Well, we seem to finally be getting into the groove of things, insha Allah, for this school year. Yes, this school year. I am still tweaking our schedule, but I’m finally just about finished choosing our books for the year (super late, but more difficult when you’ve got to basically rely upon what you can find on the internet). 

As with all our classes, I try to establish a routine for a particular study period so that it flows better, insha Allah. Here are a few resources that may help make your high school history run a little more smoothly, insha Allah.

History Glossary Templates

I made these up for my children to record people, places, and things of history. The way that the form is set up leads nicely for the form to be used for review.  I was pleased to find out, after reading a How to Study history guide, that this was a recommended practice to set up such a glossary. Ok, glossaries aren’t new, but it was just nice to see that he recommended setting it up just as I had already planned to; as reinforcement I guess.  Mind you, we’ve never formally done history studies (well not consistently) so I am having to establish guidelines for our study that I had not established before. 

Study Guide for Studying History

I came across this site today, The Student’s Guide to the Study of History.

It goes over reasons for studying history, taking notes, reading for history, research papers, budgeting your time, and more. Its really helpful.

Free History Textbooks

We were going to initially study World Geography this year (9th grade) with Free World U.org’s flashcard curriculum, but its been difficult as at times our internet connection goes rather slow.  So a friend passed on a site to me that I had see in the past, but never got back to check it out further.

http://www.pass.leon.k12.fl.us/Special Documents/Book Subject Areas.aspx

They’ve got many high textbooks here available for free (history, economics, science, English, Spanish, Life Skills, Math, and PE). We really enjoy using them so far, so I highly recommend checking them out. My oldest, who doesn’t typically like to study, enjoys them as well, so that’s a big plus.   They aren’t weighted down with a whole bunch of extra stuff, so that makes the concepts easier to digest, insha Allah.

We’ve moved onto US History this year as we’ve started World History a few times in the past and stopped, but we’ve never studied US history formally.  Insha Allah, we’ll pick up world  history again next year, and I plan on using books from here, so I hope that things will flow more smoothly the next time around.

The books at the above site are available as pieces (each unit may be a file) which is kind of inconvenient, so I used my PDFEdit program from www.pdf995.com to combine all units, for a given course, into one book.

Lastly

On a side note, www.studentsfriend.com has some nice resources for high school world history, including a student textbook. Its nice, but is more like a summary of history (great for some quick review or quick study) and it does have some supplements like quizzes as well, but I just never got very far as I would get off on a tangent trying to find materials to go along with it as it is very brief and concise.  Also, there is a nice 16 page guide to writing research reports which will be handy in any class (not just history), so do stop by there if you get a chance if you need this kind of resource.

Happy History Studies!

As Muslims, we don’t celebrate Thanksgiving or “observe” Black Friday by going out and shopping for Christmas, but I just thought I would pass this information on regarding free educational resources to be given away from CurrClick this Friday (Black Friday), insha Allah.

“You simply can’t afford to miss CurrClick’s biggest event of the year, BLACK FRIDAY! HUNDREDS of TOTALLY FREE education resources! No Traffic, No Crowds, No Cost!
10:00 am CST Friday, Nov 27th through 10:00 am CST Saturday, Nov 28th.”

They usually have some pretty good freebies, so make sure you stop by and check them out at the dates above because I am assuming these offerings, insha Allah will be even better.

CurrClick – Curriculum in a Click

For some reason, I don’t remember seeing so many things deemed Black Friday specials as I have this year. I’ve gotten several emails from places I’ve subscribed to offering Black Friday specials (I didn’t have internet at this time last year, so maybe I just missed it). Anyway, I was just curious as to when it came to be used in reference to this particular day, so I googled and came across this article on Wikipedia: Black Friday (shopping)

At any rate, don’t forget to stop by CurrClick and click!

If you are a prolific web surfer like me (and it’s almost guaranteed if you homeschool?? lol) you’ve come across sections of a web page that you want to remember and you don’t have the time to jot it down (or can’t find a pencil because your preschooler (or  baby)) took it?  If you’re again like me, you wished that you could take a yellow (or pink or green) highlighter and just highlight a word, a sentence, a paragraph. But then, that would just leave marks all over your screen and heck, every page would then have a highlighted section, but not in the appropriate parts, lol.

