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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Downloading my files

I've had a lot of questions about this lately. Scribd has started charging for their service. Because of this, I'm in the process of transferring all of my files and links to a new site called Homeschool Launch. My intention is to keep all of my files free and easy to download. This process might take me a little while but I'll keep you all updated. In the meantime, you can e-mail me for any files you want.

Weekly Report- Week 9

I wrote this post a couple of weeks ago but couldn't add the pics. Now I'm experimenting with posting from my iPad which should help. I'm going to work on Week 11 and might even have it posted by tomorrow.

We're definitely getting back into the groove.

Math: The new math plan is working out well. D-Man is really enjoying focusing on Miquon and enjoying it's non-traditional approach. On Thursday, we filled in a multiplication chart with all of the facts he knows (not necessarily memorized) and was surprised to find that there were only 12 out of 121 that we haven't studied yet. The chart only went to 10s, but we'll add 11s and 12s later. I think filling in a new chart each week will help him memorize them. We're also working with Flashmaster a few times a week. He blasted through the fraction pages this week too. He has decided he loves fractions.





Spelling: This week was really easy for D-Man. It seems we're finding a good rhythm with SWR. He's definitely ready for more challenging material. We do have 6 more weeks of review. It'll be good for him to really focus on the spelling rules. We just started reviewing them last week and he only has a handful mastered.



Reading: D-Man's still reading his way through Jesus' parables in The Beginner's Bible. It only takes him a minute or two to read the day's selection so I think we're going to start formal Silent Sustained Reading (SSR) during school. Yesterday, he read 3 extra Bible stories because he wasn't done reading yet. I haven't felt the need to do SSR because he reads so much on his own, but I think it would reinforce the importance of reading. I'll probably only start with 15 minutes and work up to 30, but it's important that he enjoy it. For his first book, I'll have him read through his Christian Liberty Nature Readers. He loves reading them and I think it would be a fun assignment.

History:. We talked about Victorian times this week. Nothing remarkable about it really. We did look on the Internet and see how different it was for children back then. We concluded that it's much better for children these days.

Read-Alouds: We started The Story of Dr. Doolittle this week. The boys think he has a funny name and D-Man wants to have as many pets as the Dr. has. I told him that when he's a grown-up and has his own house, he may have as many pets as he likes.

Science:. We are continuing to read How To Think Like a Scientist. D-Man had to come up with a question he'd like to answer using the scientific method. I had to help him quite a bit with finding a suitable question. He came up with some great questions, but most of them would require resources not available o us to prove. He's a child that tends to think big.

Weekly Report- Week 8

Now that we're getting back into the swing of things, I'm going to try getting a weekly report out each week.

Math:. I've decided to change up routine a bit. D-Man's to the point where not knowing his multiplication facts are holding him back. So, instead of forging on with Singapore 2B, we're going to concentrate on learning those facts while go through Horizons 2 and Miquon Orange/Red. Memorization is not his strong suit so we'll really have to work on those tables. Once he gets 2s and 3s down, we'll move on in Singapore. 2s aren't a problem, but he struggles with 3s past 3x5. I expect we'll have to do something similar when we get to 4s and 6s.   So this week, we did about 7 lessons in Horizons 2 and 20 pages in Miquon Orange.  He calls Miquon "fun math." One thing I really liked seeing was how fast he's gotten at addition and subtraction.  He does know his facts there and it seems has gained quite a bit of speed recently.  It is funny to hear him do his timed subtraction tests in Horizons.  He looks at each problem and says, "that's easy...it's just __."  It can get a little repetitive after the 30th problem. 

Spelling: We did List F this week. After our long vacation, D-Man needed a little remediation with cursive. Not a big deal, though. We finished off List E at the end of last week and I told him that I wouldn't help him with how to spell the words on his test, but he could ask me a anything about letter formation. He was back in the groove by the time his test came around this Friday.  He got a 100% on his test...YEAH!  It's nice to be doing these easy lists at the beginning of the year.  D-Man is thriving on his success and I think that'll take him a long way once we get to new words. 

