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.

Educational Gifts Pt. 2- Mighty Mind

This has been a huge hit in our house since Christmas. The boys call it school and like to refer to the front of the box where it says it makes you smarter. The goal is to use the 32 shapes to form the picture on a card. We'd done a couple of similar things in Singapore Math, but this is the full deal. It starts off really (!) easy and slowly builds using more shapes to form complicated pictures. D-Man finished up the whole series of 30 cards this week. I started helping him a little bit to think through the strategy of which shapes to use as he got close to the end of the series. I plan to get D-Man the next level, SuperMind, for his birthday. He's really excited about it. In the meantime, he started over doing them with no help. I'm interested to see if he can do the latter cards all by himself now that he's had some practice. C-Monster loves it too and seems to have a good grasp of the concept. He's done the first 13 cards so far with no help. He seems to get it pretty easily.

Weekly Report: Week 26

Finally, an update on my neglected blog.

We are back in the groove after being back for a couple of weeks. We had a great school week. Here's what we did:

LA: Is it me or was list I-2 really easy? D-Man didn't have any trouble at all and got a 100% on his test. Now, I will say that we buckled down and did all of our enrichments including sentence dictation and two whiteboard quizzes. He also got to move the phonogram "ough" to the mastered (blue) pile which was a big deal for him as it has 6 sounds. He was very motivated to remember all of them. Now, he only has 2 phonograms ("ei" and "ey") in the yellow pile and one in the red pile ("ie"). Those are mostly because he mixes them up. If I give him "ey" first, he can get the other two, but they aren't mastered yet.

His reading is taking off even more. I gave him the Quick Reading Assessment on Sonlight's website on Thursday and he tested into Readers 2 Intermediate. Pretty cool. He's improved even more on his fluency. It seems like something has clicked in his brain and he's able to smoothly read words he hasn't read before. Just tonight, he was reading a sign in our kitchen that said, "no excuses" and just blurted it out. The weird thing is that he'll often pause to sound out a CVC word. I think it's out of habit and it isn't too noticeable, but interesting. We are still trucking through Sonlight's Readers 1 package, but it is building his confidence to read books below his level. In the last two weeks, he's read 5 weeks worth of the schedule. Being able to finally read fluently has shown both of us that he LOVES to read Dr. Suess books. He likes the rhythm and it helps that he and Dr. Suess share a similar sense of humor. Readers 1 includes several Dr. Suess books (and others Theodore Geisel wrote) plus we have several other on the shelves, but he's read most of those and is excited to check some out at the library this week. It's the first time that we're going to get him specific books to read to himself. A big day in our house.

Oh, and D-Man started a journal on the books he's reading. It's pretty simple: he tells me what he wants to say about the book, I write his sentences on the board, and he copies them into his book. Then, he draws a picture. I had a little journal in my stuff and mentioned it to him as an idea. He loved it and spent the next hour on a page about Little Bear. I'm not going to make it a mandatory assignment, but it's a good opportunity for him to get in some narration practice. I don't have any pics right now, but it warrants it's own post anyway.

Math: We're still moving right along in Horizons 1 and Singapore 1B. We finished through lesson 58 in Horizons 1 and 57 in Singapore 1B. The only thing he's encountered that was remotely challenging was the concept of division. Singapore briefly introduces it in 1B and we covered a few weeks ago. He got it, but I actually had to explain it to him. Now we are back to doing addition and subtraction with numbers up to 100 which is easy to him. He has expressed some concern about the lack of difficulty in this section. Evidently, it isn't meeting his expectations. I've explained to him that math is like soccer and basketball. We just need to keep practicing. He's fine with it and likes the exercises, but is eager to get to numbers over 100.

Sonlight: We finished P4/5!!! Yipee!! Well, I'm a little excited. On one hand, we did it. On the other hand, it was a great core and I'm sad that we're done. The good news is that I'll be doing it again with C-Monster in a little over a year. Since then, we started our quick run through P3/4 (Fiction, Fairy Tales, and Fun). I thought it would be intense, but it is turning out to be light on reading so far. I think the reason is that we got used to the longer stories in P4/5, so this is a step back. It's not a big deal. The boys are still loving the stories and I've used the opportunity to schedule in some other great books that we got for Christmas and a few Usborne science books we had lying around. We have already read many of the P3/4 stories in the 9 months since I started slowing buying it, but these stories are meant to be read over and over (and over, etc.) again.

We also started up DEL again. We had stalled out on book 3 due to D-Man's aversion to outlining. I decided to add it back in and do it a few times per week. So, we did 1 page on Monday and 1 page on Wednesday. Then, on Friday, D-Man decided to finish up book 3 (5 pages) and run through 12 pages of book 4. He wanted to keep going, but I was done. I made him go play. He likes book 4 better because it has more to do with actual letters, numbers and writing rather than pictures and coloring.

Other cool stuff: We're still using our snap circuit set a few times a week. D-Man calls it school, but that's just so he can do it first thing in the morning. I need to read up on circuits a bit because I can't explain what's going on in all of the circuits anymore. They were simple at the beginning, but keep getting more complex. I did take EE in school, but that was awhile ago. Hopefully, it will come back. D-Man also made it through all of the Mighty Mind cards this week (I'm going to post about what exactly this is later). Now he's on his second run. The first time, I helped him a bit as the cards got more complicated, but this time he's on his own. C-Monster has worked his way through card 13 with no help so far.

Well, that's a good week for us. It was really nice out so we spent a ton of time outside riding scooters and playing bugman in the backyard.

Shelfari Bookshelf and other blog improvements

Look at the bottom of my blog to see the boys' Shelfari Bookshelf.

I got this widget-idea from a fellow Sonlighter and blogger, Jana. Thanks, Jana! I've seen some bookshelf widgets, but this was the first one that impressed me. Now, you can browse through and see exactly what's on our shelf at the moment. Eventually, I'll split up the boys' shelves, but they all sit for everyone else's stories right now. FYI, mine's in the left column if you're interested in what I'm reading. Michael Crichton's last novel is a must read.

I also was finally able to set up my blog on my own domain: www.whatarewelearning.com I've been trying to do this for awhile, but finally got it. Yes, I feel like a blog master. I'm not, but I do feel like it.

Educational Toys for Christmas Pt. 1

We got so many educational toys for Christmas that I thought I'd highlight some of them. The first and most successful educational toy D-Man got for Christamas was his snap circuit set. This was a present from Grandma and physics-professor Grandpa. It was an instant hit. At first, D-Man was mostly interested in what the circuits did (eg record his voice, light up an LED, etc), but after awhile, he started to get some of the concepts.

Today, we set up a rather complex circuit (for us) using three resistors and two switches to demonstrate how the different resistors affect the LED. It was funny as we were setting up the circuit using different resistors that D-Man told me that they make the LED go dim and didn't want me to use them. Once we set it up, he was very happy that we could make the LED have three different settings. One of the games we played with this one was trace the circuit. With the two switches, we had three different paths so both boys were tracing where the current was going depending on if the switches were on and off.