i knew i wouldn’t be able to keep up the blogging every day of school thing. but that’s ok. i’ll summarize what we did the last 3 days.
i do keep track of it all in my planner, so i won’t forget what we did and have it written out so i can see at-a-glance how we’re doing.
everyday i encourage maeven to do some silent reading in her chapter book. now that she’s finally enjoying reading, this isn’t hard at all. she’s currently working on the 3rd book in the “magic kitten” series. i am wanting her to finish that up soon because she has a few more books that we got from the library that i’d like her to get a chance to get to before they are due. also, the more she reads, the better she gets at reading. on thursday she read 12 pages (she very proudly told me).
its funny because its been this way with everything when she’s learning something new…she’ll start to learn it and i’ll be wanting to fast-forward to when she has it mastered, and it seems that that will never happen, but then all-of-a-sudden time has flown and now she’s great at whatever it was. its really weird and neat at the same time. i’ve seen it with potty training, with sleeping in her own bed, with weaning, with riding a trike and then a bike, and on and on…and now with reading. she’s been reading for awhile but never actually enjoyed it until now. she shunned chapter books. its only been a couple weeks now that she just devours chapter books. its so fun to watch!
so i encourage her to read to her heart’s content. i also have been encouraging her to read to her brother. i’ve even added it to the daily plan. i ask her to sit and read her brother at least one book a day…during a time when i think she’ll be positive about it. he just loves it, she gets more practice and they get to bond a little. course i’m not going to stress if it doesn’t happen every day.
everyday she also has copywork…although this week i only managed to get her something to do on friday. i was still getting into the groove with the other subjects so copywork got neglected til then. i have a program i bought, startwrite, that i print up the things i want her to copy, with a blank line underneath for her to copy it right under the example. it prints whatever i want it to say, on the learning paper with the dotted lines. i also use it to print up blank lined pages (again, the learning ones w/dotted lines) for her spelling lessons.
since maeven has some difficulty with a few letters: a, d/b, g…in writing them the right way (she’s getting them backwards) i have decided to make a practice sheet here and there for her to practice just those letters she’s been having problems with…i do the same thing with numbers because she reverses some numbers too (3, 7, 2…) i know this is totally normal, so i’m not worried about it. i just want to do what i can to get her more practice writing them the correct way.
i also do a couple words that use those letters…and a separate page with a short poem or inspirational saying or something like that. this week it was “mistakes are opportunities to learn”, which i got out of her spelling book.
speaking of spelling…the spelling book came in on thursday… we did our first lesson friday. its really awesome! basically i give her a spelling test of sorts each day. each word builds sequentially on the last. she corrects her work as we go, which is supposed to really help make the lesson more concrete and stick. she loves it! she even asked to do another lesson on friday…but i said we should just do the one. but today she asked again so we did another…and again she wanted to do another, LOL! so i guess, so far, spelling is a hit. 🙂
math…we’ve been staying on top of…a couple lessons behind but still doing at least one lesson a day, so i’ve been quite pleased. and finally i feel like we are covering concepts that are a little more challenging for maeven. not hard, but no longer super easy. it seems to be getting more interesting for her. i was really excited to see that they have all kinds of games to help her to learn the concepts. this week we were working on learning the numbers that together add up to 10. i’ve always thought this was a great way to do math and i was happy to see that its part of this program. we’ve played a version of memory where instead of an exact pair you are looking for the numbers that together make 10. (like if you turn over a 2, you need to find an 8 to get a match)…also a version of go fish with the same thing…pairs that add up to 10…and also some thing with old maid. pretty dang clever, i think! and she loves playing them! i am really digging this math curriculum…its finally getting interesting! 🙂 she has also enjoyed it to the point of asking to do another lesson after we finish one. so i guess it was another good buy! 🙂
we’re also moving along nicely in our history lessons. right on track. i have us down to do 2 chapters a week and also some of the additional reading (the activity book for SOTW has lists of additional books to supplement the chapters you’re on.) not all of the books have come in yet from the library (gotta plan ahead better for that…usually they come in pretty fast, but occasionally there are some that take longer) but we’ve enjoyed reading the chapters and doing the mapwork. also have been giving her the coloring pages (which i don’t particularly like coloring pages but haven’t really minded these because she’s already quite an artist so i’m not really worried about it stunting her creativity at this point). it gives her something to do while i read the chapter to her and its a bonus that it happens to be along the theme of what i’m reading.
we didn’t get to do the activity i had picked out for this week to go with the history lesson, because i never did get around to going to store to get the supplies. have to plan better for next week.
lastly, we also read some world folktales from the enki kindergarten folktales book i had from when i was going to do enki with maeven. the stories are great, and not too young for her at all. there’s quite a selection, so i’ve decided to continue to use them until i can find some other books with more world folktales/fairytales. i really want her to get a lot of exposure to quality reading and culture.
so that covers this week. there’s a lot more that i’d like to do…but for now i’m very pleased with how the first week has gone!