We also reviewed the A-E-I-O-U page this week.  It is a reference page that covers all of the ways a vowel says 2nd (long) sound.  Since he'd already done it once last year and knows those rules well, we played a game where I'd give him the word with the 1st sound (ex. can) and he'd come up with the word that uses the 2nd sound (ex. cane), tell me the rule and do the markings.  We had fun and it was a good review.  Looking at the picture, I realize we forgot to finish the last reason.  We were saving it so that he could show his dad.  Guess we should finish that off tonight when Shawn gets home.

Reading: D-Man's still working his way through The Beginner's Bible.  He's now reading about Jesus' ministry.  I can't believe he's read 350 pages all by himself!  He does read a lot on his own each week, but it's great to track his progress through this one book.  Even though this set of readers is well below his reading level, I am still amazed at his reading ability.  Maybe that's the way it is with the first reader.  It's just so fun to see them go from painfully sounding out words to reading Bible stories with ease (well, until they get to "Nebuchadnezzar").  We didn't take any of his school reading on vacation, but he got so much practice reading stories to his brothers and his nature reader for fun.  This is a really great season for both of us in this subject.

Read-Aloud: We read the sequel to Dolphin Adventure, Dolphin Treasure this week.

This was a great, on-the-edge-of-their-seats book.  D-Man asked about every two minutes in chapters 3, 4, and 5 if they were all going to die.  I did tell him that if the author wrote the book, he must have lived.  That put him at ease a bit.  Of course, they were both pretty excited about the prospect of finding treasure.  We also had a good discussion on hypothermia.  While it was definitely on the lighter-side of our Sonlight read-alouds, it was so enjoyable. 

Science: This week, we're reading through the book How To Think Like a Scientist.  We didn't actually get to science until Saturday.  Between me having strep, D-Man's golf lessons, and playing with friends; we didn't get to everything this week.  However, since science is one of our favorite subjects, we made time for it on Saturday.

In this book, we're learning how to use the scientific method to answer questions.  At the beginning, we read about why our interpretation of the facts can lead to wrong answers.  Now, we've moved on to the 5 steps of the scientific method.  It's a great book that's written at a young elementary level. 

Sonlight and Spell to Write and Read

I decided to put a post together about this topic since I had a reader ask.  Really, there is no mystery...I just use each program in its entirety.  I just substitute SWR for Sonlight's LA.  Here are a couple of items worth noting:

SWR is a complete LA program for K-2/3.  It includes all of the necessary phonics, handwriting, grammar, and writing for those ages.  Despite that, I'm adding Cursive First for handwriting (really, we're finished with this), First Language Lessons (grammar), and Writing with Ease (writing) this year for 1st grade. 

Cursive First was designed to use with SWR to teach cursive.  There's not much to it but it provided just enough support to give me confidence teaching cursive to D-Man. It does include worksheets that correspond with learning the phonograms. We used some of them, but ditched them when we started the spelling lists for the year. D-man is pretty intolerant of busy work and writing the words throughout the week gives him ample handwriting practice. We sometimes have little refreshers on how two letters connect (mostly after a straight connecter, but he's getting better each week).

Writing with Ease (WWE) and First Language Lessons (FLL) are not necessary for most people using SWR. I'm adding them because those are the areas in which I am the least confident teaching. I learned very little grammar in school so the scripted nature of FLL will be a big help. I plan to teach the boys writing classically and WWE is giving us a good head start on that road. However, instead of using the WWE workbooks, I'm correlating our narration and dictation with our SL and Noeo reading. Another reason is simply that I love to supplement with great resources. If you've read my blog at all, you know that by now and take my supplementing with a grain of salt :).

