Tag Archives: Homeschooling

P3-P4 with Mommy

The academic year is over and all three kiddos are jumping into the holiday with the exuberant energy of childhood. I, meanwhile, am happy to catch up with my own leisure reading and writing—this post is one.

Our WEE little ones

The Big Nona has just completed her Primary 4, and what follows in this post is the documentation of our teaching/learning materials and process for the mid-primary school years (Primary 3 and 4).

The Overview

Our subjects for P3 and P4 consist of:
1. Mathematics
2. Language Arts: English, Mandarin, and Indonesian
3. Grammar: English and Latin
4. Science
5. History

The learning objectives are:

For Mathematics, the child will master the lessons as paced out by our curriculum of choice.

For Language arts:
In both English and Indonesian, the child will:

  • speak the language fluently,
  • be proficient in reading at least 4th-grade reading level materials,
  • be able to commit to memory and confidently recite a literary piece monthly, and
  • be trained in (English) composition skill.

In Mandarin, the child will:

  • speak the language fluently,
  • be proficient in reading at least 4th-grade reading level materials,
  • be able to copy, memorize, and recite the first, second, and third paragraph of the Three Character Classic, and
  • cover the MOE’s requirement for the Mother Tongue subject.

For Grammar (English and Latin), the child will master the lessons as paced out by our curricula of choice.

For Science, the child will

  • discover the wonder of God’s creation through observing and reading, and
  • be inspired to express her wonder through narrating/journaling her discovery.

For History, the child will:

  • learn the nature of history as a science,
  • read the stories in chronology,
  • be confident to relate the story back,
  • be able to locate the story in the ancient and modern maps, and
  • learn to draw the geography related to the story
Our typical school-days

Following Singapore’s January-November school calendar, our school-time starts at 08.30 AM and ends at 04.30 PM with an hour lunch break in between, five days a week. Our day typically starts with outdoor activities after breakfast, followed by morning devotion, and then the academics.

The Subjects

Mathematics

This is our fifth year with Saxon Math as our curriculum of choice for mathematics. From 4th grade onwards, Saxon’s textbooks are formatted differently. There is a gradual emphasis on the mathematical concepts presented to the student explicitly in the lessons. What concepts the student has intuitively inferred through the procedures of the previous years, she now understands in clear and accurate terminologies. This is consistent with children’s developmental stage of learning. Where they have been adequately trained to handle basic arithmetical procedures, they are now ready to grapple with the abstract and conceptual as their brains mature toward analytical thinking.

We were using Saxon 5/4 in P3 and 6/5 in P4

The lesson of the day always covers four components:

1. Arithmetic drill (to improve speed and accuracy)
2. Mental math (in which the student is required to solve problems mentally)
3. Lesson practice (in which the student practices the newly learned concept)
4. Mixed practice (in which the student practices the new and old lessons, this repetition ensures that previous concepts are reviewed and mastered).

It is imperative for the student to complete all four components and in the order above.

Language Arts

At our home-school, the study of language arts consists of three components:

1. Reading
2. Writing
3. Memorizing

Reading
Reading is a daily business. There are three levels of reading that we cover throughout the day: the above-the-level, the at-the-level, and the below-the-level. I will read to the child from reading materials which are above her reading level to progressively increase her reading skill, then I will assign reading materials which are at her comfortable level. Once she is done with her assigned reading, she is free to read anything she chooses for fun.

Writing
Moving on from copywriting, our family is now using the Institute for Excellence in Writing for our writing curriculum. I have only one word for it: excellent. The IEW is part of our program with Classical Conversations (Essentials). It is possible to self-teach this writing program to yourself before teaching it to your student. In fact, I find this to be an important aspect to help me be patient and encouraging toward my student. When I grapple with the complex work of writing myself, I stop pretending that it should be easy for my student. I can empathize. 

I wrote briefly about our experience with IEW some time ago here and here.

Memorizing
While modern education has fallen out of favor with memorization, this ancient discipline proves to be vital to the study of language. Every honest teacher knows that one cannot get something out of a student’s brain unless that something has been first put in there. Likewise, one cannot get good writing (and by extension, good thinking and good communication) out of a student before first furnishing her mind with the excellent ingredients: beautiful words, language patterns, sounds, images, and ideas! And memorization has been shown to be the best way to do this.

Our family sources those excellent ingredients from the Bible and The Book of Virtues, a Treasury of Great Moral Stories. Every day, a passage, a poem, or a speech is learned, memorized, and recited, and finally presented before an audience monthly.

For Mandarin, we partner weekly with Tien Hsia Language School to cover the materials required by the MOE. At home, for every lesson we copy one verse from the three paragraphs of the Three Character Classic (三字经). We also continue to memorize and recite poems, and do a read-aloud from story books.

For Indonesian, we continue to read, copy, and memorize parts of Alkitab (the Indonesian Bible) and Kitab Kebajikan (the Indonesian translation of The Book of Virtues).

Grammar

As part of our Classical Conversation Essentials program, the Big Nona is learning English grammar using the Essentials of English Language curriculum. Separately, we are doing Latin with Memoria Press’ Prima Latina for P3 and Latina Christiana for P4. (To save cost, we only purchased the Student Workbook for Prima Latina because I found the lessons relatively easy to infer from the workbook—the Latin declension and conjugation memory work from CC definitely helps. But this is not the case with Latina Christiana. I need the Teacher Manual for Latina Christiana‘s level and above as the grammatical concepts grow more complex.)

