Weekly Report - Week 11

Posting this a week late, but we had a great week!

Tornado Boy

Math: We worked on adding 6 and 7, reviewed subtracting to 10, and started facts with 11 and 12. He likes the number rainbows used. :)

Reading: We started the week with My Father's Dragon. That took all of 2 days to read, so we continued the week with The Trumpet of the Swan. That one's not going quite as fast. I asked him to tell me about the first book, and he gave some good details. He clearly liked the book. I need to put the next one in that series on hold.

Grammar: I asked Tornado Boy if he'd like to do one lesson of FLL1 3 days a week or do a bunch per day to speed it up and move on into FLL2. He chose the second option (which I was leaning toward anyway). FLL1 is pretty easy for him, but there are some things in there that I want him to get more practice with, so we're going quickly through the lessons that he already knows. We got halfway through the book this week.

Writing: The passages this week were from The Trumpet of the Swan. Perfect! :)

Handwriting: No extra copywork this week.

Spelling: We did steps 7 and 8 this week. Sentence dictation is going very well. I am actually surprised at how long a sentence he can hold in his head without me repeating it. We won't be doing dictation in WWE until next year, but I feel a lot better about it now!


Read-Aloud: We started reading Misty of Chincoteague this week. The boys are enjoying it, and so am I, as I haven't read this in a long time.

Bible: We talked about King Solomon this week. He asked God to make him wise, and God did so. Solomon built the temple (which David had not been allowed to do). Solomon eventually strayed from God. Recurring theme.

History: We learned about the first cities of India, Ancient China, and the Israelites finally entering Canaan. We finally had one of the K-2 readers available from Biblioplan's recommendations: One Grain of Rice: A Mathematical Folktale. This is the story of the grain of rice that keeps getting doubled. Tornado Boy, being a math geek, really liked this story. I thought he would. :)

Science: We finished up our study of horses this week, with a lot of hands on discussion!

Art: No art this week. Slacker mom.

The Brute

Math: We got through Rightstart A lesson 10, but I'm really not feeling the Rightstart love. I naturally think the "Asian way" of math as taught in Singapore, Math Mammoth, etc., and I know Rightstart eventually does this too, but the visualization of numbers stuff... it's just not what I want to teach first. I'm going to get the Singapore Essential Math K books to use instead, but we'll still use the RS manipulatives and learn how to use the abacus. The RS lessons are just too scattered for me anyway. It changes topics all the time and just doesn't make any sense to me!

Reading: We did great this week!!! We have done most of the 2-letter long vowel syllables and some of the 2-letter short vowel syllables. We also completed the first row of CVC words. The syllabary is excellent for teaching reading! The Brute still asks for lessons, and he copies the letters that I write. He is now at the point of reading where he sounds something out once and then says it. He's not ready to read books yet, but that will come.

Wordless Wednesday: Happy 4 Year Old Learning to Read

Weekly Report - Week 10

Tornado Boy had a field trip this week to "Let's Pretend Hospital" at the local nursing school. He had a good time, and now the boys play hospital and check for broken legs using a football as an x-ray machine. :) With the field trip, a new horse, and The Brute wanting to do school more often this week, we didn't get quite as much done as usual, but that's ok. We're not behind, so it doesn't matter!

Tornado Boy

Math: In math this week, we started Chapter 3 of MM 2A. It began with a review of making 10s to add across a 10. As I was going over the example, I said "You remember doing this a few weeks ago, right?" and he said "No." LOL. Life with a first grade boy. It's a good thing MM has review built in! So we did the review, and he did just fine doing everything. It all quickly came back. Though I have to wonder how his mental math worked... At one point, he said "8 + 7 is 12 + 3, so that's 15!" Um... yes, but that's not the easiest method... Whatever works though, right? :)

Reading: We finished Charlotte's Web! He read 3 chapters Friday, of his own choosing, so he could finish the book! We plan to start My Father's Dragon next week. I'll probably have him do 2 chapters at a time.

