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.