Using A Whiteboard In A Catholic Home School

by Mary
(Kansas, USA)

Scheduling six to eight different classes per day for two to eight different levels of study can be one of the trickiest parts of the Catholic home school day.

I've learned to make a few combinations to speed up the day!

Me? While I am teaching any subject, I've moved to teaching the suffixes and prefixes as added to base words on a whiteboard and I cover phonics, spelling rules, grammar and vocabulary all in the same effort. I start this when our children know most of the first 54 phonograms according to the Spalding method. They love the explanation (sometimes) because once they get the idea, they can begin to understand what long words mean just by their syllables. It's like puzzle fun to bright students and makes good sense to the "puzzled" students!

I use a whiteboard for about an hour a day. (A dear friend had the idea to use a $25 piece of melamine coated white masonite - as used in cheap bathrooms - 4' x 8' available at Home Depot and Lowes type lumber stores.) I leave the prefixes that we come across on the left and the suffixes on the right throughout the year so that as the year goes all I have to do is to point to what I am talking about. This also helps with some grammar since many words become a different part of speech by adding prefixes and suffixes. I use copywork this way as well as dictation. Copywork helps students who aren't so handy with spelling so that they can keep writing without being overwhelmed. This is the very reason that we developed our St. Anne's Helper Catechism Copybooks!

This way I can use the Bible, catechism, or literature for the spelling and grammar they are learning. I do the same thing with science, history and geography which I teach to all of the little ones at the same time, even though we usually do that from the couch :-)

You can see some of our favorite Catholic home school resources on the pages linked from St. Anne's Helper Catholic Home School Resources