Well, a few months back, I came across a handy utility called Wired-Marker where you CAN highlight sections of a particular web page and it will still be there, the next time you view the page!  Ok, for some, this is not news (I have a friend that’s used a similar program for some time), but for me, this was a super find!

How Does It Work?

Wired Marker is super simple to use.  The application, when installed, gets installed to your browser. So you just open it up from the file menu (or the shortcut key). A little side panel appears in your browser with eight different marker colors.  All you do is select text in the web page with your mouse (click, drag) then you drag that section to the highlighter color of your choice and the section on the page instantly is highlighted in the color that you chose. It’s that easy. You don’t have to save the web page on your hard drive at all (however if you really want that article, I recommend saving it because we know we can’t always find stuff again, lol). The next time you open up that page, the sections you highlighted will still be highlighted.

So now as you are scanning homeschooling articles about methods or neat activity ideas, you can simply highlight them and not have to go back and read the whole article over again!

If you like gadgets like me, this is a neat (and handy one). Stop by Wired Marker and get WIRED for web page highlighting!

Do you use a similar program? What’s it called and how does it work?

(numeral that can be traced with the fingers; shows where to start when writing the numeral; word form, and objects) for numbers 1 – 10.

Some things we do with these: tracing with our fingers, spelling the number aloud, telling the number of letters in each word name, counting the objects on the card. I’ve also seen activities where the preschooler can use play dough and lay out some dough in the shape of a number on the cards (we laminated them). The cards can also be put in order from least to greatest, greatest to least; they can be used for counting.

– 3 way match, match all three (number/word/objects)

Match two cards at a time or all three for one number. 

Blackline Masters and Assessment Cards for Preschoolers/Kindergarteners

There’s a really nice site with free blackline masters (old term, lol, basically what teachers would make copies from in the “old days”) of preschool manipulatives (such as numeral cards, hundreds charts, place value strips, etc).   I remember using these materials (from this site) in my earlier days of homeschooling. 

They also have some helpful PDFS of teaching tips and math activities that you can do with younger students as well as some printable assessment cards to assess what skills your little one has and which ones need to be improved. (I plan on taking those right now as a start for our preschool math routine, insha Allah).

So if you get a chance, stop by and check it out as there are loads of useful goodies here…………Math Their Way Summary Newsletter

Happy Home Preschooling!

(Warning: This turned out to be a super long post but I hope its super helpful, insha Allah)

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I’ve got an 11 year old who is not yet a very fluent reader.  So I am trying to step up his program because not being fluent effects his ability to do other work.  I have a seven year old, and a recently turned eight year old, who both can do some/all work independently because they are fluent readers, masha Allah. So getting him up to “speed” is a high priority, insha Allah.

I’ve been trying different things and but honestly haven’t been consistent. I wanted to go back to level one with my straight phonics program (homemade), but in it, I just make up sentences that fit the phonetic concept being studied (or contains review sounds) and so the reading is a little too childish for him.

Then I tried nursery rhymes as they are great for teaching phonics concepts, but again, they are super short and I wanted to engage him more.

So, now I am trying fables. Now, mind you, for years I stayed away from fiction in our early home school days (there is a fatwa on fiction I have read, I don’t have it handy, but will try to locate it (any of you have this handy????). In essence, what I get from it is that it says that it is a waste of time to read fiction if there is no benefit in it…(I am paraphrasing so please read fatawa on this for yourself as maybe my interpretation is incorrect). At any rate, I have migrated back towards using fiction as a teaching tool. I have discussed with my children, in the past, this view that fiction is a waste of time, but have told them that I personally see a benefit in it for educational purposes. So that is my take on it, but please refer to the fatwa yourself and scholars for a correct interpretation. I do not want to mislead anyone with my paraphrasing.

However, if you believe that fiction can be beneficial for educational purposes, then read on as I have found ways to get benefit from it and I hope that there is more benefit than harm in it and Allah knows best.

So Why Fables?

I have to admit, I love reading and teaching with fables; they are short and have morals. So, they provide (for me) excellent reading material as well as character education (and of course, we islamicize the morals as well). 

So I wanted to share

a little lesson plan for a fable to give an example of how you can teach remedial (or otherwise) reading with fables.

