Before I start, I just want to apologize for not posting much over the past week or two. I am a stock analyst and I research companies and write reports about the prospects for the equities of the companies I cover. I had thirteen stocks due on Tuesday, and they were going to press this week. Next week I will be a bit less busy, and I should be able to write blog posts regularly again. Usually, once people find out that I home school my daughters I get asked a lot of questions about how I do it. In today's post, I will try to explain the process I use to teach my girls. This post, I will focus on Ashleigh, and the early years of education. Next post I will focus on Maddie and how I interact with her to help her learn. To start, I just want to say that I only loosely follow a set curriculum. After researching a number of programs, I thought that the Robinson curriculum would work best for me. The Robinson curriculum is very heavy into math, and stresses a lot of free time for reading so that the children learn through their spare time as well. ReadingThe biggest challenge, I find, is actually teaching the children how to read. With both of my daughters, we started by using Hooked on Phonics. I like the flash cards that help to show the children which sounds come from which letters. Although Ashleigh now knows how to read, I still go back to asking her what sound a particular letter or set of letters combinations make to help her figure out what a word is when she gets stuck. The second stage I used for Ashleigh was to have her write down very simple words, repetitively. I would give her a set of about six to 12 words and have her write them down ten times each in a row. On trickier words, I would have her say them out loud as well. I had her do this every day for weeks on end. As she began to recognize words, I started having her copy short sentences too. After a few weeks I began having her try to read some of her story books to me. Since she was very young, My Mom and I have always read little stories to Ashleigh. As she progresses, we began having her read them to us! Unfortunately, many of the Disney books are not geared towards young children reading them themselves. I found that too many words were there for adults to read them to the children. I solved this problem by finding an old McGuffey Reader online. For many weeks, I had Ashleigh read passages from the reader to me. I then wrote down sentences based on the words she read in the passages and had her write them in a notebook. We have gone through a number of notebooks that way. The exercise helped to improve her reading AND writing abilities. Next, I began to have Ashleigh write a short blog post each day for this website. Her topics are simple, but it helps her to learn to write out her thoughts. Me or my Mom will usually help her with spelling for some of the larger words, and I do read it with her and help her to fix punctuation mistakes. Ashleigh has to read out loud each day and when she finishes reading a book she has to write a book report for it as well. She publishes these reports on this blog, as well as on a site set up strictly for her reports. You can find that web site here. MathematicsAnother area that is very important to my curriculum is mathematics. I started teaching Ashleigh basic math at an early age. There are two things that I do to teach math. First, I give her a page or two of hand written math problems each day. I started her with very basic adding and subtracting problems, and then moved her up to larger and larger numbers. At the same time, I started her on IXL. IXL is a computer-based math tutoring program that follows the state standards for math knowledge. If you are interested, you can find it at www.ixl.com. Ashleigh has completed the program through level C math and is currently about 50 completed segments into level D math. Each day she covers about five segments, so they add up quickly. The program is good because when she gets an answer wrong, it sets back her progress in that area and she then needs to answer more problems correctly before she is allowed to graduate out from that segment. I have found her math skills have really improved since she has started that program. Recently, I have also started to give her the times table to copy down and learn. Although I have taught her the basics of multiplication, she still views it as a derivation of addition, so her progress has been slow. We still work on it weekly and she has started to be able to answer some of the smaller multiplication problems in her head. When I was teaching Madison. we used the same programs, however we also used the Saxon math books. These helped to broaden her understanding to some degree. Once Ashleigh can read better, I will likely use the same books with her as well. Physical EducationPhysical education is one of my favorite subjects for the girls! Each of my girls started training in karate when they were three years old. Currently, Maddie is a second degree black belt and 2015 Grands sparring champion. Ashleigh is currently a purple belt with a black stripe, and will be testing for her blue belt in two weeks. Both of my girls have won invitations to the Grands tournament in November. Maddie will be competing in sparring and weapons, while Ashleigh will be competing in sparring and forms. Recently, Ashleigh was honored to have her picture featured on a flyer that was sent out to all of the students in the New Ipswich school system advertising a new after-school karate program. The picture is below. Although karate is a great physical activity, the girls gain so much more from it than they would a regular gym class. The most important thing to me is that they are learning to defend themselves. As a Dad, I worry about their safety, and I wanted to make certain that they have every chance available to them if they ever have to defend themselves.
Karate is much more than a sport. It is a life style. Our dojo has five rules: effort, etiquette, sincerity, character, and self-control. We also practice peace over power. In other words, we are trained to not use our skills to start fights, but to finish them. We are only to use our skills in self defense. I like that my daughters will be bale to train in karate throughout there lives. So many of the sports I played as a child are no longer played by me or my friends. Even so, at 50 I still train three times a week. I picked up karate late in life. I started training at the age of 42. I started to train because we reached a point in Maddie's training where I could no longer help her because I did not know the material. I started to train to help her, but ended up continuing because I enjoyed it so much as well! We like to say "A family that kicks together, sticks together!" Both of my girls love karate and it is a major part of their lives. Even so, I made a rule early on that neither of them could date until they had a black belt. Maddie got hers at ten, so the rule did not impact her dating life at all. At her current pace, it also looks like the rule won't have an impact on Ashleigh's dating life. Although the rule was made half jokingly. It makes me feel better to know that the girls are trained to take advantage of weaknesses in anatomy if the need ever arises. A second way that my girls get exercise is by having a love of the great outdoors. I try to take the girls hiking regularly, and they both seem to enjoy it. We all take pictures while we are out, and many of them end up gracing many of the blog posts on this site. Madison also has an instagram account, where she posts many of her pics. Well this post is running a little long, so I will end this post here. On my next post, I will tell you how Maddie's education differs from Ashleigh's since she is older, and I will also touch upon how I teach science and history. Here are four more pics of my girls through out their karate careers!
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