Back to School

What have we been doing for the last 4 weeks...this!







The boys got a new brother on the 7th of March. We're very excited to add him to the pack and we were too busy loving on him to do any school. Added into the mix, Grandma, Grandpa, and Aunt Megan visited so we were pretty busy. The weather was beautiful so the extended spring break was perfect.

So where were we before our break?

Math: D-Man is well into Singapore PM 3A. We finished up Exercise 18 today and are almost finished with Challenging Word Problems 2. D-Man finished Lesson 17 in Horizons Math 3 as well. Horizons has been all review so far so it's been very easy.

C-Monster is joining us for school on Mondays now and is almost finished with Singapore Essential Math B. He's been working on the concept of subtraction.

Spelling: D-Man is starting list L-1 this week. We're going to hit our phonograms and spelling rules hard this week since we've taken so much time off.

Reading: Both boys have been doing a lot of reading over break. D-Man has discovered Geronimo Stilton and has been reading 1-2 books per day. Now that we're back to school, he'll finish his reader, The Pony Express, but he'll still be doing a lot of free reading. We often have to turn his light off late at night so that he'll go to sleep instead of reading "just one more chapter."

C-Monster is also started week 28 of Sonlight's Readers 1. He taught himself to read so I just placed him into the more interesting readers. He's reading The Best Trick right now and gets upset if we forget his reading time. His free reading has mostly been Dr. Seuss.

I'm not sure how much we're going to get done in our elective subjects. Going back school often proves to be slower and less enthusiastic after a long, fun break. We're going to focus on the basics this week and enjoy our last week of being with Grandma. After she goes home next week, we'll try to reestablish our routine adjusting for our new family member. Hopefully, I'll be able to add in some fun stuff. We also have soccer starting up this week for the two older boys so we'll have to work around that.

I'll try to get back to at least a bi-weekly update but no promises with so much going on around here. :)

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Weekly Report- Jan 6, 2011

Well, the holidays are over and it's a new year so it's time to get back to the grind. We had a nice Christmas full of family and joy. The boys did A LOT of cooking and baking with their grandmother and me so there was some learning involved. D-Man also convinced Grandpa
to do several science experiments with him and roped Grandma into reading extras chapters of bedtime stories. Gotta love grandparents. Now that they are on their way back to Oregon, we miss them dearly.

We had a rough start to the school week. My parents left late morning on Monday and we were sad so not much got done. We've been doing more and more each day and were in full swing by Wednesday. Here's what we managed to accomplish.

Math: I knew that math was going to be rough when we started the week. It's been about a month since we earnestly did any math and I knew things would be rusty in D-Man's head. Since I was prepared, it wasn't frustrating for either of us and we worked slower than usual. We had finished Singapore PM 2B at the beginning of December so we were just working through the last third of Horizons 2 and Miquon Blue. Horizons is helping pull the cobwebs off of D's multiplication tables. It'll take awhile to get back where we were on 4s and 6s. I plan on finishing Horizons 2 around the beginning-middle of February and starting Singapore PM 3A Jan 31. I'm also adding in CWP 2 when we have time. C-Monster joined us this week and completed several pages in Singapore's Essential Math and Miquon Orange.










Spelling: We're just reviewing this week and will start full up on Monday. Can't add in too much the first week.

Grammar and Writing: These were both VERY easy to restart so we picked up where we left off. Continuing to do copywork for writing and still doing common vs. proper nouns in grammar. Easy stuff.

Reading: Well, D-Man finished his readers a few months ago and I've just been letting him read independently. My mom gave him a bunch of books for Christmas including the #2-#7 of the Boxcar Children. He was really excited and immediately started BC#2, Surprise Island, and is tearing through it. It's the longest book he's read to date. To check off my reading box on my school schedule, I'm having him read a few pages aloud to me each night. I have no idea what's going on in the story (despite the fact I read it to the boys last April) since I'm only getting snippets each day. Once we start our new readers on Jan 31st, his new books will just go back to being free reading. Normally, I'd schedule time for free reading but D-Man reads so much that it isn't necessary.


Art: This is our big addition since Christmas. I ordered D-Man and myself the art program I Can All Things (ICDAT) with the instructional DVDs and supplies. We're still working on the fundamentals in the beginning (before we start the meat of the program). We are both really enjoying it and D-Man's even starting to create his own drawings using the techniques we've learned. I've noticed that I need to keep reminding myself that he is 6 and not to expect his drawings to look perfect. We are also going to start another art program on Jan 31st called Artistic Pursuits that goes along with our history program and includes some art appreciation. AP will be done once a week and ICDAT will be on demand. With the videos, I imagine he'll be able to do it independently.







Well, that's what is happening around here. Hope everyone else is having a good week.

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Weekly Review: Where have we been?

I've been missing for a few weeks. Evidently, when times get busy, blogging is the first to go. Perfectionism isn't the problem these days...pregnancy is. I've found that being pregnant, having littles and homeschooling can be exhausting. Nothing our family can't handle, we've just had to lower expectations a bit.

On the other hand, we are really excited about meeting our next boy in about 3 months. The boys are over the moon and even Little-J seems to understand. We're praying that understanding continues when Baby-S is being held by his mom constantly.

School is still going. Our biggest strides have been in math. D-Man has really enjoyed the last few topics in Singapore PM 2B and is racing through them. The topics have been capacity, geometry, graphs, and area. We're done with all of the instruction and will finish the last 2 reviews next week. We'll take a break from Singapore in January, focusing on Horizons and Miquon. I also have Singapore's Challenging Word Problems 2 and Ed Zaccaro's Primary Challenge Math for extras. He loves Zaccaro's PCM and begs to do it everyday. Oh, I also checked out a great book called The Adventures of Penrose the Mathematical Cat from the library last week. It's great!

