Homeschooling: Language Arts - McRuffy

For Language Arts this year, I went well off the beaten path. As I mentioned in my last post, I am not a huge fan of A Beka. This is mainly because I think the material is a bit dry and worksheet driven. However, it is a very solid phonics program, so I wanted something at least similar. My friend Melanie, who used to be a former Kindergarten teacher at a local Christian school, told me that she preferred a curriculum called McRuffy. Not to be confused with the old school McGuffy readers from decades ago, McRuffy is a phonics based curriculum that is generally not very well known. One of the main draws for me though was that Melanie boasted about how funny the beginning readers were for the children. Knowing Caleb's personality and love of all things silly, she thought it would be a great fit for him and so did I.

When the materials first arrived, I have to admit that I wasn't impressed as it looked like some guy just printed them off in his basement and spiral bound them together. However, you should never judge a book by its cover, right? In the end, we have been extremely satisfied and glad we went the route that we did.

Right off the bat I was impressed with....

As described the readers were definitely comical and kept Caleb's attention. Some of them he thought were hysterical in his little five-year-old  brain. (1st reader?)

The second book we read introduced him to something he'd never heard of before - soda cans exploding! Since we don't really drink soda (well except for Dave sometimes), Caleb didn't have a whole lot of background about what can happen if an unopened soda container is shaken up. Knowing he didn't really have the prior knowledge to fully understand the story we were reading that day, his teachers decided it was time for a little break for a life lesson. So outside we went - with a can of Daddy's soda. We practiced retelling what we'd just read by acting out the story...

...oh how fun the ending was!

Retellings and acting out stories were part of our weekly routine actually. We didn't always explode a can of soda, but sometimes we did have something else fun to try, like using puppets.

So remember when I said the workbooks showed up with spiral bound and looking a little less professional than the other homeschooling materials I'd purchased from other companies, well in the end, I found them to be some of the best workbooks. The designed allowed for the books to lay flat when Caleb was working, making it much easier to maintain good handwriting practices.

    

Caleb's favorite part was definitely the games. I did this a bit differently from what the curriculum called for, because for all except one of them, I waited until we finished up all the lessons to go back and play the games. In some ways this was good because it was a nice review transition before we started into the first grade material, but it probably would be better to have done it with the lesson it was associated with too. The problem was that there were so many materials to cut up and prepare that often I'd just sweep it under the rug until another day. For Caleb, it didn't matter much since he already knew most of the material anyway and was mainly reviewing, but for someone learning the first time, it would definitely be best to try to prep the materials in advance to use it as a support during the assigned lesson and then maybe again as review at the end if possible.

Part 2

March 

April

One area where we definitely saw a ton of growth this year was in handwriting. If you remember back to my preschool posts about Caleb, this is where we battled the most. He was definitely frustrated all last year, feeling all practicing was painful and redundant. He just hadn't developed those little hand muscles enough to feel comfortable holding his pencil correctly.

October

November

One of the things I tried to plan to help those handwriting skills grow was having some type of fine motor activity daily. Many of these were self-selected, self-motivated options like Legos or Tinker Toys. Let's be honest, with three five and under, I didn't have much time to get together a bunch of ideas online for this. Yes, Pinterest has a plethora of options, but we found lots of ideas from toys we just had laying around the house.  Would I like to come up with more interesting ideas for next year? Yep! But if not, hey this worked out pretty good for us too!

This $3 yardsale find was one of the best investments I made this year. All three kids have spent tons of time being creative and building the little muscles in their hands as they constructed their creations out of this tub of magnetic marbles and rods.

Caleb told us for months that he'd love to get some K'nex like the ones we purchased and left at Grandma Swan's for him to have there. This was one birthday toy I was happy to suggest to Grandpa - learning and fun.

The kids also loved these triangle and square shaped magnetic pieces. I even bought at second set so they wouldn't argue over them and could build bigger structures.