Grammar: We have continued in FLL1, doing 3 lessons per day up through Thursday, then we had completely gotten in sync with WWE, so next week we'll start doing 1 lesson 3 days a week, to be in sync with WWE and also to start FLL2 and WWE2 at the same time next year. FLL lessons are easy to get through, but he's also learning things, so it's all good. We're almost through the noun stuff (which can be tedious, but it's easy to go through it quickly if the child already understands it). I love the picture study, which we haven't done before. The story narrations have been great too - having a full story to read instead of just a passage.

Writing: The topic in WWE this week was Davy Crockett. Tornado Boy did well with his copywork and narrations. We did not do day 4 yet, since I had him narrate and do copywork in science instead. Normally I'd do both, but we were trying to get caught up in other subjects due to a field trip this week, so I let it slide. We'll do it eventually. :)

Handwriting: He had to do copywork of "I will pay attention to my work." earlier in the week... 2 sentences. You can guess why. :P

Spelling: We've mostly played with Webster's Speller this week, though we finished step 6 of AAS, doing the dictation phrases and sentences (about 4 or 5 throughout the week). We'll do step 7 next week and continue in Webster's.

Read-Aloud: We finished James Herriot's Treasury for Children. That is an excellent book. I have a couple choices for next week ready to go.

Bible: We learned about King David today, brief overview really. King David in one lesson isn't going very deep. :) I'm sure we'll go deeper as we get to that section in history later.

History: The Israelites left Egypt and are wandering through the wilderness, complaining about every little thing along the way. Moses gets the Ten Commandments, ends up breaking the first set out of anger since the people had built a golden calf to worship, and then he goes back and gets a second set. It's amazing to see history repeat itself over and over again in such a short timeframe, and yet it still happens even today!

Science: We've been studying horses this week, since we just got our horse Saturday. The boys have been having so much fun learning how to feed and take care of him!

Final investigating Wanagi (goat guardian dog)

As mentioned above, instead of doing day four of WWE this week, I made a narration and copywork from Apologia Zoology 3, the section on the horse's senses. I then had him draw a picture of a horse being aware of something in his surroundings. This idea first brought tears, but after some talking, he liked the idea. He was mostly afraid that he couldn't draw a horse, but then I reminded him that he's drawn a horse before in art. I even offered to let him look at that picture while he drew, and that made him feel a bit better. Then I suggested that maybe he could draw the horse being aware of Darth Vader. That brought a smile and started the brain working again! He decided to draw General Grievous riding the horse. I'm sure the horse would certainly be aware of him!

Art: No art this week, except the above science drawing... and lots of Playdough.

The Brute

Math: We did RS A lessons 5 and 6 this week. The Brute was really into school this week!!! He had no problems with these lessons, except trying to say "quadrilateral". :) He is in speech therapy, so I was impressed with his attempts!

Reading: All I can say here is WOW... We've continued with Webster's Speller this week and had great success! We did several rows - D's, F's, H's, M's, N's, and R's, plus we did AB EB IB OB UB. When we did the H's, he would see HA and say "/h/... /ay/... /bay/. No. /h/... /ay/... /bay/. No." It was really quite cute the way he said no so quickly after saying /bay/. He did figure out the correct syllable. Friday, he had no problem with the syllables we did. We went through N's and R's just sounding out once and saying the syllable immediately. I was impressed! We also did the short letters ending in B, as written above. He didn't have any problem going from long vowel sound to short vowel sound. Woohoo! His blending was great. Again, he just sounded it out once, then said the syllable right away. No repeating the sounding out a million times. So great progress here! He has also been writing letters on the white board as we do these lessons. He loves to write letters. He is very good at copying the way I write the letters. He has almost all of them down pat except the ones with sharp angles, like M, N, V, W. He makes them too rounded. We tried doing some horizontal zig-zag patterns across the white board to practice, but he had a hard time not making them curvy. He can draw straight lines just fine. It's just the angle that throws him. But that's ok, we'll get there! He's doing great for his age and stage. He already writes his letters better than Tornado Boy did at 5. :P

