Assessments 2022-23: The Younger 6

 I have tried innumerable ways to write the kids' assessments individually, but this year does not lend itself to individual recording. 

It was a kind of sabbatical year.

We rested from our usual labors, and we employed ourselves in an array of activities that all blended together into general growth.

Morning Meeting

This continued as usual because it is one of the anchors of our days--keeps us from flying away into chaos.  

Half of this school year included the end of our Come, Follow Me Old Testament studies.  We also read the Old Testament portion of Egermeier's Bible Story Book as well as our usual rereading of The Jesus Storybook Bible in December.  As part of our studies, we sang a hymn or primary song every week at every Morning Meeting.  We memorized the primary scripture of the month And I chose a scripture each week to go with the Come, Follow Me lesson that we recited 3 times during each meeting.  We didn't really memorize these verses, but the recitations helped us get very familiar with them. 

We're always reading some form of The Book of Mormon--whether it be a compilation of stories or excerpts of actual scriptures--so I know that was part of our Morning Meeting for the entire school year.  

We memorized (or reviewed) The Family:  A Proclamation to the World in 2022, and we picked up in January 2023 with The Living Christ--which we have recently completed.

Also beginning in January 2023 was Come, Follow Me New Testament.  We covered the 4 gospels in the first half of the year.  We also completed the New Testament portion of Egermeier's Bible Story Book.

In addition to the church-issued manual, we use several video websites for our Come, Follow Me study, including, but not limited to, Line Upon Line for Come Follow Me, Latter-Day Kids, and a variety of fun Christian YouTube channels. 

All of the kids participate in our Morning Meeting--from the babies to the teens!

Daily Walks

We were really good at taking a walk almost every weekday.  I'm willing to bet that we walked around the block (.8 mile) 90% of the days.

We got exercise.

We made nature observations.

We problem solved.

We foraged for food and craft supplies.

We talked.

We did oral math problems.

We spelled words.

We identified flowers, trees, and birds.

We drew with chalk.

We made snowballs.

We flew kites.

I'm sure there was more.

Other Exercise

On days with weather that defeated us, we did yoga or had dance parties.  

We also have had a number of park days that included climbing, playing games, balancing, and other awesome things that happen when kids play at the park.

American Rhythm

While this is definitely exercise, it is so much more and such a big part of our lives that it gets its own section.

The kids learned upwards of 20 different dances in weekly rehearsals that lasted 2+ hours each.  

All but our final Friends and Family show took place at senior centers or nursing homes, and we do not charge for any of them.  After each show, the kids greeted the audience members, shaking hands where allowed (and sometimes where not allowed because the seniors just reach out for contact regardless of the rules!) and making polite conversation with them.  Interacting with the seniors is a blessing in both directions.

They learned how to make fast costume changes, how to organize their costumes, and how to follow the show schedule.  

They schlepped costumes and music equipment in and out of cars and show locations, serving one another and our dance director.

Daycare/Child Development

Even though this set of 6 kids are now ages 8-12, they did quite a bit of grown-up work helping with our daycare babies.  They have learned by experience so much about what toddlers and preschoolers typically do--and what is not so typical.  They helped with potty training, hand washing, meal serving, playing, keeping safe, conflict resolving, reading, teaching, and supervising our 6 little people.

Our "babies" started the school year at ages 1, 1, 2, 2.5, 2.5, and 3.5.  

They are now one year older.

These are years of huge developmental milestones, and my kids have been part of them all.)

I count this as some of our most important therapy.

I also count this as some of our most important life skills training.

Math

We dropped all formal math this year.  It had become such a burden for all that it was one of the main reasons we used this as a Sabbath school year.

However,  we did continue to use real-life math--measuring, counting, adding, subtracting, lots of calendar work, practical geometry, problem-solving skills, and whatever else out there is possible.

The break helped all of the kids to find their joy in math again, simply by meeting it on their own terms.