Many have written extensively on the importance of learning English grammar and Latin, and much more persuasively than I can do here. However, I wish to encourage home-educators: you can learn and teach Latin even when you have no Latin background. It has been done in our home, I believe it can be done in your home, too. I don’t mean to pretend that it’s easy. It is hard and it requires hard work (though it will be a tad easier if you have a strong grasp of English grammar already). Many give up not because it is hard but because they don’t think grammar or Latin is worth their time. But if you are convinced that they are important, and that they are true, good, and beautiful, I believe you will not shun the hard work they require.

Science

For many Singaporeans home-educating families, choosing a curriculum for Science can be challenging because it is one of the four subjects for which our students will be tested for the PSLE. This means the reason for studying Science can very much be influenced by the exam-oriented concern. We, too, felt that pressure right from the beginning. Aware of the underlying current of anxiety, we prayed and returned to the basics: we asked ourselves “Why do we do Science?” The answer has always been clear: to discover and be awed by God’s creative hands in His creation, which leads to worship and praise toward God. We do science to know (latin: scio) God and to worship God. Once we had clarified the why, we could decide on the what and how with peace and confidence.

The What

The Science curriculum that supports our why best is the Apologia’s Young Explorers series. We knew the decision was right when the Big Nona remarked, “This science book is strange, it talks about God. Science books don’t normally talk about God.”

Have you ever heard your young child express something similar? Have you ever thought so yourself? I had. My then 8-year-old daughter only gave voice to what had been my own experience throughout my entire school years.

Science books don’t talk about God. They treat Him as if He were irrelevant.

But our God is the God of science. So we will see to it that the science we do, not only talks about Him but also glorifies Him.

“There is no such thing as neutral education. Every education, every curriculum, has a viewpoint. To teach children about life and the world in which they live without reference to God is to make a statement about God. It screams a statement. The message is either that there is no God or that God is irrelevant. Either way the message is the same – there is no God. An irrelevant God is the same as no God at all. If God is, then He must be relevant – to His entire creation.”

—Dr. R. C. Sproul

The How

We started with the Botany and progressed on to the Zoology series, covering one lesson in two weeks. The student reads, observes, and conducts experiments before documenting her newly learned facts, observation, or experiment results in her journal. Because she gets to decide what interesting and important bits get recorded in her journal, those facts stick with her better. In fact, the act of narrating the information she just studied helps to assimilate the knowledge into her mind.

History

What is history?

History has been widely misunderstood as the events happening in the past. The Britannica defines History as discipline that studies the chronological record of events, usually attempting, on the basis of a critical examination of source materials, to explain events. In other words, the past events are actually the chronology that history attempts to explain as a science. Understanding that history is really an interpretation—a story that historians wrote to explain some past events, is crucial to how we teach history in our home. It teaches us that historical records (written records and archaeological findings) do not automatically translate to the stories we are reading from our history books. It teaches us that no history books is 100% objective. It is, in fact, impossible for any history book to be 100% objective, which teaches us that every history book has its own bias. The ideal is to find history books with minimal bias in which the author does not tell the student what to think or believe about the issue studied. We believe the religious interpretation of historical events should therefore remain within the authority of the parents, under the authoritative teaching of the Bible through the leadership of the family’s local church.

Why study history?

“You have to know the past to understand the present,” said Carl Sagan. History answers man’s quest for identity because it helps us make sense why we are who we are and why we are where are. It is the collective memory that humanity shares in the progression of time and places. Events are always caused and they always effect. Every individual event is always the result of when and where it is located, and is always the cause to another event in another time and place. For this reason, history must be studied in chronology, within context, and alongside geography.

The what and why above are the considerations for our choice of History curriculum: The Story of the World series. We started with Volume 1: The Ancient Times for P3 and progressed on to Volume 2: The Middle Ages in P4. In every lesson, the student reads one chapter of the book, finds the story’s location on the map, writes a short summary, and draws the map pertaining to the story. As each book contains more chapters than our school weeks (we do 36 academic weeks a year), we treat the extra chapters as leisure reading.

A heads-up for Science and History, these two subjects are content-based subjects and should only be incorporated into a child’s education when the child has acquired the skill to read well. Neither should they crowd out the time necessary for a child to master the three most basic skill-based subjects i.e. arithmetic, reading, and writing (not to be confused with composition). Impediment to these basic skills is impediment to every other learning. Once the three R’s have been solidly grasped, it is not too late to begin the study of Science and History.

Classical Conversations

We are entering our seventh year with CC (seventh year for Foundations and third year for Essentials for the Big Nona and myself as the tutor for both programs). With every growing year, we are loving the community more.

Our beloved CC family

God has been immensely gracious to place us alongside these Christian families for friendships, supports, and accountability. Ultimately, the people we journey with matter as much as, if not more than, the learning throughout our home-education. For this we are deeply grateful to God. And if the Lord wills, the following year will see the Big Nona embarking on the Challenge A program.

The Most Important Thing

Year after year, after year, before the waves of a new academic year engulf us, it is important to remind ourselves again of what the purpose of our home-education is.

