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.