I do still use the Sonlight readers alongside SWR. SWR does call for assigned reading several weeks into the program (after list I-1). I found the recommendation to wait on assigned reading a good one. The author, Wanda Sanseri, calls reading too early "torture reading" and waits until the child has the skills he needs to read well. Before they start reading books, they read the spelling lists several times a week to practice decoding and fluency. By the time D-Man got to list I-1, he started in week 24 of Sonlight's Readers 1 (after the I Can Read It Series). His fluency took off and he was soon capable of reading at a 4th grade level. I've chosen to keep him tracking in Sonlight's reader programs so he's working his way through Readers 2. They are an easy read for him, but he's enjoying the books and often chooses tougher material from the library as his free reading selections. I have him read all of the Sonlight books aloud to me while he reads his free reading selections silently. His reading and spelling levels are still steadily improving through the SWR spelling lists and enrichments. C-Monster is a bit of a different animal as he started reading before 3 and likes to pick up Fun Tales (Readers K) or Bob Books so I expect him to continue this trend over the next year and possibly getting through the first 24 weeks of Readers 1 (which he's capable of reading now) or farther. Between our collection and the library, we'll have plenty of books to keep him busy.

Where have we been?

I'll include a more thorough update with pics later, but we've been on vacation. It was great, but now it's time to get back to work.

Weekly Update: Weeks 41/42

I was waiting until I had time to add pics, but that never happened.  So...here's our last two weeks a little late.

Ahhh, another box of curriculum is on my way!!

We've had a great couple of weeks as usual.  I'm getting ancy to start our full schedule, but I'm glad we're waiting until June to start the rest.  Here's what we're doing in the meantime:

Sonlight: 

   Read-alouds:  We love this core's read-alouds!!  We just finished the My Father's Dragon trilogy.  Both older  boys ate them up.  I'm sad that we finished them so quickly and that the author only wrote 3.  We will read them again and I've already ordered the audiobooks from the library.  We are starting The Hundred Dresses next week, but we'll continue to read Boxcar Children sequels at bedtime. 

  History:  History hasn't really come alive for us yet.  The Usborne encyclopedia isn't really enough for D-Man.  He really needs more than a 2-page spread on each subject.  We do like Living Long Ago, but we're missing a good narrative on the subject.  I keep reminding myself that my only goal is exposure. 

 Bible:  We just started reading about Moses this week.  The Egermeier's Bible Storybook is a great read and I highly recommend it!  Because D-Man has been exposed to many of these stories in picture Bibles, he notices the details.  It's also fun to keep track of the people we're reading about on the timeline.  D-Man likes to flip through his Book of Time to see who all we've put in it and when they lived.  He doesn't fully grasp the logic of BC and AD yet, but we're working on it.  I think it's just too abstract of a concept for him at this point.

Math:  We are whizzing right along in math.  I was worried about D-Man starting addition with renaming (some of you will know it as carrying), but my concerns were unfounded.  He breezed through the concept and had no trouble.  I introduced it using Cuisenaire Rods and that helped him visualize the first few problems.  Once he saw how it worked, he was off.  For our supplemental math this week, I worked with D-Man on subtraction in Miquon.  He has gotten it into his head that he hates doing subtraction.  I used Miquon and the rods to bring some fun back into that concept.  I also told him that if he works on his subtraction facts, the problems will be easier for him.  While math concepts are a breeze for him, he isn't great at memorizing.  He understands subtraction and can figure out the answer to subtraction problems, but it takes him a long time.  I know that he'll need a lot of practice to get all of those facts to stick into his brain.  He's been working with Flashmaster this week which is fun for him.  We're supposed to start subtraction with renaming (borrowing) next week, but I may delay it if he starts to get frustrated.  We'll just work on subtraction facts and do some Miquon.  The funny thing is that he was faster on his fact recall a few months ago, but I guess we haven't been practicing enough.

LA:  We finished learning all of the cursive letters last week.  Now it's just a matter of D-Man getting used to writing in cursive.  This week, I'm just having him copy words to practice the formation and get used to the different way of writing.  He's begging to start spelling again so we'll start that soon.  I think I'll do another review next week and then start our first week of spelling words the following week.  I'm waiting for my box to come so that I can start my own Learning Log in cursive.  D-Man's going to love it.  Writing with Ease (WWE) is also coming in that box so I'll be able to finish my schedule correlating WWE with Sonlight and Noeo, our science program.  D-Man's still working his way through The Beginner's Bible.  He is so happy to have read 150 pages in one book.   He does struggle with some of the Bible names which is kinda cute.