Our Bibles, Hymnal, and Catechism materials

To pursue wisdom and virtue, to the glory of God, must be our motivation. To know God and to enjoy Him forever, must be our destination. The education that we are pursuing every day may look like messy tables with strewn stationery, tears over difficult assignments, proud moments when the child finally gets it, happy trips and wonder-filled nature walks. It will certainly look like an ordinarily busy life with its undulating ups and downs. And it is frighteningly easy to get sucked into the busyness of schooling while being oblivious to the fact that we are losing the anchor. Yet, forget we never must, this education we are pursuing bears the loftiest goal with the longest lasting impact.

To know God. To glorify Him. And to enjoy Him.

Forever.

P1-P2 with Mommy

I should thank some of you, readers, for nudging me back into writing and documenting our homeschooling journey. Looking back to my last article dated December 30, 2019, lots have happened between then and now! Right at the start of the year, we were all swept up by a new virus which rapidly spun into a global pandemic. In the following month, our family’s citizenship application was approved. This brought us straight to another application for our eldest daughter’s exemption from the Compulsory Education (which is no easy process and deserving of a separate post on its own). And last but certainly not least, we moved to a new place. Normally, I have been keeping records at the end of a school year for future use with the younger siblings. But when the hurricane finally died down and the dust settled, we found ourselves in mid 2021 already! And I haven’t been writing, ops!

So, here’s me catching up.

The eldest is now in Primary 2, and what follows in this post is the documentation of our teaching/learning materials and process for the lower-primary (Primary 1 & 2).

The Overview

In accordance with the MoE’s requirement, our academic learning subjects for P1 and P2 consist of:

  1. Mathematics
  2. Language Arts, which include:
    1. English
    2. Mandarin (Mother Tongue)
    3. Indonesian (this is not required by the Ministry of Education, but we keep it as it is an important element which connect the children back to their roots and relatives in Indonesia)

The learning objectives are:

  • In Mathematics, the child will master the lessons as paced out by our curriculum of choice.
  • In both English and Indonesian, the child will:
    • speak the language fluently
    • be proficient in reading at least 2nd-grade reading level materials
    • be able to reproduce writing materials by visual copying (Primary 1), and by dictation (Primary 2)
    • be able to commit to memory and confidently recite one poem/Bible passage monthly
  • In Mandarin, the child will:
    • speak the language fluently
    • be able to memorize and recite the first and second paragraph of the Three Character Classic
    • master the MoE materials for the Mother Tongue subject
Our daily time-table, as required for submission to the MoE

Following Singapore’s January–November school calendar, our school-time starts at 08.30 am and ends at 12.30 pm, five days a week. We start with marking the calendar, followed by morning devotion and then the lessons.

The Subjects

Mathematics

This is our third year with Saxon Math as our curriculum of choice for mathematics. Many others have written in length about Saxon’s benefits and why it is a good math curriculum so I will simply add that we like Saxon for its no-frill, repetitious and continuous review approach to mathematics. It provides daily drill to hone speed and accuracy, it is incremental, it is not so much interested in teaching logical thinking in the grammar years than in helping students grasp the basic math operations solidly, which will be an invaluable skill when the time comes for them to logically think through a problem.

We began with Saxon 1 when our eldest was in K2. Each level consists of two workbooks.
Saxon also provides Teacher Guide for parents who need help in teaching the lessons.

I have observed while the local math curriculum provides interesting brain gymnastics for bright students from time to time, it has unfortunately left the rest feeling intimidated. Many are misguided into thinking themselves stupid and ended up hating mathematics. The fact is children’s brains in the primary school years (also known as the grammar stage) are developmentally more suited to information absorption than to abstract or logical thinking. Once their brains mature and are equipped with strong mastery in basic math facts, they will be more ready to tackle mathematical problems that require higher analytical thinking.

On top of doing the math exercises, we memorize the multiplication table, moving to the next table always only after the present one becomes easy for the student.

Language Arts

Our focus for elementary language instruction is proficiency in reading, writing and the grammar of the language. The ability to read with ease will enable students to learn other content-based subjects, such as history and science, for themselves. Consequently, a student who is struggling to read will be hampered in every other area of learning.

We make reading our daily activity. There are three levels of reading that we cover throughout the day: the above-the-level, the at-the-level, and the below-the-level. I will read to the child from reading materials which are above her reading level to progressively increase her reading skill, and then I will assign reading materials which are at her comfortable level. Once she is done with her assigned reading, she is free to read anything she chooses for fun.

It is natural that a child is inclined to express what he has just learned. Every parent knows the enthusiasm with which their child tells of how he has spent his day, what he has done with his friends or what interesting things he has discovered. The goal of learning how to write is to help the children “tell” information in a logical and coherent manner. Because the process of writing is slower than that of speaking, it affords the brain more time to think and to arrange its thoughts better before expression. However, before a student is able to put his thoughts into written words, he needs to first learn how to form the words on the paper. Therefore, in the elementary years, we focus on the mechanics of writing, namely, how to spell properly, how to write a coherent sentence, and the writing conventions (capitalization and punctuation rules). We do this by copying well-written sentences in Primary 1, and we progress to dictation in Primary 2. I write the material to be copied (usually a poem or short story) in my best handwriting and then I have the child copy four lines every day. Once she can copy with ease, I dictate the poem or sentences and she writes them down.