Pick out spelling words from the fable

So we are on “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.”  The Boy Who Cried Wolf. I took, I think, all of the fables on that site and printed them out, one per page to make it easy to use them (usually we read a lot of stuff straight off the computer).   My plan is to spend one week on a fable. I don’t attempt to have him know how to spell every word because that would take more than one week, lol,  and I have him do repeated readings daily, insha Allah, so I think he would get tired of the same fable for more than one week. So we take out what we can and move on, insha Allah.

So my first list (from the link above) has the words: there, would, once, who, from, about, what, come and was. I put these words into a Spelling City list. So, I gave him a pretest yesterday on the words (from me, not Spelling City) to see what he knew (he got them all wrong). So today, insha Allah, he works on the Spelling City list with the Teach Me feature.  I like this because they say the word, spell it one letter at a time, give it in a sentence and say it again.  So on my lesson plan (I’ve written it in his assignment book), he is to do the teach me feature twice today.

At some point, later on in the day, insha Allah, I’ll quiz him myself (or  have one of the big ‘uns—but  have to be careful here with who I choose because he is super sensitive, so picking the wrong person could result in a brawl….so maybe I better do it, lol).

Backing up to my pretest yesterday, after he took the pretest, I had him write the words 10x each. Ok, I use this technique with all my spellers, but frankly, that alone does not help all of them remember the spellings. So after this, I made up little sentence frames for him.  The big idea is that I provide a sentence frame for him, featuring the misspelled words. The frames have blanks for him to fill in. (spelling words are bold)

Example. There was a __________________________ in the __________________.

So what he does is write 10 sentences filling in the blanks.  He LOVED this activity! I gave him just a few and he wanted to do more. I guess it was fun  to think of things to fill in the blanks (as well as to not have to just think up sentences on  his own). This activity provides for lots of repetition of the words in context, which I have read is important in spelling.

A few other example frames I made:

Was there a __________________ on the _____________________?

Who ________________ the ___________________?

I would like some __________________________________.

Come to the ___________________.

What did _______________________ say?

I just gave him two sentences initially and he asked for more, lol. Hope the enthusiasm stays, insha Allah.

 

After we do the sight words, I will decide whether or not we’ll pick out phonics based spelling words. We may just stick with this list for the week, which is probably a good idea. Again, trying to get too much out can probably be draining on him.

Reading Practice

So I have him read the fable a few times daily or maybe the first paragraph several times. This is called “repeated reading” if you are not familiar with this technique.  You can read the selection (it’s suggested for repeated reading to pick like a paragraph or part about 100 words for younger kids).  Basically you model it first, by reading it (so they can hear your inflections, pauses, etc). Then you have them read it several times, daily.

In this part of a session, we would talk about some components of the writing such as what a paragraph is, who Aesop, the writer is, what a fable is, etc.

Grammar

For grammar, I have him pick out all the nouns (you could do adjectives or any other part of speech that has been taught or you can introduce a grammar concept through this).  Well, maybe not all the nouns, but say in the first few paragraphs, it just depends on his attention span.  This is great because it forces him to read again and more carefully. 

Then, I have him make all the nouns plural (first reviewing plural rules).  Then I have him do a quick exercise in alphabetical order by putting the words in the title in order.  On subsequent days, he could put the words in a short sentence in alphabetical order. Other things you can do is teach/review synonyms, for example.  You can just use a grammar book outline to help you get grammar topics (just look and see if those concepts occur in your fable) or just pick them from the fable, because sometimes in using passages for teaching, there are just ones that seem to stand out from time to time (like maybe one rich with adjectives, for example).

Listening

On the first day of a fable, to provide listening practice, the fable can just be read to introduce it. You can discuss its moral, etc.  On subsequent days, after much repeated reading has been done, you can read sentences, leaving out words and then have them fill in the word orally.

Copywork

Since my guy doesn’t do a lot of composition at this point (for right now, I think the sentence frames will be fine for us), I just have him copy a short paragraph as he is not so used to the physical action of writing so much. I have just kind of let him slide  by as its hard to get him to sit down for lessons, so he’s kind of been more on an unschooling program for most of his days. But again, I am trying to change that, insha Allah. He’s very mechanically inclined and loves to tinker with stuff, but just doesn’t like sitting for lessons.  I hope to tap more into his interests and maybe give him opportunities to write about his creations. 