Wordless Wednesday: The Brute's First Syllable

Weekly Report - Week 9

Tornado Boy

Math: We are almost finished with chapter 2 of MM 2A. We studied clocks and calendar this week. Several people on the WTM forum had said their children got stuck on this chapter, so I was mentally prepared for it to be difficult, but he never hit anything he wasn't able to do. Go figure. He learned to tell time to the nearest 5 minutes, learned the terms "half past", "x past y", and "x till y". He also learned how to calculate how many hours span between two times, even if one is AM and one is PM. Some of the word problems were very useful, like if a mother wants to get 7 hours of sleep and needs to wake up at 6AM, what time should she go to bed? He did very well with these types of questions. All we need to do now is the chapter test and the cumulative review. Then we'll move into chapter 3 next week.

Reading: Still plugging away at Charlotte's Web. :)

Grammar: This week, we did 3 lessons per day of FLL1. Several of the lessons at this point talk about common vs proper nouns, which he pretty well understands, so we are quickly going through those, but still hitting them just to reinforce the concepts. We have done one picture narration and a couple story narrations (which are similar to what we do in WWE, but the whole story is presented instead of just a passage of a larger book, so I think it ends up being a bit easier). For nouns, we've talked about family relationships ("My grandmother is my mother's mother or my father's mother.") and some places (city, kitchen, living room, etc.... capitalizing city and state and learning to write the city/state combo we live in). Once we get past the review of nouns, nouns, and more nouns, we'll do 1 lesson per day. I'd like to breeze through FLL1 and then next year do FLL2 at regular pace (3 lessons per week).

Independent Reading: Still plugging through the same books he had last week.

Writing: This week we had passages from Charlotte's Web. How appropriate! :) Copywork was a little sloppy, after not doing any writing since Wednesday of last week, but the narrations were pretty good.

Handwriting: We didn't do any separate handwriting this week.

Spelling: We did step 6 of AAS level 2, learning about syllable division. This should especially help his reading of those bigger words he's encountering now.

Read-Aloud: I got James Herriot's Treasury for Children from the library, and the kids LOVE IT. They love it so much that I have decided to put this on my "to buy" list. It's that good. Sweet stories about animals, written in language that is a little more difficult yet still understandable, great illustrations. The kids keep asking me if we can read the next story.

Bible: The Israelites got their first king this week - King Saul!

History: This week we learned about the New Kingdom of Egypt and the Israelites leaving Egypt. The boys love hearing about the plagues. :) During play yesterday, Tornado Boy started playing "Hyksos Army", so he is getting something out of history!

Science: We talked a bit about clouds this week. Tuesday involved lots of rain, and there were plenty of clouds to look at. We decided they were probably stratocumulus clouds (strato = layer). We also estimated the wind speed based on what was being affected by the wind (small tree branches were moving). We used Considering God's Creation to guide our studies. I copied some of the workbook pages, but didn't really end up writing on them. I did use them to help learn about the clouds and the wind speed.

Art: We drew turkeys this week! The Brute had a nap that day, due to attitude issues.

I had to discuss with Tornado Boy that art is his idea of what something should look like, not the book's. So it's ok if his turkey doesn't look like my turkey or the book's turkey. He can draw it however he wants! He had been having a little bit of a meltdown over the red part that goes over the beak. He's a bit of a perfectionist and doesn't have a lot of art experience. We're working on that. ;)

The Brute

Math: We didn't do any formal math this week, but Tornado Boy has been teaching him some. He now knows 2 x 2 = 4. Sigh. Tornado Boy tried to teach him negative numbers. He's really not quite ready for that. He can, however, add 1 + 3 = 4, 3 + 1 = 4, and 2 + 2 = 4. He's pretty good with sums of 4. :)

Reading: We didn't do anything reading-wise until Friday. I decided to give Webster's Speller a try. Yes, this child is a guinea pig. We did our first lesson: BA BE BI BO BU BY. He actually did quite well! I'm hoping this might get him over that hump of having to sound out every single word, even if he knows the word. We'll probably do the D's version of the above today. We are skipping C's until we have some other letters under our belt, since C says two different things in this progression. Tornado Boy sat in on our lesson. Working the syllabary should be good for him too. :)

Memphis Homeschool Convention

Last weekend, we went to the big homeschool convention in Memphis. It was my first time to go to one, and it was pretty cool!

