This week was a bit hectic with appointments and errands and the whole Christmas season and all, so we got horribly behind and then caught up magically. Strange how that happens.
Tornado Boy
Math: After we learned long division in MM 4B, I switched Tornado Boy over to Singapore Standards Edition 4A. Why? After reading threads on the WTM forum about how Singapore makes more conceptual leaps, I was thinking, "That's exactly what Tornado Boy needs!" He also likes the presentation a lot better, and he's a bit bored of MM. MM was the best choice for us in the last year because he was accelerating to "where he is". Now that we have found where he is, we can use Singapore without having to go through 3-4 grade levels in a calendar year. :P We started a couple lessons Thanksgiving week (our week off, but Tornado Boy wanted to start, and so did I!), and then this week we got through Order of Operations and started the Negative Numbers section. We skipped the first chapter on Place Value, since he's already done that in MM4A and has no trouble whatsoever with place value. Order of Operations is review from MM4A, but it was good to practice it again. We also got into some divisibility rules. I love the Singapore HIG (Home Instructor's Guide). It gives extra information for the teacher, including the "why" of the divisibility rules. I always knew that if the digit sum was divisible by 9, then the whole number is divisible by 9, but I never knew why that worked. The HIG explained it very well in a way that I wouldn't have thought of myself. Very cool!
We were only supposed to do through Order of Operations this week, but Tornado Boy saw the Negative Numbers section and just had to do that one too. He loves negative numbers. There was nothing new to him in that lesson, so we were able to quickly go through it and do the workbook pages.
We did some IP 3A and CWP 3 this week, reviewing a bit of long division, since he's only learned how to do that a month ago. Surprisingly, long division was very easy for him to pick up. I taught him the standard algorithm one day (via MM4B), and the next day he remembered how to do it. I haven't had to review how the algorithm works at all. He remembers and does it without problem. Very strange. I expected it to be a bit harder than that!
Reading: He has been reading 101 Dalmatians by Dodie Smith. I think he's around chapter 6 or 7 now.
Grammar: We did lessons 40 and 41 this week. I looked ahead and decided to do lesson 42 next week and skip lesson 43 (a review of poetry memorization that we haven't been doing anyway <bag>). FLL3 is still going very well. He's learning from it and understanding. He seems to like the book pretty well.
Writing: We did week 12 of WWE2 this week, with passages from Pilgrim's Progress. Tornado Boy really liked these passages! His narrations were excellent. We also talked a little bit about the allegory involved and what things symbolized what. He was able to catch on to that pretty easily.
Spelling: We did Lesson 6 of R&S 3, which is a review of the words from Lessons 1-5. He got a 100 on the test, as he has on all the tests so far. I am liking R&S because it's fairly independent, yet he's still learning how to spell the words. I will probably add in some HTTS... maybe alternating between them. He might be able to do some of book 3 now.
Read-Aloud: We are still reading The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. A couple days this week, I even read 3 chapters at a time. Go me! We have just gotten to the point where the group is going to find the Good Witch Glinda. Oz has flown away in a balloon, and the Winged Monkeys can't take Dorothy across the desert. We'll need to watch the movie when done reading this book, as I can't even remember how the movie goes. I do notice that the movie has her wearing red shoes from the Wicked Witch, and in the book, the shoes are silver.
Bible: We're currently in the middle of Jesus' ministry.
History: This week we have done chapter 6 of SOTW2 - the Rise of Islam. We actually only did the first section, but I'll probably have Tornado Boy do the next 2 sections Sunday afternoon to catch up. He read The Three Princes to go along with this chapter and really enjoyed that book. He said he's read it 3 times. :)
To get more writing in, and to give him a little bit of original writing, I had Tornado Boy start notebooking in history the last few weeks. He is enjoying this and doing very well with it! I made some sheets in Startwrite that have 2 spaces for drawing pictures and 2 spaces for writing something about a section of his history. He likes drawing a picture, though they are always stick figures. The funniest one was when he did "Monks in Caves" and he drew a cave with a statue of Buddha and a Buddhist monk. The statue was a stick figure! I have him write one sentence about what he read - all on his own, not dictated or copied or anything. He thinks of a sentence and writes it down. I help him with spelling if necessary. He has done so well with this. His first sentence even had a comma in it, so it was a decent length. Yay!
Science: WE DID SCIENCE!!!!! That's right, we actually got out BJU Science and did TWO lessons! Woohoo! I also had him write 3 things he remembered from what he read, and he did the activity book for the lessons. This week's lessons were about ecosystems.
The Brute
We have not done much school the last few weeks, but we have read some books and answered a LOT of questions... Oh, the questions just never end! This week, he asked, "When is the last day?" and I said, "Last day of what?" He replied, "The last day of the world!" This kid thinks too much. :P
As far as learning goes, we've been doing I See Sam readers (first 52 are free online), and he really likes those! We have done through book 5, I believe. In book 4, Sam (a lion) is reading a book and doesn't notice a hole in front of him. he falls right in. At the end of the story, the Brute asked where the book was. He was talking about Sam's book. Once he falls in the hole, you don't see the book anymore.
Math knowledge is certainly increasing by leaps and bounds. We're still working on basic counting to 20, yet one day he asked what 4+4 was. I asked the question back, and he said 8. Then he asked what 8+2 was, and I again asked the question back to him. He said 10. Then he said, "Hey, that's the same as 5+5!" We haven't worked on ANY of those facts at all in our math, so he has picked them up on his own somehow, possibly from big brother drilling him, and possibly from C-rod play. I don't know. It's just a bit scary, because again, he's still working on counting to 20!
We haven't worked on handwriting at all. I'm still waffling on whether to start him on cursive or do print and then cursive very soon. I don't want to wait until 2nd or 3rd grade to do cursive. I'm finding that that's a really bad time to do it because the kids are just then getting used to writing in print, and writing is finally starting to get easier, and then you throw cursive at them and set them back completely! Why? 5 year olds can learn cursive. So I'd like to do cursive either this year or next year.
I had an IEP meeting with the local school recently about the Brute. He is in speech therapy right now, and I had some other concerns. They have decided to test his language soon, which I'm anxiously awaiting. I think language is what holds him back. They also had me fill out the C.A.R.S. (Childhood Autism Rating Scale) sheet, but I don't think he is autistic. Sensory issues, yes. Language issues, yes. Incredibly imaginative, yes. Autistic, doubtful. I couldn't answer one question on the scale (the one about intelligence). I honestly can't say whether he is as smart as his peers, less smart than his peers, or more smart than his peers. He's a bit of all 3 all at once! That's the big thing I can't figure out. His intellectual ability is very nebulous to me. He seems very VSL, and they are often late bloomers. So that could be part of it. I just don't know how his brain works, how much he knows, what he's capable of learning. I just don't know! He's doing great with K level work - not speeding ahead, not going too slow. He's technically doing this a year early, but he doesn't act or seem academically gifted. It's his questions that make him sound gifted. The things he thinks about and the connections he makes sometimes blow me away, yet the very basics sometimes take him a while to figure out (like counting). So that's where we are. I look forward to the language testing to see where he is and what they can do for him in that realm. That's the biggest barrier to us understanding his speech right now. He uses strange word order!
Mischief
Every day, when I get ready to teach Tornado Boy's math lesson at the white board, Mischief pulls up a chair and the Singapore EM K book A (that the Brute already completed) and a pencil, and he "does maf" with his big brother. Very cute. He can count a little bit past 10 and knows several letters and colors now. I'm not doing anything formal with him, of course. Not for a long time yet. I suspect he'll be like Tornado Boy, teaching himself before K.