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So these are just examples of what you can do with fables or nursery rhymes or passages.  If I keep up with our fables, insha Allah, I’ll will try to post multi-day lesson plans for the fables that we cover……

Have you ever used fables for teaching reading?

What types of techniques do you try for remedial reading?

Photo credit: Library.ThinkQuest.org

Dhul Hijjah 9 is Yawmul Arafah (The day the Hujjaj (hajjis) do wuqoof al arafah (standing on Mount Arafah and making duaas).

It is from the sunnah to fast on this day.

It is related in by Qatadah (Radi Allahu anhu) that the Messenger of Allaah Muhammad (Salla Allahu Ta’ala ‘alayhi wa Sallam) said,

“Whoever fasts on the Day of Arafat, Allah may forgive his/her sins of the previous year and of the coming year.” (Sahih Muslim)

This year, for many (depending upon when the crescent moon was sighted for the month of dhul hijjah) , iYawmul Arafah will fall on Thursday, November 26, 2009.

So, don’t forget to set your alarm clocks extra early and plan your suhoor now!  (smile)

Do you generally fast on Yawmul Arafah?

I recently read an answer posed to Shaykh Fawzaan regarding the difference between jealousy and envy. Masha Allah, I have to admit I never knew the difference. In English, we tend to use them as synonyms. But, in Arabic, there is a bigger difference.

Help your kids/students learn the difference between the two in this simple lesson, based upon Shaykh Fawzaan’s answer to the question “What’s the difference between envy and jealousy?” 

Hope you find benefit it in,  insha  Allah!

When is Eid al Adhaa this year?

For many, Eid al Adhaa will be next Friday, November 27, 2009. Eid Al Adhaa is the Eid in which Muslims slaughter (for those who may not have known).

Getting Ready for Eid

Have you started preparing? You may want to take a look at TJ Ramadan’s Preparing for Eid Page.

One difference between Eid Al Adhaa and Eid ul Fitr is that for Eid Al Fitr, you eat BEFORE the prayer.

Other than that, I think the prayers/etiquettes for getting ready, etc. are basically the same, Allahu ilm.

We generally don’t do much for Eid, despite being in a Muslim country.

What are your plans for Eid?

While browsing the web a few months back, I saw on the Well Trained Mind forum, a few members shared their free curriculum choices. So, I thought I’d do the same.  I am so happy to be homeschooling now as when I started out, there were not so many free resources out there.  You really can educate your children these days (with the help of libraries and internet) for virutally free, masha Allah. (Now, if there was some way to get your school supplies for free………..

So anyway, I thought I’d share my ninth grade curriculum as it is from free resources readily available from the internet.

So here we go……………….

Grammar

Guide to Grammar and Writing

I have them read the pages, take notes in outline form. For each concept/term, they write an example.  Their practice is them to take and write 5-10 sentences to illustrate the concept taught.  It is self paced right now, they just must work the full hour allotted for Grammar.  At the end of each page is a quiz or quizzes.

Yesterday a friend gave me the URL for a site that has workbooks for grades 6 – 12 that are free.  So if you looking for other free grammar, spelling, writing, and composition resources, then try  Glencoe Language Arts Workbooks. I am going to peruse these and may forgo the Guide to Grammar for something (these workbooks) that’s a little more defined (in the sense that I can just assign pages, whereas with the Guide to Grammar, its more self paced).

 

Literature

We’re using NCERTS Level 10 book here.  The ninth level was too far below their level and although the level 10 may not be quite 9th grade level in the states, I thought it was a good match for us.  You can view/download all the NCERT texts here. Here is the Level 10 we are using. It consists of two books. There are many words from familiar authors in here including Nelson Mandela and Anne Frank (her diary).  The books include the literature selection and work to accompany it (comprehension questions, speaking and writing, grammar activities, etc).

Here is my current outline of study, though insha Allah, I’ll be doing some fixing up (and finishing, insha Allah) on it.

We’re also supplementing our study with novels. I’m shooting for one a month maybe. As I wrote about earlier, the kids are to read sections of a novel and do an entry in their reading response journal.  Of course, there are so many novels available for free at the internet, masha Allah, so that makes this free as well. Here’s one place to start: Planetebook (the books have a nice little cover).  We supplement (using that word a lot on here) with study guides/notes, such as those from The Best Notes. They have nice summaries and character/literary analysis. I hope to have them do their reading journal daily and then sit down with them at least once a week (maybe the weekend) to go over the summaries at sites like The Best Notes.