When I got there Friday evening, planning to hear Jessie Wise do a lecture on First Language Lessons (which we just switched to), I found this huge line of people across the lobby area. It was crazy! I finally managed to make my way to the registration booth to pick up my bracelet. Then I learned what the line was for - Tim Hawkins. Ok, phew! I was afraid that was a line for lectures or something!

The next issue was finding where the East Mezzanine was. They really didn't have clear maps, or if they did, I didn't get one. :P I asked the ladies working the entrance to the exhibit hall, and they said it was downstairs. Well, they didn't say WHICH downstairs. I went downstairs the way I'd come, and didn't see anything resembling where I needed to be. Then I found a fellow attendee and asked her where it was. She said it was up 2 floors. So I went back upstairs, and didn't see a way to get up another floor. So confused!

Finally, I asked the guy at the registration area. He gave me directions to a DIFFERENT set of stairs to go down. I easily found the room now. Phew! Now I had 30 minutes until start of lecture, so I went back upstairs and perused the exhibit hall for a bit... Oh the curriculum! :)

I mainly walked around to see what was where, taking mental note of which places I'd want to stop the next day. When 5:30 was getting close, I headed back downstairs to the lecture room. I eagerly awaited Jessie Wise, but she wasn't there. Finally, the guy from the registration area came in and said she wasn't coming. Her husband had had emergency surgery. :( Hopefully he is ok now.

I went back upstairs to the exhibit hall to check things out a little closer, purchased Considering God's Creation used, then got picked up by hubby and the kids, who had been off doing something fun. :)

Saturday morning, DH dropped me off in time to get to Susan Wise Bauer's first lecture of the morning. This one was on Teaching the Real (Distractable, Impatient, Argumentative, Unenthusiastic, Non-Book-Loving, Inattentive, Poky, Vague) Child. This was an excellent lecture! She said it would be available on the Peace Hill Press site soon, though I haven't seen it there yet. She gave several ideas for how to do deal with symptoms of having a real child. She even has 4 of them herself. It was so neat to hear her describe some of her children that were not perfect little scholars that learned everything right away as she taught it. :)

In this lecture, she outlined how to solve the problem of homeschooling a real child. The first thing to look at was yourself, and she listed some questions to ask yourself. Next, she suggested looking beyond the symptoms of your child to find out the actual character of the child. For example, a purposeful child might be argumentative, unenthusiastic, etc. She listed various character types and which symptoms tended to be associated with that type. These types often had good qualities, especially as adults. She then listed some ideas to use for various types of children, including "Nibbled to death by ducks", "System of rewards (aka bribery)", and several other ideas. She also reminded us to remember that our child is a human being, and human beings don't act like robots.

That's a brief overview of the lecture without giving away too much. ;) I highly encourage purchasing the audio when it is made available!

After that lecture, I hung out in the exhibit hall for a bit more. I needed to replace the lecture that Jessie Wise was supposed to do next. I decided to go to Ed Zaccaro's lecture on Five Real Life Math Investigations That Will Astound Teachers and Students. It actually ended up being 7 investigations, which I found amusing. :) The first investigation was on pay day loans and how awful they are. If you borrowed $100 and didn't pay it back, in 6 years, I think you would owe around $6 billion, if I recall correctly. He also talked about bad math used by journalists all the time (that's easy to find!), how cost effective (or not) ethanol is, the importance of math when flying an airplane, etc. It was an interesting lecture.

