We're jumping in too and some questions

[littlefamily]

Looks like we are enrolling our dds in public school as well - 5th & 3rd grade. My oldest is excited to try school and my younger one is very apprehensive. Unfortunately we just moved, so they don't know anyone at the school, so I think that is part of her apprehension. My husband and I are on the fence, but figure if it doesn't work, we can always go back to homeschool.

We will do some afterschooling, but I want to be careful not to do too much and have them feeling overwhelmed. As I look at what we did at home, I know there are some things we just have to leave behind, but it is hard to narrow it down... Give me your thought.

Latin - we are going to stop; although they enjoy it something has to give
Logic - hoping to leave in doing fun things like Mindbenders
History - we will continue reading and maybe timeline (we would be starting over with ancients). Not sure if the timeline would be too much.
Grammar - on the fence; I hear many PS don't focus on this and I feel that is a mistake, but we do R&S, so it would be pretty intense
Math - I will probably just work on the basics in fun ways and maybe continue with Singapore word problems.

And of course we will continue with required reading and read alouds.

Does this sound doable? Any thoughts on the subjects that are maybes? What do you think are the most important areas to hit in afterschooling?

Thanks!

[LibrarianMom]

What you've described sounds doable. My kids aren't that old yet, but I like your emphasis in several areas on keeping it fun. Work around their other assignments, combining when able. Doing something is always better than nothing.

LibrarianMom

[Melinda in VT]

I've always wanted to do a timeline, but somehow I've never gotten to it.

I think I'd look at doing your "maybes" during school breaks.

[Martha in NM]

We afterschooled K-3 before switching to full time hs. If the school isn't focusing on grammar you might want to think twice about dropping Latin, but I say that only because your children enjoy it. It might be possible to find a curriculum that would work for your situation. IMO the best way to learn English grammar is through Latin, and you can also include a fair amount of history and geography in the elementary years.

One year I did afterschool math out of necessity. I had mixed feelings about it; that was our least satisfying of the four years we afterschooled. My son's days were full, and he was usually tired at the end of the day.

What worked best for us were educational/recreational field trips as often as time and budget would allow (usually on weekends), and a reading/discussion program that was structured in the sense of being consciously planned but informal in the sense that I didn't require a lot of tangible work. We always kept it as a time to relax and have some fun together.

That said, I was amazed at how often our reading helped with school assignments. One example: in 3rd grade the teacher asked the students to write a simple puppet play on a historical theme. We were reading about Egyptian history, so ds wrote a hilarious play about two bungling tomb robbers named Bata and Mosi. The teacher was impressed, and the class laughed in all the right places.

This isn't an idea that appeals to everyone, but when the weather was nice, nature walks and journaling made a nice change of pace after being inside a schoolroom most of the day. You can "hang" lots of other subjects on nature journaling such as art, life science, earth science, literature, and writing.

IMO, the one thing that overrides curriculum or subject choice is encouraging a desire for learning and staying connected with what your children are learning. That's more important than designing the perfect group of subjects. You may find that you have less time and energy for afterschooling than you might like; don't feel like a failure if you can't do everything on your list. Also, I found that our situation changed from year to year. One year I had to do some serious remediation because the teacher was going through a divorce and the school made poor curriculum choices in core subjects. Another year, for some reason, math didn't get done in school on a regular basis, so I had to do more than supplement.

Best wishes,
Martha

One other thought; I volunteered in ds' classroom so I usually had access to all the textbooks and advance notice of homework assignments. I had time to think of ways to tweak our afterschool activities so that we could use that time to satisfy homework requirements. One teacher was so enthusiastic about our outside reading that he tweaked his homework assignments for us, but I never advertised what we did as "afterschooling" for fear of giving offense. When I mentioned anything at all I just spoke in terms of visits to museums, nature walks, and evening read-aloud time. Sometimes I asked for advice on things such as re-enforcing math facts and other things that came up on progress reports. I didn't call what we did afterschooling in front of ds, either. In the elementary years he was one of those "tell all" children.

[littlefamily]

Thanks for all the ideas!

[tracywag]

Martha, this is an *excellent* post on afterschooling. I think I'm going to save it to re-read. We are doing some of the same things as you, but I could lean a lot from your approach, and your grace.

Thanks!
Tracy

[JFS in IL]

It will depend on how much homework comes home with them - it almost sounds as if you might as well be homeschooling if you want to keep doing more than one extra subject after school.

[Jean in CA]

My dd and ds are in school after being exclusively homeschooled since K. My plan is to assess the strengths and weaknesses of their school experience and supplement where necessary.

So far for 5th grader, we'll be continuing with Latina Christiana 2. DD has worked so hard on Latin, and I know she'll forget so much in one year if she does not continue. She does this on her own and is highly motivated (otherwise I'd probably not have time to do it with a toddler and baby in tow :)

Then, the school uses Saxon 6/5 to which I supplement with Singapore CWP and IP word problems and some mental math.

Then, I using the school's history and science texts, I plan to have her learn to outline and take notes for studying for tests. Not a bad skill that she wouldn't have learned with just me homeschooling.

I would also like to do something with writing (more along the lines of WTM method ) as the school's assignments tend to focus more on creative writing or long ambiguous assignments that I don't think she's ready for.

As for the 3rd grader ds, I'm adding reading historical fiction and biographies to go along with his social studies (they don't read real books at ps). I also add Singapore word problems. I'm adding parts of FLL (memorizing the prepositions and narrations, dictations) The school seems to do a good of on parts of speech, so I'll let them do that portion.

I was hoping to continue SOTW, but I think that will be overkill as they have so little free time as it is. My plan is to work with what they have at school and beef it up, modify, versus using completely separate curriculum and overlapping.

HTH!

Jean in CA


Looks like we are enrolling our dds in public school as well - 5th & 3rd grade. Does this sound doable? Any thoughts on the subjects that are maybes? What do you think are the most important areas to hit in afterschooling?

Thanks!

[Martha in NM]

I enjoyed thinking about those years again; we had some good times. A lot of my time these days is spent thinking about testing and transcripts instead of planning nature walks or field trips.

Thank you for your kind words, Tracy. I'm glad you found the post helpful.

Martha

[Tabrett]

Looks like we are enrolling our dds in public school as well - 5th & 3rd grade. My oldest is excited to try school and my younger one is very apprehensive. Unfortunately we just moved, so they don't know anyone at the school, so I think that is part of her apprehension. My husband and I are on the fence, but figure if it doesn't work, we can always go back to homeschool.

We will do some afterschooling, but I want to be careful not to do too much and have them feeling overwhelmed. As I look at what we did at home, I know there are some things we just have to leave behind, but it is hard to narrow it down... Give me your thought.

Latin - we are going to stop; although they enjoy it something has to give
Logic - hoping to leave in doing fun things like Mindbenders
History - we will continue reading and maybe timeline (we would be starting over with ancients). Not sure if the timeline would be too much.
Grammar - on the fence; I hear many PS don't focus on this and I feel that is a mistake, but we do R&S, so it would be pretty intense
Math - I will probably just work on the basics in fun ways and maybe continue with Singapore word problems.

And of course we will continue with required reading and read alouds.

Does this sound doable? Any thoughts on the subjects that are maybes? What do you think are the most important areas to hit in afterschooling?

Thanks!
Honestly, if your going to do that much for afterschooling, why don't you just continue homeschooling? I agree with the other poster about homework and children being tired. A young child can only do so much in a day. I would continue with one subject and reading. That's it. I have a 9th grader who I wanted to after school for just one subject. She has so much homework and is so tired, I can't even afterschool.