Pros and Cons of Having Kids Close Together in Age

My children are all within 3 years and 3 1/2 months of age: the first two (both girls) are 2 years and 3 1/2 months apart, and the last two are 1 year and 2 days apart. I admit I was shocked when I found out I was pregnant with child #3. I wasn't upset about having another child - I just really didn't want to be miserable and pregnant again! But that's another story.

Now, I call my youngest two children my "almost twins." Right now, at ages 3 1/2 and 2 1/2, they are almost the same height and weight. My middle child, even at just 1 year old, loved her baby brother from the start, and is very nurturing and mothering. Most of the time. My son, the youngest, would follow his biggest sister around anywhere. All three of them love playing together, and one of the most immediate benefits to home schooling was the increase in closeness between all 3 of them. The few times I've let my girls go spend the night at grandma's house, my son wanders around the house looking for his sisters. Not to say that he doesn't quickly recover and enjoy playing with all the toys by himself.

Which brings me to one of the cons - sharing toys. They are all so close together in age that they all like playing with the same type of toys. If they were further apart, I would imagine that the oldest one wouldn't still be so interested in the "baby" toys that her younger siblings receive as presents. As it is, whenever we get something new for any of them, they all want to play with it exclusively. When I enforce the rules, saying that the birthday boy or girl gets to play with it first, then the others sit there pouting and glaring. When I let the older one have it for a short while during the littlest's naptime, she tends to hide it when I'm not looking and it takes forever to get it back from her. I still sometimes find old infant and toddler toys in my girls' room from time to time. They like role-playing and alternating being the mommy.

I once thought that, to solve the fighting over toys business, I would just buy 3 of the same thing. 3 Hot Wheels cars, for example. No good. It works for a few minutes, but then they all decide that they want to have a matched set, and need all three of the toys in their own little hands. Sigh.

But usually, after a toy looses its "newness," they share pretty well. My middle child is so compassionate and obedient, she tends to give either sibling whatever they ask for, even if it is her own new present! She's outgrowing that some, but still tends to give things away a lot. So does my son, actually, when he's in a good mood. Not when he's not. My oldest - well, she's gradually learning that giving her siblings a toy makes them happy, and that, in turn, makes her happy. She's actually becoming quite good at getting her little brother to stop crying by giving him a toy (he's in the terrible twos stage right now - lots of little temper tantrums!).

For the most part, I love having my kids so close together in age. It makes things simpler in many ways - sharing things, being close to the same stages, and hopefully being able to teach them together for many subjects in the future. The first year of my middle child's life was hard, because I felt miserable during my next pregnancy, and the first year of my third child's life was hard, since I had a toddler and an infant at the same time. (Grocery carts are not designed well to carry/contain a 3-yr-old, a 1-yr-old, and a newborn!) But we're beyond that stage now, and even though grocery store trips are still logistically difficult, everything else is getting much easier.

Math Again

When I last wrote about math (on March 19th), I said that choosing this curriculum was the easiest for me, and I didn't even have to look around very much - Saxon just seemed like the best fit right away.

Well, I started looking around some more, just for fun, and now I'm rethinking my choice. Sigh. But it's probably for the best, since more knowledge about choices can only lead to the better choice, right?

Now, we're doing fine with Saxon 1 right now (on lesson 34), and I think the manipulatives are really good for my daughter. She enjoys all the different activities Saxon has us do, and seems to be learning some. A lot of it is still too simple for her, though, so I'm skipping through parts more often. The teacher's guide says to have her count from 1 to 100 every day, for example, and I think that's a bit overkill. She's been able to count to 100 since preschool, and she and I both get bored listening to the repetition every day. But she still asks to do math, if we're having a shortened day. She'd gladly skip handwriting, but she wants to do math every day.

But I started reading some reviews that talked about Saxon not teaching enough of the understanding behind math, and about it being geared more toward passing tests, and not understanding. I read that it will get your student quite far for high school, and is good for applied math, but it's not quite rigorous enough for someone who plans to enter a scientific field in college that needs theoretical math. Then I read a research paper, actually, not related to homeschooling, that studied mastery learning vs spiral learning in math, and found that mastery learning produced students who were far more knowledgeable about math, and comprehended the underlying truths much better. I know that I do better with a mastery approach, not leaving any details "to be learned later," and having to see the big picture before I can understand all the details.

Saxon is definitely not mastery. Its incremental approach is spiral learning to the extreme. I know people say that whether to use spiral or mastery depends on your student - some like one better than the other, or learn best one way. I'm all for utilizing your student's learning preferences to help teach things best, but I don't agree that all students will be universally happy with all subjects if you just find the right approach. Sometimes they just have to learn things they don't like, and sometimes they just have to work harder in order to learn something the right way. Spiral may be good in some subjects, and reviews and drills are good even in a mastery math program, but I'm leaning toward thinking mastery is best for math.

So I think I'm going to switch. I still plan to use Saxon K (for preschool) and 1 (for kindergarten), and I like all the manipulatives that we're using. In fact, my 2- and 3-year-olds love to play with the manipulatives we're not using during my 5-year-old's math class. I'm not sure yet if I'll use Saxon 2 or not, though I did already buy it.... The other math curriculums I like don't start until 1st grade, so I have no problem using Saxon for kindergarten still (since I already have the teacher's manual).

I liked Christian Light Education's math at first, with their workbook approach, but it is spiral too. I also read good things about Rod & Staff's math, which is mastery. But from the samples, it seems to be too classroom-focused, and requires more charts and/or displays which I don't really want to pay for or make. I had been looking at CLE and R&S for English curricula, which I'll talk about later, but I've decided to pass on their math choices.