I did use some Wild Math lessons with the kids here and there.  As the year passed, I brought up some of our Life of Fred books, and we've completed Apples and Butterflies; we expect to complete Cats in the next week or so.

In spite of the break from formal math, I've seen growth in all of the kids in their reasoning.  Ladybug lost most of her math facts, and even Mister Man has groaned in frustration a few times when a multiplication fact refused to surface from the depths of his mind.  

The kids are rested and well-ready to dive into lessons again--in fact, they have with Teaching Textbooks.  By the time our next school year officially starts, they'll be through with 3 weeks of math lessons already!

Language Arts

We dropped all formal lessons in this subject.  No one did a spelling lesson, grammar lesson, or handwriting lesson.

What did happen, though, was lots of practice in this subject with listening, discussing, and writing small narrations for history pages.

And the kids wrote their own stuff:

*stories

*lists

*questions

*captions

*notes

etc.

If I asked for a written narration, I made 3-4 corrections at the most.  The kids would correct their own work with me looking on, and we'd ignore any other mistakes.  There's only so much a person can absorb at any given time, and while I want the kids to know how to accept correction, I don't want to paralyze them with it.

This year Ladybug and Mister Man completed 3-5 sentence paragraph narrations.

Brother and Beowulf copied 2 sentences and had to write 1 of their own.  (Brother often wrote much more.)

Lola had to copy 1 sentence.

Baymax had to copy 1-2 sentences, depending on what I thought he could do on any given day.

Ladybug does not know how to pick out the main idea of a reading selection.  She writes long, long narrations, telling all of the details she can remember, and she is so proud of her ability to write.

I'm proud of her, too.

But a goal for the year to come will be for her to find and summarize the main idea.

The rest of the kids are pretty good at it, with Mister Man having an absolute gift for concise,well-stated summaries.

Reading

No one had a reading lesson this year. 

Going into the year, Lola and Brother were my weakest readers--and they still are.  However, they are at a higher level of reading ability now than they were at the end of last school year.  They are both reluctant readers, and neither is truly independent.  Brother will walk into a room where everyone else is absorbed in a book and mutter sadly to himself, "Why are they all reading?  What's the point of all this reading?"

It hurts my heart that he feels that way.

He did, though, set the goal for himself to read the first Fablehaven book.  It took him months.  But he did it!  He read the whole book all by himself.

It didn't turn him into a reader.

It did give him the courage to start other books, even if none of them has caught his interest.

Lola is not a fluent reader.  She volunteered to read to me once in the past year.  I was pleased to see that she really only needs practice to become fluent.  She has become interested in graphic novels, and even though she mostly asks for them to be read to her, she's following along enough that some of the repeated words are sticking in her brain.  One day, she even read a little familiar book to one of the babies.

The rest of the kids are or (in the case of Beowulf) can be voracious readers.  They are into fantasy stories and Pokemon.  I have indulged them this year, but I'm going to give each of them a list of books to try to broaden their individual ranges.

History/Geography

This is probably the area in which we had the most academic growth.  We read countless stories about countries, cultures, people, and events.  

We did a rapid-fire survey of almost modern American history (post-Civil War to the Vietnam War) with gorgeous picture books.

We read a whole bunch of stories from the Libraries of Hope rotation.  The vast majority of them were read online, but I did purchase hard copies of the My Book of Delights series and the My Fine Art Storybook series because they had a lot of color illustrations (and it's not reasonable to study fine art without seeing the actual pictures).

The kids absorbed a lot of information from all of the reading we did, and we began the habit of making history notebooking pages this year (as recorded above in the Language Arts section).  Every single kid improved their ability to copy/construct sentences.  And they love to look over their history notebooks and review who they've learned about.

Science/Nature Studies

We did so much reading and walking and video watching!  These kids learned a ton about gardening, mammals, insects, biomes, birds, astronomy, and the ocean.  They learned a little bit about geology.

We did a deep dive into botany, and that was just pure fun from beginning to end.  