Geography:  We haven't done much of this the last couple of weeks.  I just got some Galloping the Globe sheets copied so I need to add it in next week.  I have three books to use with Galloping the Globe in my shipment:  Geography Through Art, Eat Your Way Around the World, and an atlas.  We may focus back on Egypt when all of that comes since it'll be fun to add some art and cooking to the mix.

Library:  We are back to our weekly library trips.  D-Man is enjoying picking out books that he can read by himself.  C-Monster checks out whatever Dr. Suess book looks interesting even if we already have it at home.  Now that D-Man is a certifiable Star Wars nut, he checked out a bunch of Star Wars visual dictionaries.  He can't read them by himself yet, but Dad's happy to help him out.

Homeschool Conversations Pt. 4

How does a 6yo figure out negative numbers? I have no idea. Here's what happened during a lesson on how to use Singapore's bar models.

I was trying to show D-Man how the bar models correlate with addition and subtraction problems. In the course of the lesson, I used 6-10 as an example of a problem that doesn't work. Of course, that sent up a red flag with D-Man. He told me that it does have an answer and that he knew "all about negative numbers." Then he asked me to write a number line on the board and to add negative numbers to it. I did.

He then told me the answer was -4.  After that I came up with a couple of similar problems and he solved them just fine.  Then, he told me that he wanted to come up with his own problem.  Did he come up with one like mine...no, of course not.  He wrote down -20 + -10 =.  Just as I was about to stop him and explain that negative numbers can be a bit tricky, he writes down -30.  I stared at it dumbfounded.  How did he figure that out?  I have no idea, but he got it right.  

So ends another math lesson at our house. 

What's D-Man reading?

D-Man loves to read.  Now that he's had such a big jump in reading level over the last few months, it's widened his book selection.

For school we're going through Sonlight's Readers 2.  These books are pretty easy for him, but I can't think of any reason for him to read harder books at his age as long as he's enjoying them.  His current book is The Beginner's Bible.  He loves having his own Bible to read.



D-Man reads a lot of books for fun.  He gets to pick these books himself, but I do steer him towards appropriate selections at the library.  We also have a pretty nice collection of books here at home for him to choose from as well.  He'll often take 5 or so Dr. Suess books from our shelf to bed with him.  Last night, he decided to start reading The Christian Liberty Nature Reader Book 1.  These are great readers for kids who like science.  I asked him how much he'd read and he informed me that he's reading one chapter each night.  Last night's chapter was about a wasp that digs.  He told me all about this wasp and how it isn't a wasp when it is first born.  I was surprised he remembered so much information. 

Weekly Report: Weeks 38/39

I know this is really late, but I finally have somethig to report!! After a couple of months off, we finally have all of our new curriculum and have started back up. D-Man is still officially a Kindergartener, but we're starting the next level in our progression.

Sonlight: We received our big boxes full of books from Sonlight Tuesday night last week. YEAH!! The boys were eager to start reading books, so we started our first week right away. I didn't get them to bed until 9:30. Our new core is called Introduction to the World: Cultures. During this year, we'll get an overview of some geography and an idea of history. We started D-Man's timeline which he loves. So far, we've got several figures on our timeline from our Bible reading. The biggest hit so far has been our read-aloud, The Boxcar Children. In fact, we finished it last Saturday. D-Man loved the book and kept asking to read more chapters so we did. We weren't supposed to finish it until week 4, so we picked up a couple of sequels at the library and started the 2nd book Tuesday night.

We started studying Ancient Egypt this week. Since we tend to go through the SL material quickly, I decided to get some Ancient Egypt books from the library so that we can dive into the topic a little more. We'll cover it again next year, but I think D-Man will find the topic interesting. I'm also printing out some heiroglyphics activities that I found online since both boys were intrigued by them during our reading.