Spelling

We are just using spelling lists from around the internet.  At the bottom of this page (new project, lol), you can see what lists we are using (links are given).  And again, I recommend checking out the free Glencoe spelling workbooks, which I am not sure I’ll use as we are on a roll with our lists, and we have our spelling routine mapped and it seems to be working, so……….

Composition

Well, I was going to kind of just wing it here and do prompts from 501 Writing Prompts, but now, insha Allah, I am thinking I’ll use the composition workbooks (there are three for each grade 6-12) from the Glencoe site mentioned above (an enrichment workbook, a reteaching one and a practice one).  They seem really good, masha Allah.  I think my kids will enjoy using them, insha Allah.

Math

For ninth grade math, we’ve switched over from NCERT books to CIMT (Centre for Innovation in Mathematics Teaching’s Year 9 books. I really like NCERT math books for levels 6, 7, and 8, but for us I think CIMT’s year 9 book is better for us than the level 9 NCERT math book.

However, here is the link to view/download the NCERT books.

Science

We are using (which I totally love), NCERT’s Level 9 book for science. I have found it pretty easy to teach from them and I think, on the whole, they don’t get bogged down in too much detail which is great for us as we have never really done math formally for very long.  The ninth grade book is a general science book so I think if that was all the science we got around to, that would give then a general understanding (my opinion). 

I am in the process of outlining our studies here, which may not help you this year if you have a ninth grader (as I am making it up as we go along), but insha Allah, I’ll complete it and it may be of use in the future.

World Geography

We’re currently using FreeWorldU.org’s Ninth Grade World Geography flashcard curriculum. I really like it because it allows the student to study independently. I am trying to supplement it with activities such as current events and maybe a little report writing. 

In addition, I may have my kids take notes or just record the card numbers they worked on or something as I feel I need a way to make sure they are doing the cards.  The only thing I don’t like about it is that I would like to be able to see in advance what they are working on so that would help me prepare supplemental material. I asked the owner if there was a file available that had each class’s questions and answers (he seemed a little perturbed at me asking) and said that there were over 1 million cards (Ok, that’s a lot, but I just thought as individuals make up the cards, they would maybe have an outline and that could be used to generate pdfs, but hey, didn’t hurt to ask).  There is a browse flashcards feature, but you can’t see all of every question and you can’t see the answers at all).

But anyway, still a good program, I just feel the need to supplement, but if it came down to it, with how busy things are, then insha Allah just going through the cards would suffice.  

Islamic Studies

Working on Islamic Studies, right now, we’re just reading articles from scholars here and there at the present…….one excellent source for material that I use to base our lessons on is Abdur Rahman.org. There are so many great resources there from authentic sources.

and that’s basically it. Hope you find it helpful if you are planning for ninth grade (or heck, even in the midst of it now and struggling to find resources.

What FREE Ninth Grade resources do you use?

If you’ve got a moment, please share your choices for free ninth grade resources.

Although they have large, more “Amreeki” type notebooks here (the spiral type), in Yemen and here, the smaller, (cheaper) exercise book (similar to that pictured) is widely used in schools. So right now, my younger students are using those.   They have clear bag pouches

right now that they keep the notebooks in. But I found that at class time there was a scramble to make sure they had all their notebooks. It was a task to keep track of which ones they were missing. 

So I came up with a simple method to help us keep track and it really works, masha Allah. Nothing earth shattering, but sharing……..

Make a List of All Notebooks Student Should Have by Subject

Pretty self explanatory.  By the subject, I put numbers

Spelling 1

Grammar 2

Math 3

Science 4

Reading 5

Writing 6

Arabic 7

Number the Notebooks

The kids write the subjects on the notebooks, but I had them take the numbers from my list above and they number the notebooks accordingly. 

Wow, this little trick did the trick. Now when they gather their notebooks, they don’t have to sit and say, ok, here’s spelling, here’s grammar, what’s missing? They just put the notebooks in order by the numbers and can tell instantly which notebook is missing.

This was a great timesaver, masha Allah.

I keep the list of notebooks handy by my desk for reference, so they can say, ok, notebook 4 is missing, that’s science, and go off to look for their science notebook.