Copywork assignments

Now, many might ask if such practice impedes creativity. We believe that creativity is only possible once a child has something to be creative with. In writing, before a child can know what to write, he needs to be taught how to write, and in stages. We adults may find writing difficult only on the “what” end, but for a young child who has only begun to learn to write, writing is an exhausting activity. Think about it. When a young child writes, she first needs to sit still and straight facing a desk, she then needs to grasp her pencil correctly, after that she needs to visually recall how to form her letters before correctly spelling them into words. On top of that, she needs to be mindful of words spacing, capitalization and punctuation. Asking a student who barely masters all the above to come up with a creative essay is akin to asking a noob who can’t tell the garlic from shallot to whip up a banquet.

Dictation assignments

Copywork takes away the need to come up with what to write and allows the student to focus solely on how to form the words. A step further, dictation strengthens her memory of how to form the words by forcing the mind to retrieve the mental pictures of the words. Dictation also hones the student’s ability to properly apply the capitalization and punctuation rules.

It is important to base these exercises on good resources. To be a good writer, a student must learn from the master writers. Beautiful poems, well-written sentences from great authors, and the Bible verses; these are what we copy. We use The Book of Virtues, a Treasury of Great Moral Stories for our copywork practices. It contains beautiful poems, great stories told in well-crafted sentences, and great moral lessons, what’s not to love? We also have the Indonesian translation which we use for our Indonesian lessons. Once the student is done with copying a poem, a story, or a Bible passage, she memorizes it and presents it once a month. Memorizing stores the beautiful language in the student’s mind, reciting them teaches the student pronunciation and prepares her for public speaking.

Grammar provides the bolts and nuts of a language without which it is impossible to produce good writing. It also equips the student for foreign language study. During the lower primary years, we memorize the English grammar facts such as parts of speech, parts and purposes of sentences, principal parts of verbs, list of irregular verbs, etc.

For Mandarin, we supplement our lessons at home with weekly lessons at the Tien Hsia Language School. Aside from learning the MoE materials, we continue to memorize and recite poems and the Three Character Classic (三字经), reviewing the first and second paragraph and working our way towards copying them.

While she has no issue with learning Mandarin as a subject, our daughter’s ability to speak and understand spoken Mandarin has not improved much since her preschool years. Where she flourishes in English’s vocabularies, she has difficulty holding a simple conversation in Mandarin. “I don’t like speaking in Mandarin!” she would protest whenever I reminded her to reply me in the language. We figured out where we have been diligent to stoke up her minds richly in English by reading lots and lots of English books and exposing her to massive input of English sounds, we have been rather negligent in doing the same with Mandarin. We realized that growth in any language is only possible when a student is familiar with its sounds, equipped with adequate vocabularies, and provided with ample opportunity for its usage. Our daughter was not exposed to enough Mandarin audio input that she could increasingly understand, and this resulted in her not having enough vocabularies that she could speak.

To improve, we have since watched more Mandarin TV shows (presently, I found this to be the fastest and easiest way to get the child interested in the language again) and incorporated Mandarin storybooks in our daily reading. Thus far, one TV show has successfully inspired her to speak the language. (The show was the Mediacorp drama “A Quest to Heal” which tells the story of a martial heroine and an imperial guard who time-travel from the Ming dynasty to the 2020 Singapore.)

Image credit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Quest_to_Heal

Eventually, we hope that Mandarin will not be just a subject to our children; a chore to endure until the PSLE. We hope it will be a language that ties them to their ancient roots and whose literary beauty and wealth they may come to appreciate.

Classical Conversations

We reserve one school-day every week doing only CC. This is when the student gets to do hands-on science experiments, fine art lessons, and presentations.

Our memory training materials come largely from CC. Every school-day the student is required to recite the memorized facts of the world’s timeline, science, history, mathematics, geography, English, and Latin from the last seven lessons. (Please don’t be intimidated by this, as I have shared in my post about CC, students at this age are able to memorize HUGE amount of information that they do not necessarily understand yet. If my two-year-old can sing along and know that “Early Native Americans” came right after “1000 BC, 1000 BC!” just because I play the timeline song every day, every child can memorize the whole timeline song. Parents of young children know this to be true.)

Due to the pandemic, we are unable to meet up with our homeschooling friends for the community day. We have since been doing CC on our own at home, but we are looking forward to meeting and learning together again once the situation stabilizes, hopefully soon!

The Good Portion

I shared above that we started the school-day with morning devotion before diving into the academics. There was a period when I was anxious about moving quickly into the lessons of the day—the maths and language arts, that I rushed through our Bible time. The Lord convicted me by reminding me again of the story of Martha and Mary. In my quest to “serve” the Lord with the academics, I had foolishly forfeited the good portion.

Our devotional materials

I don’t mean to say that academics are not important, they are, they are just not the most important. For the sole purpose of education is first worship, and only then, service. Therefore, we begin our school-day by meeting with the Lord and sitting at His feet. And we begin our school-week by studying our characters and learning to be responsible and contributing citizens for the country the Lord has placed us in. We strive, by God’s grace and power, to manifest the fruit of the Spirit, and we pray for and give back to our country in ways that we can.

