vonfirmath wrote:Has anyone tried Afterschooling MFW?
Particularly, next year, I am thinking of picking up the 1st year Bible reader and notebook to get my son involved in regularly reading the Bible.
He's already a very good reader, but of course they don't cover any of the bible stuff in public school. He's in K this year.
Hello,
There are a few posts about afterschooling over here:
http://board.mfwbooks.com/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=2050
I started "afterschooling" my grandson this year. He's in public school K, as well. He goes all day, due to a dual language program, so I don't like to wear him out, but as you mentioned, the character lessons are priceless. And I babysit him a lot.
My method is just to present ideas when time allows or boredom sets in, and let my grandson decide. I usually couch MFW-K in with other choices, so he doesn't feel pressured. "Well, after dinner we could read a story, or play a game, or do some of the kindergarten activities..."
Over the year, his interests have drifted widely. At first, he loved the games -- for the ones that were easy for him, he invented even more wild versions
He also adored making the Creation book, and wanted to make a second one. Later, he started being interested in the letter units, but mostly the songs, poems, tracing letters in salt, etc. Now since around Christmastime (after he was 6 for a bit), he has begged to do "activities" -- which to him means the worksheets. Well, not the letter tracing one -- his K teacher sends home pages of tracing, even though he's in the classroom for 6 hours a day. But he loves the other pages -- checking off the pictures that start with the sound-of-the-week, matching the words to pictures, putting together sounds on the blend ladder pages (and sometimes changing them to silly sounds), any fun math pages/activities (we don't do the basic daily math since he does that at school including a 100th day celebration etc.). Sometimes he'll do a whole unit of worksheets in one day. He even asked me to pack them up when we took a trip to Florida(of course we never got to them). He also very much enjoys the little character/Bible sayings and the related Bible lessons. Sometimes we do other things from the grid, sometimes not. He's been very interested in the little lessons involving the globe. Playing hide-and-seek right after learning "I can't hide anything from God" was perfect. Oh, and just this week, he became interested in the Cuisinaire alphabet book and rods, and has been building the various pictures daily -- before this week, he had no interest so I set them aside.
This week, he made a couple of comments that really told me he is getting a lot out of this even as far as reading lessons (getting a lot out of the Bible is a given, of course
). One day he wanted to write something (he's into creating greeting cards these days, with all the recent holidays). He came to a letter we hadn't done together yet and said, "I haven't learned that one yet." In other words, he meant he couldn't read it well because he hasn't learned the MFW-K lesson yet, even though he's in a kindergarten class all day that must do far more with reading than our little after-schooling lessons. Another day, he was reading his little word list at the end of the current MFW unit (which is actually getting fairly long), and he noticed the apostrophe that was new. He was so excited! He realized it was another thing he "hasn't learned yet." It makes me feel like our very random, very unstructured activities and such are really making a difference even in his reading skills.
And he's actually asked to look at the catalog for 1st grade (because sometimes I tell him that he won't learn how to read a particular word until 1st grade). And he's excited for box day! I've homeschooled for some 11 years and this is the first time I've had a kid excited for box day
Julie
My older boys are in week 6 of AHL & WHL (Ben & I started later since we did a quick ADVENTURES study this summer) and they are doing well also. 