Math: Although, we received Singapore 2A last week, I've decided not to start it until this week. Instead, we tried to make some progress in Horizons 1. We finished lesson 125 last week and are eager to finish the rest of the book. D-Man progresses so quickly in math that it has become too easy and boring for him. I think that I need to be more picky about the exercises we do in Horizons 2 when we start it in June. D-Man did beg to do some PM2A, but balked when he saw that it was review. The review was covering place value to the tens place and he was a little confused about why that topic was being covered. He's just not a kid who needs much review and that is compounded by the fact that we school year around. This week, we focused on getting through the review in 2A and added in Miquon Orange for some meat. We did the first 6 lessons in 2A which he actually enjoyed once we got to some big numbers.

LA: We got more serious about learning cursive last week. I'm surprised at how well D-Man is taking to it. Now, he did ask to learn it, but I thought it would be harder for him than it has been. His fine motor skills have really improved this year. We've covered letters a, c, d, g, o, q, e, l, b, and f. I'm hoping we can continue doing 2/day and practice for the rest of the month. He's asking to start spelling again and I think the early lists will be really good cursive practice. I'll just have to see if he'll be able to handle that when we get to the beginning of May. The salt box has been a key activity in Cursive First for us. He starts cursive everyday with the salt box and it warms him up for writing on paper.

Geography: I got Galloping the Globe spiral bound this week which will be really helpful when I copy pages for D-Man. We'll be doing a quick overview of Egypt this week to go with history.

Field Trip: We tried to go to the zoo this week for C-Monster's 4th birthday, but we were rained out. We're renewing our membership, so we'll be going a lot this year. I'm planning on going next Friday, but am unsure if the zoo will be open. It's Fiesta time around here and most everything is closed next Friday. We'll see.

Well, that all for this week. We aren't starting the rest of our subjects until D-Man officially starts 1st grade in June.

SWR-First Grade Schedule

It's ready! My Spell to Write and Read schedule for 1st grade is done. This time I went through and chose which enrichments I want to do from the WISE Guide. That'll make it even more open-and-go for me.

This year we'll be doing 20 words/week and writing everything in cursive. D-Man actually asked to learn cursive, so he's pretty excited about it. We're already on week 2 of the schedule and love Cursive First.


SWR Schedule-1st Grade

Getting Ready

We're getting everything ready for our new school year. Officially, D-Man won't start 1st grade until June 1st, but we are starting our new Core and math as soon as it gets here which should be early next week. Along with that, we'll re-energize handwriting and finish up our geography workbooks. I'm getting my schedules and binders ready so that we're all organized as soon as the boxes arrive. I'm also trying to get some spring cleaning in before we start. It's been nice to take a few months "off," but we're rearin' to go.

Homeschool Conversations-Pt.3

We are working our way through Singapore's Challenging Word Problems 1. We just got to the section on multiplication. We haven't worked on multiplication since we covered it in Primary Math 1B which was around Christmas.

So here's how two of our problems went this morning:

D-Man: That's 9x2. I have to go potty. Be right back.

D-Man: (Immediately after the quick trip to the restroom) That's 18.

Mom: That was fast, how did you know that?

D-Man: Well, I was thinking about it while I was going potty. 5-2's is 10 and another 4-2's is 8. 10 plus 8 is 18. It's really just an adding problem.

Mom: Wow, that's exactly right.

Next problem...

D-Man: (After reading the probem) That's 3x2. Hmmm...That's 10-4. It's 6.

Evidently, he thought that 5x2 = 10 and 2x2 = 4. When you subtract them, you get 3x2.

Interesting math day.