D-Man finished up Sonlight's Readers 2 a couple of weeks ago and we'll finish up our Sonlight Core next week. We've been reading The Apple and the Arrow about William Tell this week. It is a really interesting version of the story and D-Man's really into it. It's also been a great introduction to politics. D-Man has so many questions.

Song School Latin has been a big hit. In fact, due to the convenient ad on the back cover, D-Man is pressuring me for a promise that we'll Song School Greek next. This week we learned about family members. Both he and C-Monster have decided they have no use for the word Soror since they won't have one. Here are our vocab words for the week:
Pater (father)
Mater (mother)
Frater (brother)
Soror (sister)

For those of you wondering, I don't have any Latin background. I'm learning right along with the boys.

Hope everyone else is having a good week!

New Curricula-Latin and Grammar

We got some new stuff last week.

Grammar

I wanted to start grammar along with writing at the beginning of the year but the author was releasing a new edition of the program I wanted to use so I decided to wait. I finally got a copy of Jessie Bauer's new edition of First Language Lessons 1. It is exactly what I needed. I wanted something that would be gentle but thoroughly introduce grammar concepts. I also didn't want a program that would take up a lot of time. FLL is almost perfect. If I used it as scripted, it would move too slowly for D-Man so I am combining every two lessons into 1. Even doing two lesson a day, it only takes about 10 minutes. The instruction is so clear that D-Man is getting the point. We've covered common and proper nouns, and a story narration while memorizing the definition of a noun and a short poem.

Latin

We also received a cute little Latin program, Song School Latin. It is a song-based Latin program that focuses on vocabulary. We've done two units so far: Greetings and Making New Friends. D-Man LOVES it! It has been a bit challenging for me since I don't know any Latin. I'm used to picking up a curricula and teaching but this requires more preparation on my part. I have to listen to the songs in advance and learn the pronunciation in order to work on it with D-Man. He is not strong in hearing and picking up sound differences so I have to correct his pronunciation and say things slowly. Because of this, I'd like to go through the program slowly with a lot of practice each week. D-Man likes to power through things so I'm letting him do as much as he wants in his own time without writing in the book while we stick to our one official lesson/week schedule.







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Weekly Report- Week 24

Okay, I'm working on doing away with my blog perfectionist syndrome. I keep writing weekly updates and other posts but not publishing them because I haven't had time for pics. So...they might not have pictures (I'll try) but I will post them anyway. So here's how this week went down:

We had the best of plans for this week. School, gym, tutoring, dr. appt, fire truck visit, Bible study. Great stuff, right. Well, it all went out the door when Little J threw up at 9:20am on Tuesday. Thankfully, I still made it to my appointment due to a great friend but the rest of the week was shot. The stomach bug ravaged our house one by one until Friday. Okay, that's a little dramatic but it wasn't fun. We didn't do any school on Thursday because that was my day and D-Man's day to be sick. Poor guy was glued to the couch. We made up quite a bit on Friday since D-Man actually missed school and wanted to do a lot of math (tolerating spelling in between each activity) and went a little crazy with our new curricula. We did have to spend a good amount of the day disinfecting and cleaning on Friday and Saturday in between bouts of post-sickness exhaustion. BUT...now it's Monday and the house is clean; everybody is well and feeling great.

Math:. We are still finishing up Miquon Red which is going slow as D-Man did all of the pages he deemed fun already. We have 20 pages left of addition, subtraction, and multiplication. They're all easy but he'd rather surge ahead in the Blue book which has negative numbers. Horizons is going well. We're just doing one lesson per day which keeps previous math topics fresh and reviews multiplication facts. Singapore Primary Math 2B is where our heavier lessons are coming from at the moment. We just finished up a unit on mental addition and subtraction and have moved onto multiplication by 4s. It's easy for D-Man but I'm really focusing on the 4s table (do you see a pattern?). Each day he does a drill exercise on either Flashmaster or my iPad and watches Multiplication Rock.








Spelling:. We are finished with all of our review lists and have been covering new material for the last two weeks. This week, we completed list J-2. It was an easy list for D-Man which was good since the sickness caused us to miss a day of enrichments. He easily scored 100% on the test on Friday. I don't like skipping material but not every week can be perfect. We are slowly working through our latest review page which is called the ER page and lists words by the different 'er' used. D-Man didn't want to write them all in one day and I didn't see the need to rush through it. We have been slacking on our phonogram and spelling rule reviews so I'm going to get on that. C-Monster joins us for that portion (voluntarily) and actually told me tat we missed it last and could we do it today.



Writing:. I haven't talked much about writing. We are working on it. I'm using a very gentle program called WWE which I really like. It focuses on narration (summarizing) and copywork. We do each of those 2-3 times per week. For copywork, I choose sentences from our reading and he copies them learning proper sentence structure. We just switched from 3rd grade dotted middle-line paper to regular wide-ruled paper. Because of this switch, we're also focusing on handwriting.

Reading:. Still truckin' along in this area. D-Man finished Daniel's Duck last week and started The Big Balloon Race.






Read-Alouds: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was a huge hit here. I'd never read it before and was surprised by the differences between the book and the movie. We finished it earlier than scheduled, of course, and downloaded the sequel, The Marvelous Land of Oz. We're only on the second chapter of it so the jury's still out.





We didn't do much with our electives last week because of the sickness but I have a feeling we'll get back to it this week. We did dive into grammar and Latin but I'll save that for another post.



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