Whole Brain Teaching At Home

Whole Brain teaching is a revolutionary program to get kids excited about learning, following rules, listening and becoming better students in the process. Which makes the teachers job of teaching a lot easier. I wondered if this would be right for me. I use the K12 program for my child's teaching and he is only 1 student. How could this work when it was designed to help a large class? Well I'm going to find out. I hope you follow me on this journey.

Day 1:   School has not started yet. First day of school is September 4th. I'm more excited about it than he is. After watching a few videos on WBT I decided to try it. You begin with the rules. OK here we go. Here is a snapshot of our conversation:

      Me: Lets go over the rules before school starts.
    Him: No not school today
      Me: Its not school its the rules for school you need to know them before school starts.
     Him: Moan groan
     Me: When I say class you say yes
     Me: Class
   Him: YES. 
  wow I thought he participated without a fight
   Me: However I say class you say Yes
   Me: Class Class
  Him: Yes Yes
   Me: classity classity
  Him: yesity yesity
wow OK this is working like they said it would lets try the rules now
 Me: Rule 1 (using gestures) follow directions quickly
He repeated the rule using the gestures without being told
 Me Rule 2 Raise hand before speaking
he again repeated me
Within 5 minutes he knew all 5 rules and I had his full attention. He was engaged, excited and ready to learn.
I'm also going to incorporate circle time and story time into our daily schedule. Instead of dreading the arguments of a typical school day I'm looking forward to making learning fun and enjoying my time with my son.
  I will keep posting updates on how this system is working and also if it stops working.
Again I hope you follow me on this journey to implement the WBT system into a home school (1child) experience.  

DIY Chalkboard

Watching Caillou the other day we (My son and I) were discussing the pros and cons of school vs homeschool. In the episode Caillou was a guest at his friends school. He was not allowed to play ball.
He was not allowed to climb. He missed the assembly because he had to go potty and when he was writing on the chalkboard his friend said. "Its a good thing this is a special day because we only write on the chalkboard to do our work"

We are allowed to play, we are allowed to climb, We stop class to go potty but we did not have a chalkboard. Hmm so I started pricing chalkboards. Wow are they expensive. So we decided to make our own.

You can find tons of ways to do this project on Pintrest but this is how we did it.

Littleman painting the drywall

 

We went to Lowells to get plywood but the cutting guy was not there so we settled for a precut piece of drywall.

 

Added 4 coats of chalkboard paint letting each coat dry before adding the next.

 

 

Then with dads help we edged it with duct tape. Littleman chose orange.

 

Again dad helped affix it to the wall and Hunter was ready to go

 

 

Now he has his own chalkboard. Total price 25 dollars and took less than an hour to make.

Of course now we have lots of chalkboard paint left. Hmmmm what to paint next :)

Junk Journaling With Kids.

My journal. A altered composition book.

Really you have got to try this. My son hates to write. Doesn't like pencils, Can't stand crayons and if it not his name he is writing its a meltdown waiting to happen if I push the issue. Then I came across
journaling. I started making scrap books. Didn't really know what to do with them. Still don't. Searching and googling ideas for them connected me with the idea of journaling.
  First it was lapbooking. Oh we love to lapbook. (More about those in another post) Then paper bag scrapbooks, mini books and altered notebooks. That's when I discovered Junk Journals.

  If you don't know Junk Journals typically are to get rid of your scraps from other projects. Smash books are a type of junk journal. Anyway. I watched a video on youtube about a lady that made her own junk journal from stuff found around the house and my little lightbulb popped on. I can do that with LittleMan.
 
  So I brought up the idea with him...... I was nervous, just the thought of telling him to write something sent shivers down my spine. I approached the subject like this.

Me: Today we are going to make a book. A different kind of book than you have ever seen. A book that you will create. Its yours. Do with it what you want. The only rule is you can not use notebook
paper. You can use boxes, scrap paper, flyers, foam, anything you can write on but not normal everyday notebook paper.