Weekly Report: Week 32

It's been awhile since I've reported. Honestly, we haven't been doing much. Since we finished our Sonlight Core, school seems scattered. I'm realizing that I needed the core to ground our schooltime. However, it is a great time to take a break. Despite his academic level, D-Man is still a Kindergartner and I don't want to overwhelm him or me. Here's what we have been doing:


Sonlight/Reading Aloud: We've been reading through Fiction, Fairy Tales and Fun. While the stories are great, they are a step down in complexity and length from Explore God's World and that's been more of an issue than I anticipated. D-Man does love the stories, but they're more of what he's used to for bedtime, not school. He really wants more substance. The good thing we've done is adding A Treasury of Children's Literature, Usborne First Book of Knowledge, and Usborne Starting Point Science Vol. 1. These have added more meat to our reading. However, I am longing to buy our next SL Core, Introduction to the World: Cultures. I am going to wait until April when the next catalog comes out so that I can have the latest version available, but I'm not going to like it.


Math: We've still been chugging along. We finished Singapore 1B and Horizons 1 book 1. Now we're working on Challenging Word Problems 1 (CWP 1) and Horizons 1 book 2. D-Man really enjoys Horizons book 2. Book 1 seemed like a lot of pages of addition and subtraction practice. The problems were easy, but I'm finding he just doesn't enjoy rote problems without context. Now, he loves word problems. Book 2 has more variety in the lessons so I think he'll complain less when we do get to those addition/subtraction pages. He's even declared that we have to do that book first thing every morning. He also loves practicing more complicated problems in CWP 1. It's a good review before we start 2A in April.

Reading: We finished SL Readers 1 a couple of weeks ago and I'm still surprised at D-Man's reading growth spurt. I haven't been having him do any formal reading practice with me, but he's been staying up late at night to read books. He's (re)read some Dr. Suess, Little Bear's Visit, Syd Hoff books, and Scholastic readers. My husband hasn't been able to turn his light off when he's reading at night, so he's been sleeping in a bit more in the mornings. It's just so exciting for us to have a child who wants to read books to himself instead of sleep. Tonight, my husband let C-Monster stay up in D-Man's bed extra late so that D-Man could read him stories. How do you say no to that? Today, I surprised D-Man by buying him Yertle the Turtle at Costco and he read to all of us during the ride home. Fun times.

Spelling: We're finished with this for now. I was planning on doing a few more lists this year, but we're taking a break to learn cursive instead. I do think that we'll do some phonogram, spelling rule, and reference page review until we start up again. I'll have to look for (or think of) some fun projects. I might ask him to narrate and illustrate some more pages in his reading journal (for lack of a better word) on books he's reading for fun. He might be really excited about that once his cursive gets to the point that he could write in it instead of manuscript.

Art: We haven't been doing much, but I need to. That'll be my project for next week...resurrect our art program. Hopefully, I'll have something to report on that next time.

Well, that's it for school. Other than that, we've been outside a lot. The weather's either been fabulous or snow flurries. Either way, we're outside in it.

New Curriculum: Cursive First

We have finished much of our Kindergarten curriculum so I've been getting a jump start on next year and exploring different programs.

Cursive First

I wasn't planning on starting Cursive First (CF) until at least June when I make my next SWR purchase. However, I was able to buy it used from a fellow homeschooling mom for a good price. This was great for us since D-Man has been begging to start cursive since we started K. It was also the motivation I needed to make a salt box for C-Monster.

The woman who sold it to me stated that she needed something with a little more handholding. I can see what she means; CF is a barebones program. It's filled with a lot more theory than how-to. However, I taught D-Man manuscript without a formal program (just the instructions in SWR) and had no difficulty. CF is the perfect amount of help for me to get him started in cursive. The CF style is very simple and nice for a young child. My plan is to have him master this style and then we can choose a "prettier" cursive style together later on. It is really important to me for my boys to have nice, legible handwriting.

