Friday, February 26, 2010

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.

7 comments:

Liza Q said...

Your D-Man is doing wonderfully well! It really is exciting when they start reading for pleasure.

Daisy said...

My son loved Syd Hoff books so much. I think he read every book a million times. Perfect boy humor.

You've got some great books going. Kindergarten is such a fun year.

Dinsfamily said...

Thanks, Ladies. Kinder really is a fun year. I feel like there's no pressure and plenty of time to do fun stuff. D-Man seems to thrive being challenged without stress.

Julie said...

Hey! Thanks for stopping by my new living math blog! I bet it's hard not to buy the next core! When does the catalog come out? End of March? How have you been liking SWR?

Dinsfamily said...

No problem, Julie. Thanks for blogging your experience. I'm sure you'll come up with a lot of things that I'll be able to use with my younger two. The new SL catalog comes out in March and purchases can be made April 1st. At least that's what I'm assuming. Only 30 days :) I love SWR. It is the perfect amount of structure vs. flexability for me. Thanks for pointing me in that direction. Have you decided on an LA program yet?

Robin Johnson said...

I love it when my children read to each other. It is too precious to interrupt!

Karin said...

I had to chuckle when you were typing about how D-Man doesn't like the rote problems without context...we started Horizons K this am and after doing a few things here and there in the first 9 lessons, Squeak declared it was too easy and boring and wanted to do her "octopus math". That is a Word Problem book that I recently found at the Dollar Tree!

So, I promised her it would be more challenging and I'm going to skip more stuff. I'm not sure how Book 1 is going to make it to the fall!! I was hoping to start SM 1A and HM K Book 2 in Sept!!

Did you just skip a bunch of the early lessons in HM K Book 1??? I am not sure what to do because I'm afraid I'll miss something.