What I think I will use for 1-6th grades is Math Mammoth, the Light Blue Series (http://www.mathmammoth.com/complete-curriculum.php). This curriculum is mastery based, rigorous, colorful (if you print it out in color), workbook format (electronic, actually, though you can buy it printed out too), and cheap. All good things for us, I believe. I plan to buy the whole set (it's cheaper that way), and can print out whatever pages I need for all 3 kids. I believe it's even going to be on sale later this month. It can apparently be quite independent starting even in 2nd grade (or 1st, for good readers?), though others say that the parent still needs to teach it. It probably depends on the child.

As for later grades, the author highly recommends getting a regular textbook, and has lots of recommendations on her website for what to use. In fact, the way I first came across her website was by looking for recommendations for upper level math textbooks. After deciding to look at things other than Saxon, I came to the conclusion that textbooks used in public schools and even in colleges were the way to go for algebra and higher. Saxon calculus doesn't cover much of what's needed for math-heavy college majors, and I found several recommendations to just go ahead and get a college-level calculus text and go through it slower. Several places offer "video teachers" for these levels, on DVDs, though not all are universally acclaimed. I may end up just teaching them myself, as needed, since the DVDs can get rather expensive. I realize that most homeschool parents don't have the extensive math background that I do, however, so that's probably not an option for most. But anyway, since I liked the Math Mammoth author's advice so much for the later grades, I decided I would probably like to use her 1-6th grade material as well.

For more motivation to teach math, I found this article today:  How the U.S. lags in math, science eduation, and how it can catch up

Here's a few links that might be useful for upper levels:

video aids:
Chalk Dust - very good reviews, a little pricey
Math Without Borders - companion videos for Foerster textbooks
Ask Dr. Callahan - DVDs don't have wonderful reviews, but might be ok; uses some of the texts listed below
Teaching Textbooks have a really nice format, very independent, but they are not as rigorous as I'd like and are probably at least a grade level behind - may be good for a student not going into a science or technical field, or for earlier years before switching to a regular textbook

recommended textbooks:
Also, see this part of the Math Mammoth author's website for tons of useful information. My suggestions are really just a subset of hers.

Foerster's Algebra and Trigonometry: Functions and Applications (Prentice Hall Classics)

Handwriting Desk Strip

Teaching my five-year-old to write legibly is a bit of a struggle. She is getting better, but she's not enjoying the process too much. It is difficult for her, and so she doesn't like doing it. She doesn't like doing things unless she's good at doing them, which is a bit of a catch-22 in terms of learning something new.

We are using A Reason for Handwriting, Book A, right now. It is meant for 1st grade, but we are going slowly. We started with the practice sheets, which reviews single letter formation and is basically at a "2nd half of kindergarten" level, which was perfect for us to start this past January. We just finished the practice sheets last week, as we were only doing 2 lessons a week. This week, we started the real lessons, and I think she's liking them a bit better. She is doing better, so that might be the reason too. (It might also help that I've realized I have to teach her how to form the letters, and not just hand her a worksheet to practice and think that she already knows or can figure out how to form the letter the best way.) The real lessons have half a page of writing a day, with 2 or 3 words to practice. These words are all from a weekly Bible verse. The entire verse is traced on day 4, and on day 5, the student writes the entire verse on a decorative sheet of paper, which they can then color and give to someone after they're done. I'm hoping that will be a good incentive for her to do well, since she likes the idea of giving her grandparents or someone from church a fancy, decorated sheet.

Anyway, I have been thinking that it might be a good idea to stick a alphabet sampler on her desk, so she has a reference to look at when she's writing things for her other classes. We have letter posters hanging around the school room, but they are a bit high and far away for her to gaze at when she's writing on her desk. I saw some self-adhesive alphabet desk strips for sale on the Christian Light Publications website, in their elementary electives - penmanship section. They seemed like what I was looking for, and you could buy them individually, instead of in the packs of 36 which is the only option I see on Amazon. But I don't want to pay nearly $5 in shipping costs to buy a $1.75 alphabet strip, and I'm not ready to buy anything else from CLP at the moment (I wish I had ordered them when I ordered their 1st grade reader a while back!). I searched around and found a few other sources for similar desk strips, but they all either came in multi-packs or would require too much in shipping to make it worthwhile.

So I made my own.

I made and printed out some blank pages with handwriting guide lines, and then wrote my own alphabet on them, trying to make them in the same style as the Reason for Handwriting books. I couldn't find any fonts on my computer that were similar enough. My attempt isn't perfect, but it's good enough for our purposes. My cursive samples in particular may not be exactly the same as the Reason for Handwriting ones - it's hard to write in cursive differently than you learned how! I then cut out the strips and taped them together on her desk. I just put the manuscript version on her desk for now, and then when we start cursive in 2nd grade, I'll put out the cursive version. I turned my desk strips into a pdf file, which I am making available for free here, in case anyone else wants to print out their own alphabet strips. I suggest using a paper cutter to get the lines straight, and I also suggest using just a small piece of clear tape to get the placement of the strips on your desk correct before taping over it all with wide, clear package tape.

Here's a picture of the final result on Rebekah's desk. It may not be perfectly straight, and my tape got twisted a little bit, and then I ran out of package tape and had to revert to plain, narrow Scotch tape. But you get the general idea. You can rearrange the strips to be long and narrow, or short and wide, depending on the size of your desk. You can cut and paste the letters into whatever size strips works best for you.

Here's the link to the pdf file:  https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=explorer&chrome=true&srcid=0BwJU7PcbWJdcZDlhNmNjOTQtZGI4Zi00MGM0LWI4NDQtNzc4ZGQzYWRiOWVi&hl=en

Enjoy!