A Healer’s Geste

School Year 2010-2011: Hans’ Lessons

After Hans does his independent work, then it is time for his one-on-one lessons.

Accountability

When he’s finished his work, he comes up to report to me. I look over his checklist (to remind myself what he was supposed to do, but don’t tell him that), he shows me his work, I send him back if he has to redo anything (which has actually been rare so far), then he narrates his readings to me.

Narration

We have done narrations starting off with “Tell me something interesting from what you’ve read,” but I’m trying to transition him to a more complete rendition and he’s not taking the transition well. I believe it is because he is reading too quickly, because his narrations invariably mix up who did what and when he gets to the middle even he himself is confused about what actually happened. And I know that frustrated feeling where you thought you had it all perfectly straight in your brain until the pesky people push you to tell them what it is and suddenly it doesn’t make any sense at all. I hate that feeling, and now I’m being the pesky person pushing my son headlong into that pool. I am trying to think of strategies to give him. Mostly I need to remind him to read well, not quickly.

Handwriting

Next we do handwriting with Beautiful Handwriting for Children, and here’s my favorite part: Penny Gardner made YouTube video lessons for every lesson in the book. Somehow a video instruction is so much different than Mommy. I tell him to start at the top and he looks at me like “Mom! I knew that! Leave me alone!” and then 2 seconds later starts his letter at the bottom. Now the pressure is off our interaction and both boys watch carefully and then copy according to her directions. Not only that, but Ms. Gardner is infinitely patient. She can give the same instruction 5 times in the same encouraging, gentle, cheerful voice. So I supervise and make sure he does what he is supposed to do, but the video does the teaching and coaching. We all like it.

Spelling

We’re continuing with Sequential Spelling 1. I doubt we’ll finish it this year, but someone happened to be selling book 2 at the local used curriculum fair for $5, so I have it on hand if we need it. We’re still doing only half a day at a time, and I’m trying to be strict about writing in lowercase letters. I need to also get a little more strict about his a’s and d’s also.

One thing I started doing last year that was quite helpful for me was to crochet during spelling. I can make substantial progress on a project in 10-15 minutes, and it helps me keep my cool. If I have a project in my hands, I’m not just sitting there staring at him thinking about how to spell a word or staring at him making his letters incorrectly. When I’m not doing anything else, somehow frustration seems to build inside and I am working more at containing and controlling myself than anything else. I have no idea why it’s frustrating to watch a 6 or 7 year old think through how to spell something and then do so deliberately, but I do know that if my fingers are busy, that feeling totally evaporates. So I’m taking the easy out at this stage and I hope that the character flaw will simply dissipate itself as well. And crochet is handy in situations like this (and read-aloud time), because usually patterns are very repetitious, so it requires no brain power and I can start and stop with ease and even go a little ways without looking (while glancing at a word list or what Hans is writing, for instance).

Sequential Spelling

Piano

We haven’t started piano yet, but we will be soon. Matt is going to take this over. We own a piano (Matt’s parents’ before they bought their baby grand, so it is the one he learned to play on, as well), and Matt had lessons for many years and still plays occasionally. I assume we’ll delegate piano lessons at some point, but it seems like level one can be easily taken care of at home. And I think Hans will like having a lesson with Dad. Since it is what Matt learned with and what the several teachers I talked to used, we went with the standard Alfred’s books. The lesson book is non-consumable, just so ya know. :)

That’s all we do together, although math has so far been notably absent. Next post: Math.