My plan for the year: Numeracy and Literacy

Covering the basics while leaving room for wonder

I’ve written about how I plan in a previous post, but I thought it might be interesting to share a bit more information on what that plan actually looks like. We used to be unschoolers, but we’re slowly moving towards a little more structure and formal learning. For us, unschooling was wonderful up to the age of seven-ish, but now that my daughter is entering Year 3/2nd Grade, I feel she benefits from a bit more structure, and I like the security of knowing we are covering the essentials.

But I also want to leave room for all the wonder and surprises of unschooling. I have loved the adventure of not knowing what we’ll learn about from one day to the next, and the freedom of being able to follow an interest for as long (or as short) as the child wants. So my planning amounts to a small amount of non-negotiable work each day, which leaves us plenty of time for everything else.

Taylor Henry via Unsplash

I’m not a week-by-week sort of person and nor are my children. For us, a detailed plan like that would be setting us up to fail from the first day we didn’t manage to stick to the schedule. A loose plan gives us direction and something I can refer to when I have a wobble and feel like nobody’s learning anything, and acts as a checklist that I can look at throughout the year to see where we’ve made progress and where we need a little more focus.

My children are 5 and 7, and people often ask how I differentiate when teaching two children of different ages. (As I type that I’m thinking of the homeschooling families I know with 4 children, or more, who must be rolling their eyes at my paltry two!). The short answer is, I don’t do very much. For maths, we often all work together, playing a game for example, and I help my son with problems that his sister can do in her head. When they use workbooks, the books are either at different levels or they do the same books with varying degrees of independence or assistance. For some subjects—science, for example—my daughter may well retain more information than her brother, but they can both enjoy learning about space, or parts of a plant. They find their level.

I use any curriculum only as a guide. Having looked at different curricula from different countries and different schools, I know that there is variation in when children are taught their 5 times table, or halves and quarters, or what an adjective is etc. Sometimes my children are ready for more challenging work and sometimes they need to consolidate something from an earlier year. I like to look a year ahead as well as behind, so I have the full range of where I can expect my children to be working. I’m not obsessive about everything from the UK National Curriculum for Year 2 being completed by the time my daughter’s friends at school finish Year 2, so long as she is broadly on the right track.

As I implement this new structure, our daily lists have been instrumental. I wrote a whole post on exactly what the lists look like, so I won’t repeat it all here. The lists mean I focus every day, just for a few minutes, on what the children are learning and what should come next. They magically make the ‘school work’ largely inevitable.

I often begin the planning for the new school year feeling rather overwhelmed and trepidatious. It all seems so much to learn, to teach, to hold in my head. But once I’ve looked through it all a few times and selected a few basic resources, the overwhelm subsides and I can see a way through. In summary, our numeracy and literacy work for the year comes down to this:

• Daily Jolly Phonics work, which covers spelling, phonics, handwriting, and grammar.

• Daily maths: either Multiplication by Heart, or a maths game/Khan Academy/workbooks.

• Lots and lots of reading, thinking about it and talking about it. Independent reading, me reading aloud, and sometimes them reading to me.

• An awareness (on my part) of what the school curriculum holds so that at an opportune moment I can draw their attention to a particular concept.

My two non-negotiables are numeracy and literacy. As Susan Wise-Bauer says, with these two skill sets you can learn anything, but without them you’re pretty much stuck. So here’s some more detail on how I’m approaching these two subjects in the year ahead.

Our plan has to leave plenty of room for things like this. Annie Spratt via Unsplash.

Numeracy

I have short lists for the maths skills to be covered in each year (from Reception/Pre-K onwards). A curriculum can take up 1 page or 100 pages and say pretty much the same thing, and I prefer the short version!

Here is my ‘essentials only’ summary of the UK National Curriculum for Reception to Year 4 (age 4/5–8/9). For myself, I might condense it even more, but that document wouldn’t make much sense to somebody else. I also recommend Oxford Owl for concise curriculum summaries for each year group.

National Curriculum Maths Rec Y4

104KB ∙ PDF file

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This year we will be working on the Year 3/2nd Grade skills, but also on all the earlier lists too, because I have learnt that you can’t really ‘tick off’ an item and expect a child to know and understand it for the rest of time. So we are constantly revising what they’ve already learnt.

Lots of these skills can be developed in everyday life. But, particularly for my daughter who is moving on to more complex and challenging skills, I want the security of knowing that she is working through a programme and that everything will be covered. I could use workbooks for this, but at the moment I’m relying on Khan Academy, which she generally prefers. As we don’t use worksheets or textbooks very often, this is a really easy way for me to know she is getting through the work appropriate for her level. And some aspects of maths—like bar charts, for example—don’t come up so easily in everyday life, so it’s nice to have them covered by Khan Academy in case they don’t come up elsewhere.