When the package came in the mail, D-Man asked to start immediately. Without having time to read the manual, I decided that we could work on some easy letters like a and d on the whiteboard. He, of course, wanted to do all of them. He quickly changed his tune when he found that it was much more difficult than he'd thought. It turns out, he just wasn't ready for the whiteboard yet. While my husband put the boys to bed, I decided to read the manual which prompted me to make a saltbox. This took me about an hour, but was definitely worth it. Since then, I've been teaching D-Man his cursive letters using the saltbox. Only after he's practiced them several times in the box, we move on to the appropriate worksheet. The worksheets are simple, but exactly what we need. The first day, I even had to give C-Monster his own worksheet so that he could keep up with his big brother. The salt box has been a huge hit and very useful tool. He went very quickly from just forming the letters to learning how to connect them to forming simple words like 'cat' and 'dog.' Most of all, they think it's fun. It is also a perfect pre-writing exercise for C-Monster. He's been asking me to write a letter in the saltbox and then he'll trace over my writing with his finger. I'm really focusing on his formation as D-Man had developed a lot of bad habits by the time we'd started K.

Spell to Write and Read-Learning Log

Oh, the neglected blog. We've been sick and tired (ha,ha) and blogging is the first thing that goes. Actually, the second. The first was being a good sister. Now that I've taken care of my sisterly duties (sorry, Katrina!), I have a little time to blog this morning. Normally, we'd be doing school, but D-Man has just rediscovered Lincoln Logs so he's busy building a village. It is tough to build a Lincoln Log village as a 5yo when you have an 18 month old brother. We had so many meltdowns yesterday on both sides that I had to ban Lincoln Log use. Today, D-Man asked if Little-J could take a nap at 8am so that he could rebuild his village. Considering that the baby slept for 14 hours last night and had only been up for an hour, I said no. I finally convinced D-Man and C-Monster to rebuild the village in their bedroom where the door can be closed all day preventing little feet from trampling the buildings. So, Little-J is in my room with me figuring out how to get the shapes through the correct holes into the box and I am blogging.

This first post is owed to a friend. She is very interested in using SWR and we've been talking about it online. It's so hard to get a handle on a program and which parts you NEED to buy when you haven't seen it in action. So...here is a little bit about the Learning Log. This log becomes a self-made textbook for the year. It contains all of the reference pages and spelling words we've covered. At the end of the year, it will be a record of what we've done and we'll start a fresh one for the upcoming year.

Reference pages: The biggest advantage of the Primary Learning Log is the formatting on the reference pages. Reference pages are pages used to teach/review a concept or spelling rule. I really appreciate the clutter-free ease of these pages. It really maximizes our teaching time and D-Man's understanding of the concept. We will fill these in and discuss them each year. The SWR philosophy isn't first-time mastery, but mastery through reviewing year after year.

Spelling list pages: The formatting is less important here, but nice to have. The lists themselves are very valuable. For a K'er, it is VERY important that they read their spelling lists. It helps build reading fluency and gives them more exposure to the words. At first, D-Man would request to read from my Learning Log since the penmanship was so much neater. I'd let him since I wanted his frustration level to be as low as possible. In the meantime, we kept recording his words in his logbook working on his penmanship each week. Now that his reading is more fluent and his writing is neater, he would rather read from his own logbook. It also helpful for me to look through his book and see his progress for the year. Another use of the lists is to mark words as he gets them wrong on his tests. I haven't made this a priority this year as I was focused on building his confidence and he tends to get down on himself for making mistakes. Also, this year was only an introduction to the lists we covered. Even though D-Man scored a 90% or higher on all but 2 lists, I don't expect mastery until we cover the list as least twice. We'll start over at the beginning next year and with mastery expected, I'll keep track of missed words more closely. Another aspect of the lists in the future will be the expectation of D-Man to study for his tests. I don't require this right now because of his age, but I will expect more independent study as he gets older. Using his log will be an integral part of this.

Some of these pictures are from my log and some are from D-Man's log. Why do I have a log? Well, a lot of people complain that SWR is hard to use. It does take time for the teacher to understand the program and the fastest way of doing that it to build a log. I taught the program to myself before I started with D-Man. I went through each reference page and spelling list trying not to cheat by looking at the samples in the back of the book. It really helped me learn the marking process and use of each reference page. As we are advancing in the lists and words are getting harder, preparing my own log gives me exposure to any potential questions I might have and time to get answers from the author or a trainer.