Overwhelmed? Don’t Be!

If you have been considering to homeschool, taking up the responsibility to educate our lower-primary students may seem like a daunting task. I won’t deceive you and myself by saying it’s easy, it’s not. But I want to encourage you by telling you that it’s doable. 🙂 All it takes is a strong vision (know why you are doing this), a working curriculum (understand what you will teach), and faithfulness (this is how you are going to do this: by learning alongside your student humbly, by preparing your lesson-plans diligently, and by showing up every single time). Above all, pray, pray, and pray. Pray that the Lord will fix our eyes on the true goal of education­—the cultivation of wisdom and virtue, to the glory of God. Pray that we will be given the endurance to run the course. Finally, pray that the Lord Himself will establish the work of our hands. For “unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain.”

K2 with Mommy

This year marks the last of the preschool year for the Big Nona. Come January, she is starting her first year of elementary education. I get a mixture of excitement and slight sadness in welcoming the “Primary-1 with Mommy” — excited because we are embarking on a new level in the pursuit of knowledge, a little sad because it felt like only yesterday I was holding my first newborn and now she is a preschooler no more!

Being mindful of that, we made it a point to spend this year with plenty of outdoor play and nature exploration. I hope the Big Nona will remember her preschool years as nothing but full of play and wonder from observing God’s awesome creation.

What follows in this post is our K2 lesson plan based on the specific focus of the year mentioned above. I document the teaching/learning materials in this blog for future use with the younger siblings.

Lesson Overview

Similar to last year’s K1 with Mommy, our learning subjects consist of:

  • Memory training
  • Mathematics
  • Literacy

The aim was that at the end of the year, the child would master:

  • fluency in counting 1 to 100,
  • addition and subtraction of numbers up to 20,
  • analog clock reading,
  • the 26 alphabet letters in manuscript, and
  • reading and writing simple sentences using manuscript.

Following Singapore’s January to November school calendar, our school-time began at 8.30 and ended at 10 in the morning, four days a week (we have weekly community day with our Classical Conversations’ homeschooling community every one of the weekdays). We started with marking the calendar, followed by morning devotion and then the lesson.

picsart_12-30-105988874694809586958.png

The calendar included shape-pattern and weather graph.

The Subjects

1. Memory Training

I shared in last year’s post that we believe memory training is crucial to developing the mind of the child in order for it to be capable of higher thinking. We did this by memorizing one hymn and one Bible verse every week, and by reciting certain works of literature. This year we continued with the second paragraph of the 三字经 (Three Characters Classic) and two poems by 白居易.

2. Mathematics

For numeracy, we did not do anything new this year but continued to hone the child’s fluency in counting from 1 to 100. However, the frequency of this exercise was reduced to once a week. She seemed to have picked up a few tricks to make the otherwise boring exercise interesting by filling up the boxes in random order with the correct numbers. I believe the child has gained a better sense of numbers too through this kind of game.

Similarly for basic arithmetic, we continued with the addition and subtraction of numbers up to 20, and then slowly moving up to 30. We also continued doing addition/subtraction of three numbers to strengthen the concept of number bonds. The exercise was done every school-day for the first semester, then two days a week in the following semester. The goal, again, was for the child to over-practice the basic arithmetic so much that it became intuitive.

This year we also added Saxon Math 1 into our curriculum. It provided daily guide for homeschooling parents to teach grade-1 mathematics and daily assignments for the students. The Big Nona was required to complete two assignments every school-day.

On clock reading, we moved to identifying the clock and the minute that each number represents. We did so first in Mandarin (because Mandarin goes by the number itself i.e. 一个字, 两个字, 三个字, and so forth) and then in English. She was also taught how to identify “a quarter past…” on the clock.

3. Literacy

Picking up from where we left last year, we carried on with writing a-z in manuscript (cursive). Once the child was fluent in these letters, we practiced writing (Indonesian) words from words starting with “a” all the way to those starting with “z”. The writing exercise was done every school-day until the end of the school year. Towards the end of the year, having been done with the last z-letter word, we practiced writing simple sentences. The objective for all these exercises was to train the muscle memory of writing in manuscript.

As for reading, we routinely had story-time when all the children were being read to before naptime and at bedtime. We would pick books of different types and levels, from manga such as Doraemon to chapter books such as The Chronicles of Narnia, or from baby’s picture books to encyclopedias. The Big Nona also practiced her reading-aloud by reading to her younger siblings. And when they were napping, she would read on her own.

That’s it!

Now it looks like I can tick off all the objectives we jotted down at the beginning of the year. But looking back, I am made to see that the true learning that has taken place was so much more than just a list that I could tick off. This is true not only for the Big Nona, but especially for me and all of us in the family.

Earlier this May, we welcomed a new baby into our home. And the arrival of a new member has undoubtedly changed the dynamics of the family in significant ways. Sticking to the normal schedule was harder and school-time often got disrupted. With a newborn clamoring for most of Mommy and Daddy’s attention, the girls couldn’t help feeling left out and we began to have discipline issues, and often. Ticking off a list of lesson objectives seemed like the most impossible thing to do.