We tried so hard to have a garden . . . we have a few cherry tomatoes, a squash, and lots of edible flowers growing outside our dining room window.  Hummingbirds have found the flowers, and even though it's a new school year, I'll still report that we've been watching them!

We went on field trips to nature centers, parks, a farm, and an aquarium.  We used magnifying glasses, compasses, knives (dissecting pumpkins), hammers (geodes), and various measuring devices.  We learned to identify plants in our neighborhood, and we learned how to cook some foraged plants right in our own yard.  We drew pictures of things we observed, too.

All 6 kids grew in their understanding of the world around them.

Literature

We read so much!

I started to try to compile a list of what we read this year, but I got tired and overwhelmed.  Then I remembered that I've been keeping a list of books since January!  After copying and pasting that in place, it was easier to face going through every post from August to December to find what we read.

The Peterkin Papers--Lucretia Peabody Hale

Little Lord Fauntleroy--Frances Hodgson Burnett

Sarah, Plain and Tall--Patricia MacLachlan

Toby Tyler--James Otis

Beowulf--adapted by H.E. Marshall

Exploring the Himalaya--Douglas O. Williams

The Golden Name Day--Jennie Lindquist

El Cid (we didn't finish it)--adapted by unknown author

Don Quixote--retold by John Lane

Understood Betsy--Dorothy Canfield Fisher

The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle--Avi

The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus--L. Frank Baum

Why the Chimes Rang--Raymond MacDonald Alden

The Best Christmas Pageant Ever--Barbara Robinson

The Hundred Dresses--Eleanor Estes

A Christmas Carol--Charles Dickens

Hans Brinker or The Silver Skates--Mary Mapes Dodge

Landmark Joan of Arc

Landmark William the Conqueror

The Children's Book of Virtues

The Children's Book of Heroes 

Stories of William Tell--Told by H.E. Marshall

Mary's Garden and How it Grew--Frances Duncan

Along Came a Dog--Meindert deJong

The Blue Cat of Castletown--Catherine Cate Coblentz

The Princess and the Goblin--George MacDonald

Landmark John James Audubon--Margaret and John Kieran

Junket--Anne H White

Lad: a Dog--Albert Payson Terhune

The Vanderbeekers and the Secret Garden--Karina Yan Glaser

Clara Dillingham Pierson Nature Reader Volume 1

Stories of Robin Hood--H.E. Marshall

The House That Lou Built--Mae Respicio

Drawing Outside the Lines: A Julia Morgan Novel--Susan Austin

In Search of the Castaways--Jules Verne

This list doesn't include the dozens and dozens of picture books we read, too.

My assessment:  The kids have fantastic vocabularies, excellent comprehension, the ability to make connections, and a genuine love for a good story.

Art

We used Lily and Thistle to work on watercolor skills.

We used Art for Kids Hub for drawing specific pictures that related to science, history, or something we were reading for fun.

The kids made cards, did origami, made collages, copied the manga art in their graphic novels, drew Pokemon characters, drew dragons for a long time, harvested their own clay and sculpted with it, painted with acrylic and tempera paints, and explored so many kinds of art.

All of them made progress in their abilities to follow directions in a directed art lesson and expanded their joy in non-directed lessons.

Spanish

I put up a small list of words and phrases with the English translation on our dry-erase board every month, and I left them there for the whole month.  Occasionally, I would point them out and pronounce them.  The kids sometimes ignored them and sometimes used them.  It was a small activity, but it helped the kids think about how other languages work and how other people express themselves.

In Conclusion

This reads less like an assessment and more like a curriculum description--and a poor description at that.  But all 6 kids grew physically, academically, morally, and socially.  

The sense of being on a break and doing so many hands-on activities recharged us all and brought back so much of the joy that had disappeared over the course of the 22-23 school year.

We are ready to be more organized and have more structure than we had last year, but I don't want to lose the joy.  I sincerely hope to find the right balance!