Him: Can I cut the box?

He then ran to get a box to cut. He cut two pieces for the cover. We found all the little foam sticky letters he had scattered on the floor and found all the letters to his name. He then stuck them on his cover in the correct order. Took a marker and copied his name 3 times. on the inside of the front cover. That was day 1.

  Every day he has found something to place in his journal. On day 15 he decided to decorate the front and back covers. Took some old scrapbook paper and glued it on. Found some stickers and decorated.

Even on days when we don't do school he asks to do his journal. We write the date on each page and he draws or writes a word or two. Its now the second month of this project. We have on occasion missed a couple of days but he always remembers to pick up some kind of paper from the places we go to add to his journal.

 A few days ago my granddaughter was born and we were at the hospital awaiting her arrival. LittleMan ordered a sandwich from the cafeteria. He made sure we kept the order form to add to the journal and dated it.

 This has been the best idea so far. Plus its such a neat history of his life. Places he has gone, food he has eaten, toys he has bought, and things he has seen.

Lost in Blogville

Hello Everyone,

  Let me introduce myself. I am a mother of 7 and a grandmother of 3 soon to be 4 adorable grandbabies. I live in the Beautiful Willamette Valley AKA Heaven, Garden of Eden. We (I) love it here. We moved here from Arizona about 1 1/2 years ago. Our children are aged 25, 23,23,21,21,16 and 5. My grandchildren are aged 2, 9m, 1 week and the 4th is due in July.

   I have always had my children in brick and mortar school but I've always had the secret desire to homeschool. A few times with my older children I needed to homeschool during the summer. Using a popular phonics program helped teach them to read. The school always wanted to hold back my now 16yo So I would teach him at home during the summers so he wouldn't need to be. Plus one of my sons would of never graduated 8th grade without me schooling him at home. So I guess my secret wasn't really a secret just a disguise.

 I have a child with MS and has lost the majority of his vision. I fought and fought with his schools to
have him get all the help he needed to succeed. He did graduate high school!!! So for that I'm so proud as he was encouraged by the school to drop out.

  My youngest son is Autistic. He went to B&M preschool. I worked full time as did my husband and I thought I didn't have a choice. Then we moved to Oregon and our life changed forever.

The 1st 6 months we lived here we had no jobs, tons of bills, and lots of hope. Praying to God everyday, trying Feng shui to bring money into the home. Feng shui did not work but praying did.
We got rid of everything. 2 cars were repoed, No cable, internet, no going out for dinners, no traveling, nothing. Stay home, look for work, lots of family outings exploring the great outdoors. We became closer as a family and learned to appreciate the little things.
  After 6 months I found a job. I worked and my husband stayed home. Little man would be starting kindergarten in Sept and he wouldn't talk to anyone but family. He wasn't potty trained and meltdowns were the norm. I stressed about sending him on a bus by his self to a school full of strangers. How would/could he succeed when the whole world was scary. He wouldn't even go into the next room without someone with him.

 Then we heard about K12. Most people don't count this as homeschool and they shouldn't. K12 is a public school you do online at home. But it was perfect for me. It relived the stress of him going to school. We still weren't sure if we could do this. We weren't sure if we could even stay with Oregon. So we set a time limit. If no work for husband by September we would go back to AZ. I started looking for homes for sale there. The last day of our time limit. He heard back from the job he wanted. Yay. We could stay. I could lower my hours to near nonexistent and little man could do K12.

Now we have been with k12 for almost a whole year. Little man flew through kindergarten and started 1st grade in Feb. I'm so thankful for this opportunity to watch him grow and learn. I still 'homeschool' him a lot. I buy curriculum to fortify the concepts and help him along the way with completely out of the box ideas.

I will be sharing a lot of those ideas here in this blog. Hoping that maybe you will get some ideas also or maybe just a little entertainment. This is my first day ever blogging so please feel free to give me some constructive critiscm and hopefully encourage me on this new path. Thanks for reading.