That was the moment when God convicted me and helped me regain my focus on what we believe was the purpose of education: to pursue wisdom and virtue, to the glory of God. Until then I had always rushed through our morning devotion in order to finish the lesson on time and keep up with the day’s demands, even as the children asked for longer Bible time. But God through His Word in Luke 10:38-42 showed me how I, like Martha, was anxiously preoccupied by the wrong things.

It’s not that the academics are not important, it’s just that they are not the most important. I had to learn again and again that, indeed, the beginning of wisdom is to know and to fear God. I also had to learn to put my trust in Him instead of in my own ability, to get my peace and rest from Him and then teach with that peace and restfulness.

We had since spent longer time for the morning devotion and shifted some parts of the schooling to the afternoon. We also reserved one school-day solely for reviewing our weekly growth in character, giving encouragement for any virtue we saw in each other and addressing the vices we needed to repent of. We called it Hari Ngobrol (Heart-to-heart Day), the girls were loving it so it is here to stay! And did we get plenty of time to play outdoor and explore the nature? You bet! 😉

In the end, alongside her soon-to-be first grader, this momma, too, has learned many things this year. Thanks be to God for His faithful and loving hands which have guided and upheld us year after year. May His mercy and grace continue to shadow us as we embark on yet another year of homeschooling.

K1 with Mommy

We have always believed that early childhood is the period of life when children should explore and experience their world in ways that make the most sense to them, that is through lots of play and hands-on experiences. The first six years of childhood are meant to be playful and carefree rather than filled with hours of sitting at desk doing academics. In fact, the playful years are crucial in preparing the children for the journey of academic learning which comes later. These short but essential moments, once gone are no longer retrievable. After all, it is called the preschool years for a reason.

As much as I wanted to spend my children’s preschool years playing in parks, watching birds and smelling flowers, we know that we are living in the part of the world where schooling normally starts at three. So it was understandable when the grandparents asked more questions and more often around the topic.

To accommodate their concerns, last year we started our formal academic learning with our eldest daughter at home, then turning five years old. We kept the “school-time” short so we had plenty of time for play and other non-academic activities daily.

In this post, I am compiling the lessons that we have done for the past year for future use with the younger siblings. The materials are derived largely from my memory of what were taught to me during my own Kindy years. If you are teaching your preschooler(s) and find the materials useful, please feel free to take anything that could be of any use for you.

First Things First

Before the school year began, Husband and I sat down and planned an overview of the year’s lessons. We reminded ourselves again what the definition of education is and what kind of education philosophy we believe in. For us, education is the pursuit of wisdom and virtue, to the glory of God. The approach we take is the classical model of education. Once we got that settled, we moved on to the practical e.g. lesson sets and their objectives.

Lesson Overview

For K1, we focused on four academic subjects:

  1. Memory training
  2. Numeracy
  3. Mathematics
  4. Literacy

Here is my scribble of the year’s lesson overview (written in Indonesian). The aim was that at the end of the year, the child would be able to:

  1. Recognize and write the 26 alphabet capital letters,
  2. Recognize and write (count) from 1 to 100,
  3. Read simple words (in Indonesian),
  4. Counting objects.

lesson-overview

Following Singapore’s January to November school calendar, our school-time began at 9 and ended at 10 in the morning, every Monday to Thursday (we have community day with our Classical Conversations’ homeschooling community every Friday).

The Subjects

1. Memory Training

The classical model of education puts a lot of emphasis on the training of memory. I used to question why my teachers would make us memorize things every day, regardless of our understanding them. It wasn’t just the school teachers, my Mandarin tuition teacher, Sunday School teachers, tuition teachers would all drill their students with rote memorization. In fact, memorization made up a huge part of my education from preschool all the way to high school. So, how important is memory training actually? The successful founder of Alibaba, Jack Ma, among many others, has proposed that we do away with teaching children what machines can do better. In the age of the mighty Google, are we to do away with memorization? We believe no.

“That is because a developed memory is a wondrous and terrible storehouse of things seen and heard and done. It can do what no mere search engine on the internet can do. It can call up apparently unrelated things at once, molding them into a whole impression, or a new thought. The poet T. S. Eliot understood this creative, associative, dynamic function of a strong memory. The developed imagination remembers a strain from Bach, and smells spinach cooking in the kitchen, and these impressions are not separate but part of a unified whole, and are the essence of creative play. Without the library of the memory…the imagination simply does not have much to think about, or to play with.” – Anthony Esolen, Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child, p. 9.

So we started every lesson with prayer, memorized a hymn of the week and a Bible memory verse of the week.

We ended every lesson with recitation of a particular work of literature. For the year we worked with 木蘭詞 (The Ballad of Mulan) and the first paragraph of  三字經 (The Three Character Classic).

sanzijing

2. Numeracy

We started with number 1 (one), working our way progressively one number a day. We stopped periodically to review and reinforce the numerals previously learned (1-10, 1-20, 1-30, 1-50, 1-70, 1-100).

3. Mathematics

Once the child was fluent with numbers, we began doing math by counting objects in small quantities, and then moving on slowly to larger quantities following the progress of the child’s numeracy.

math_apr

In our initial lesson plan for the year, we only expected our daughter to master counting objects. But since she progressed rather quickly we moved on to the next math’s lesson. One of the things we love best about homeschooling is we can tailor-make the learning to suit a specific child’s progress. It is, however, important to note that it is necessary for the child to over-master a lesson before moving on to the subsequent lessons. So we took our time and refrained from rushing even when she seemed ready.