Following the Zaccaro lecture, I went back to the exhibit hall to window shop some more. I bought Apologia Zoology 3 since we're planning on doing a study on horses soon, and I had wanted to use that as one of our references. I'm quite impressed with the quality of this book! It's hard back, thick pages, etc. This will be a nice collection to have on my shelf. I'll just skip over some of the bits where we have theological differences. ;)

Finally, I went to the next Susan Wise Bauer lecture on teaching writing in the K-12 years. I have the audio lecture for the elementary years, but it's nice to see her in person, even if some of the material is stuff I've already heard. :) She once again reinforced the idea that I'm heading in the right direction with writing for Tornado Boy - focusing on copywork and narration this year, next year adding in dictation, then in 3rd grade we'll start putting these skills together. No assigned creative writing, no journaling required. If he wants to do that stuff (which he doesn't), he can. But that type of writing won't really help him with expository writing, which is the type of writing most people use in real life. Instead, we work on the skills that make a good writer - first being able to put words onto paper (copywork), then being able to come up with a complete thought (oral narration), then being able to write down a thought held in their head (dictation). Once these skills are worked on separately for a couple years, you then start putting them together, and the child can start coming up with a complete thought and writing that thought down onto paper. In grades 5-8, the child learns to outline what they've read and write from an outline, learning paragraph skills and such. Then in high school, they work on style and the art of rhetoric.

After this lecture, it was time for me to be picked up so we could get back home. I'm so glad I didn't have my kids with me. I wouldn't have been able to sit through a lecture with Mischief. Thankfully, I have a wonderful hubby who entertained the children at various museums in Memphis while I had my homeschool encouragement fix. :)

This was a great trip! Oh, and we also did putt-putt, the zoo, a Japanese restaurant where the chef prepares the food in front of you, and a tack shop so I could get a helmet and gloves (which I found both quickly and easily - hooray!).

Tornado Boy was actually pretty good at putt-putt!

Mischief playing the drums at Benihanas

Weekly Report - Week 8

This is a late update, so this weekly report is for LAST week. We had a 3 day school week, as we went to Memphis for a family vacation (so I could go to the homeschool convention!). We did our normal 5 days' worth of work, but just doubled up some things each day to get it done in 3 days. It wasn't that hard, and we somehow still managed to finish around the same time as normal each day. Weird.

Tornado Boy

Math: We worked through more of MM2A Chapter 1, doing ordinal numbers, fact families, and learning some simple fractions (fourths and halves).

Reading: Still working on Charlotte's Web. I have him read about a page out loud, then he reads the rest on his own. He's needing help with very few words now, often none at all.

Grammar: We switched our grammar curriculum to First Language Lessons 1 this week! I had some issues with Rod & Staff, and I'm VERY happy with our change. We did the first 3 lessons, which were very simple, but we were introduced to poem memorization, which we had not been doing. I think this will be a good change for us. :)

Independent Reading: We borrowed several good books from a friend of mine, and during the trip to Memphis, most of them were read. I am often finding Tornado Boy with his nose in a book these days. So refreshing to see!

Writing: This week's passages were from Caddie Woodlawn. Narrations are slowly but surely getting better.

Handwriting: No separate handwriting this week. He still had to write neatly for WWE's copywork, however.

Spelling: We did one step of AAS level 2 this week. He's definitely retaining rules, as he notices when he's able to apply a previously used rule to what he's doing now. Very cool to see!

Read-Aloud: No read-alouds this week.

Bible: We learned the story of Ruth this week. Ruth followed Naomi (her mother-in-law) from Moab to Judah. Ruth picked up the leftover grain from the fields as they were being harvested. She was noticed by Boaz, and he had his men leave more grain leftovers for her. Eventually, they married and had a son named Obed. This continued the lineage of Christ.

History: We learned about the old and middle kingdoms of Egypt, along with the history of Joseph, from being sold into slavery on up to being reunited with his brothers and father.

Science: We made an anemometer. Unfortunately, our paper plate was too heavy (it was the good, thick kind), and our cups were too small (dinky bathroom drinking cups), so it didn't really work very well. It took a lot of wind to get it to turn at all. Oh well. We tried. :)

Art: We skipped art this week.

The Brute

The Brute didn't have school this week.