(Khan Academy is used by millions of students worldwide, so I am always amazed to meet so many parents who don’t know about it yet. If you are one of those parents, Khan Academy is a free online resource for many subjects, but for younger children it is especially good for maths. There are videos explaining concepts, and tests and quizzes to give children the chance to practise their work and test their knowledge. You can jump in anywhere you want, so you can go back to earlier maths if you need some more practice, or move ahead if you need more of a challenge. Parents can monitor their child’s progress, so if your child likes to work independently you can still check in. There is also Khan Academy Kids, which has fun animal characters. My two are beyond the Kids version now but it’s great for early counting, letter recognition etc. Children generally love it because it’s on a screen! I really recommend it if you haven’t tried it yet.)

I will probably also purchase one or two new maths workbooks to give her more practice at pen and paper maths, the way it is done in schools. One of my priorities is that the children should be able to keep up if they do end up in school at some point. Although I love that my daughter can do mental maths much better than I ever could at her age, I know that’s not what maths looks like in school, and some practice at more traditional maths work is a good idea.

Maths appears on the children’s lists every day, Monday-Friday. At the moment I alternate between Multiplication by Heart (times tables flashcards) and another activity. The ‘other activity’ is a choice between a maths game, Khan Academy, or a workbook. The daily maths work varies between five minutes and half an hour or more, depending on the activity and how keen the children are. And of course we continue to spot the maths in the world around us, every day.

To help us cover the various maths skills this year we will principally be using:

Tiny Polka Dot and Multiplication by Heart from Math for Love (check out their free lessons as well as their paid curricula)

Khan Academy

Maths workbooks (like these and these)

Games from Family Math (an old but brilliant book with lots of maths activities requiring little more than pens, paper, dice, and playing cards. Importantly for me the set up time for each activity is virtually zero.)

Usborne lift the flap maths books

Wild Math

(For other thoughts and resources on maths see How We Do Maths without Doing Maths)

Literacy

My main plan for literacy is: keep reading. The children read independently every day, and most days I also read aloud. They sometimes read aloud to me too. We talk about what we read in order to make sure everyone understands the text and to consider things like: What do we think will happen next? Why did the author start with that bit of the story? What does the narrator want us to feel at this point? But I don’t do formal comprehension exercises and they don’t write out book reports or anything like that.

Read, read, and read some more. How gorgeous is this painting by Carolyn Edlund?

Each child has a notebook where I jot down what books they’ve read. If it’s been a really good or particularly popular book, I ask them to tell me about it (a favourite scene or an amazing fact, for example), and I write their answer in the book. My plan is that they will gradually come to write a sentence or two themselves.

They are working through their Jolly Phonics books which teach handwriting, phonics, and spelling. Once my daughter has finished Book 3 she’ll move onto the Grammar books in the same series, which continue to be a ‘one stop shop’ for literacy/language arts. Each child does a page of these workbooks every day, Monday-Friday (although sometimes my son, 5, does less, because I’d rather he do a few letters carefully and willingly than a page in a hurry and a grump.)

I also have a list of the grammar concepts we should be working on this year: noun, adjective, adverb, verb and so on. These are covered in the Jolly Phonics programme but I also want to start noticing them and introducing them in day to day life. I don’t have a specific schedule: when my daughter is writing I’ll start pointing out when she is using, for example, the past tense. From time to time I will probably write a list of eg. suffixes on the blackboard and then point them out when they crop up in what we’re reading.

I long for a reading nook like the one in Lore Pemberton’s painting.

We do occasional Poetry Teas and the children sometimes learn poetry by heart in exchange for cold hard cash (their father’s idea). As part of the history plan (coming up next) we’ll also be introducing Chaucer and developing their knowledge of Shakespeare. If this sounds bananas for children of 5 and 7, rest assured it will be appropriate for their ages—I’ve been delighted to discover children’s versions of Shakespeare plays and The Canterbury Tales. We will not be staging a full-length production of King Lear. (In my husband’s dreams). They are always reading when we’re out and about, so we talk about things like what an advert means, why the company chose those particular words, why the ketchup bottle says ‘grown not made’ etc.

They children don’t do a lot of writing by choice, but occasionally they get the urge to, for example, gather all their space books together and write down everything they can find out on that subject. They will then write feverishly for an hour and not return to it for weeks, months, or ever again. They occasionally write letters to friends and relatives, usually under duress. My daughter probably writes something by choice most days—a few words illustrating a picture, a spell to make me give them sweets (!), a secret message for a friend. But essentially, they’re not that keen on writing, yet. I have found that forcing them to write against their will is deeply painful for all concerned and not particularly productive. I am sure different families will have different views on this, but for us, for now, I am happy for them to do their daily Jolly Phonics work and occasional other writing when they choose.

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Over the next couple of weeks I hope to share how I plan history, geography, and science. I hope these are useful and if you have any questions please do ask.

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How We Homeschool Pen Pal Exchange

If your child would like a pen pal, let me know their age and home country and I’ll try to find them a match.

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How We Homeschooled This Week: posts you might have missed

On Monday we had a lot of fun with bubbles.

On Tuesday we stayed up late writing pen pal letters.

On Wednesday we looked at clouds and spent three hours in the library.

On Thursday we went back to the easy reading books and read about an empress.

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