After object counting is mastered well, we introduced the concept of “more than, less than, equals to.” And when this has been over-practiced, we moved to simple additions, working with number bonds within 5, and then moving slowly to 10, 15 and 20. We did the same with subtraction, but only after she mastered the corresponding addition well. This addition and subtraction exercises were done every school-day until the end of the school year (and even to K2 the following year). The goal is for the child to over-practice the basic arithmetic so much that it becomes intuitive.

Apart from arithmetic, basic clock-reading was also taught this year.

clock-may2018

4. Literacy

We chose to start our literacy lesson in Indonesian language. It is a phonetic language and therefore possesses simpler and more consistent phonetic rules. There are only 27 distinct sounds (phonemes) to its 26 alphabet letters (graphemes). Once these correspondings are memorized, they can be paired up to sound out words using very consistent and logical rules. We figured that it would be far more beneficial as the same rules can be applied to learning Mandarin’s hanyu pinyin, Japanese and Korean romaji, Latin and other phonetic languages. We also presumed that with ample exposure to spoken English (through conversations and being read-to daily) the child would be able to decode English with the phonetic rules learned in Indonesian language. Happily, this has been the case, our eldest daughter was able to read in all the languages mentioned above by end of the year.

We started with capital letter A, moving progressively to Z one letter a day. We stopped periodically and did dictation to review and reinforce the letters previously learned (A-J, A-T and A-Z).

Once the child was fluent with A-Z, we moved on to basic phonics, starting with two letter combinations:

BA-BE-BI-BO-BU to ZA-ZE-ZI-ZO-ZU and

AB-EB-IB-OB-UB to AZ-EZ-IZ-OZ-UZ,

then three letter combinations:

ANG-ENG-ING-ONG-UNG,

NGA-NGE-NGI-NGO-NGU,

NYA-NYE-NYI-NYO-NYU.

We read simple (and interesting) words with short syllables for reading exercise, working our way to more complicated words with longer syllables.

simplereading

The end goal for the year’s literacy was the ability to read words in capital letters. But since we achieved this earlier, we continued with introduction to lowercase letters in cursive. Why cursive? Because that was what I was taught, I never learned print letters from my teachers, they were picked up from textbooks (which I thought was just another style of writing because of the lack of ‘tails’). Now that I am teaching my own child, I did some research to find out why cursive, and let me just persuade you to do the same because there are just so many benefits to this way of writing which has been neglected by our modern education.

As was the case with capital letters, we stopped periodically and did dictation to review and reinforce the letters learned previously. This “a-z in cursive” exercise was done until the end of the school year and is still continued into the current year of K2.

literacy_oct-nov

That’s it, Kindy 1 with Mommy! Looking back, both Mommy and Big Nona have learned so much in one year, an hour for four days a week! Academics aside, we have also learned about each other’s character, temperament, about discipline and a lot more. It has especially been a tough training ground for me to practice patience, gentleness and kindness. Education, after all, is not just about transmitting knowledge and skills but also about how to bring those involved to higher wisdom and nobler virtue. We thank God for His sustaining grace throughout the past year and pray for His favor and blessings for the new year’s journey of learning.

Our First Year with Classical Conversations

We had always been entertaining the idea of homeschooling our children, but only last year did we seriously ponder over it.

On one side, there was our extrovert four-year-old who constantly craved for friends to play with, yet unfortunately more and more peers of hers could no longer be found at the playgrounds as they were getting busier with schools and homeworks. On the other side, we wanted her preschool years to be filled with plenty of play and free time instead of academic schooling – as is healthy for a four-year-old, but the preschools that shared our philosophy were just beyond expensive. And then, there were also the reasonable inquiries from the grandparents if their eldest granddaughter would be starting any formal education soon.

The carefree and playful preschool years.

Considering all the above, we concluded that if we were to continue with our education philosophy for our eldest daughter, we would need to find a community of people to do this homeschooling thing together. This we hoped would provide healthy peer interactions for her and also assure our own parents that we were not queerly doing this alone, that we had a community that supported us and a community we were accountable to.

That was how we decided to join a Classical Conversations (CC) community, a Christian homeschooling community that pursues a Christian classical model of education. If I could summarize it simply, classical education is a philosophy of education in which the goal is the cultivation of wisdom and virtue in its students, using the greatest ideas and thinkings of the wise men past as its main resources, learned by its students through three major stages called the Trivium:

1. Grammar stage (where students train their minds to hold huge amount of information by memorization);
2. Dialectic stage (where students learn to make connections between what they have memorized, to build understanding of what they have learned, and to critically question what they learn); and
3. Rhetoric stage (where students learn to synthesize ideas based on what they have learned and present their case in the most persuasive way possible). 

I like to think of these three steps as the steps I take in making a meal: get the ingredients, cook, present. And I think, in essence, almost everything naturally goes through the trivium process, like how my preschooler and toddler memorize my vocabularies, internalize them, and spit them out back at me to their advantage, can you relate? 😒 Anyway, if you’d like to find out more about classical education, you can start here.

