On a wall outside our homeschool room (because there isn’t wall space in the homeschool room) I have printed the Memory Work for Week 1. My plan is to display the Memory Work here every week.

That’s our plan! I will update how it’s going in a few weeks from now.

- Elaine