So, back to the community, we were really blessed to have found a CC community nearby (with a toddler in tow, I could only do minimum traveling). We met once a week with several families from 9 AM to 12 PM. Our community day always started with prayer, scripture memorization, and national pledge, after which a tutor (CC engages one mother of the families as tutor) would guide the class through:

1. A set of new grammars to memorize (consisting of History timeline, a particular History sentence, Science, Math, Geography, English, and Latin);
2. Fine arts;
3. Presentation;
4. Science experiment;
5. Review of the previous 6 weeks’ grammars.

With so many things going on and so many facts to memorize, it seems rather hefty, doesn’t it? Thankfully, it was not as intimidating as it seemed to be. Points 2 to 5 involved a lot of moving around, games and hands-on moments so they were engaging. Now, for the new grammars memory work, although we used many creative ways to aid the memorization process, I have to admit that the amount of informations needed soaking up were not few. However, we were really impressed with how the children did it quite effortlessly! It’s not mere hear-say, children truly have amazing minds and memorizing comes naturally to them. (Think how our toddlers just copy whatever they hear from their surroundings.) And I was not less surprised to find that old brains like ours – the parents’, could keep up too when re-trained!

Singing and dancing while memorizing the world’s history timeline.

Hands-on science experiment.

One of the Fine Arts sessions – Andrew Wyeth (copying the great master’s painting style).

Science project – Anatomy.

Presentation, a show and tell session for the younger ones.

A CC year spans across 24 weeks, usually with a break every 6 weeks, following the U.S. school year it starts in September and ends in April before the summer break. We have just finished one cycle last April and are loving the long break, but we also miss the weekly meet-ups, especially the fellowship over lunch and the playground time afterwards.

For now, we are keeping the academic side of the learning light for our eldest, and we intend to keep it that way throughout her preschool years (after all, it’s called pre-school for a reason). To us, most importantly her needs for meaningful and extended interactions with peers were met through the CC community. When asked what she liked most about CC, she replied “My friends, of course!” And we are glad for her.

“My Friends”

As for me, I am thankful for a community of very supportive and gracious Christian families. Homeschooling can be a lonely journey, it is tough and is often full of doubts. Having a group of committed people to journey together is truly a blessing.

Looking back, we thank God for a blessed and fruitful year. Looking forward, we can’t wait for September to come!

Learn more about Classical Conversations here.

Little Nonas’ Nature Finds: Rearing Autumn Leaf Caterpillars

Our little nonas are very much fascinated with butterflies; their beautiful wings, in amazing array of patterns and colors. But we have never been able to get close enough to admire the detail of arts they carry on their wings.

Yesterday morning, as we were chasing butterflies around, we thought why not try rearing caterpillar, that way we could have a chance to get up-close with the butterfly once it emerges. So we got ourselves some Autumn Leaf caterpillars as pets from the garden behind.

We have since been watching these creepy crawlies with amazement; their colors, their movement, the way and the speed with which they chomp down leaves, and how quickly these creatures excrete their frass too. We hope we’ll get the chance to see them metamorphe into the beautiful butterflies they are meant to be. (Just please don’t die on us.)

I am probably more excited than the nonas. It’s the first time I get this close with caterpillars, and while I still freak out a bit inside, I find it very exciting and I delight in observing them. I guess not only is it preschool with mommy but also preschool for mommy. Never mind I am in my late twenties, because learning never ends.

Singapore, 19 May 2017

 

Little Nonas’ Nature Finds: Mating Snails


While the Big Nona was chasing a Changeable Lizard this morning, she fatefully jumped over another creature. The lucky thing turned out to be a pair of garden snails (Cornu aspersum), and they are in the busy process of mating!

It’s the first time we saw copulation process of snails, and it’s so unlike that of vertebrates. We had initially thought that it was just two snails lying dead before noticing that they were actually connected by what we supposed were their reproduction organs (see the white tentacle-like organs near their heads).

Not long after, we met a pair of dragonflies, yes you guess right, in the process of mating too. No picture as they kept flying away whenever I approached them (“What a rude human being!” they probably thought ).

Love is in the garden. May could be the month of love for them.

As to the 4 year old I could only say “The snails and the dragonflies are both getting married.”

Singapore, 11 May 2017

Little Nonas’ Nature Finds: Gliding Lizard

We spotted a gliding lizard (possibly a Draco boschmai) during our morning walk last week. With body color that very much resembled the tree on which it was perching, the lizard was well hidden. It took some time for the nonas to be able to spot it, with Mommy busily pointing “Look! Over there! There! Can you spot it?” all the while.

The lizard had a yellow triangular gular flag under its neck, which I initially thought was a piece of leaf. (Wait, do lizards even eat leaves?? Haha ) Only when I spotted its folded patagium (wing membrane) between the limbs did I suppose it to be a type of flying lizard. And true enough, Big Nona caught it gliding to another tree nearby soon afterwards.

We tried to take a picture of the lizard but it was no good, the lizard was way too far and we were facing the bright sun. I guess we should just leave such phototaking to the professionals and make do with hand sketches.

This was the first time we spotted a different lizard. The ones we usually meet are the Changeable Lizards (Calotes versicolor). But to Young Nona, they all probably look the same, because she always points to every one of them and says “MUSHU!”

glidinglizard

Sketch reference from:
www.ecologyasia.com/verts/lizards/boschma’s-gliding-lizard.htm

Singapore, 08 May 2017