Tuesday, January 31, 2012

January Homeschool

Maybe I'll try updating this blog monthly with items of interest. We'll see how that goes.

We have 2 days a week where we have no activities scheduled, and 2 days a week with afternoon activities. And Friday is our free day, as long as we've been working well all week. We either play games or go somewhere special. This serves as a great motivator for Bee to do his work.

Anyway, I decided to try making one of our long homeschool days a "language day," where nearly everything we do is reading/writing related and the other day a "math day," where everything is math except for Bee's 15 minutes (or chapter) of silent reading a day. This seems to be working out beautifully. I was feeling that our days were too crammed, and I'd rather spend a long time on each assignment and let Bee get as much out of it as he wants than chop things up and have to finish the next day.

On the math front, the program TOPScience: Get a Grip, for grades K-6 program is still really enjoyable. We use it once a week. If we do anything too much, Bee tends to get bored. I need to add some different containers for Bug to play with. I've also had to buy more lentils, since Bug makes such a mess with them. In fact, the floor in the computer room has a lot of lentils on it right now.

Bee hadn't worked much with the concept of rounding/estimating before, but it's something that kids his age are expected to learn. For some reason, we struggled with it a bit (probably because it's boring). This online game has helped a lot:
Round Off.

I bought the book Games for Writing by Peggy Kaye, and I've started using some of the ideas. The main difference is that I'm encouraging Bee to dictate writing to me, rather than trying to make him write so much. This way, he puts his very creative ideas into words, and I get them on paper for him. His thinking is so much more advanced than his ability to write. He's been writing more too. He likes to write me emails on the iPad, mostly about products he wants to buy. The important thing is that he's writing! We do one collaborative creative writing a week, at least one writing a week where he writes pretty much whatever he wants (he can choose a prompt or make up his own), and we do spelling and/or dictation sentences once a week, where we focus on spelling, handwriting, and basic punctuation. It seems to be working.

Materials we are using for wrting:

1) I'm a Writer! (And I Didn't Even Know It), Grade 2 by Teresa Domnauer
2) Rory's Story Cubes

I also signed Bee up for Explode the Code Online, to help him with phonics. It's a bit repetitive for him, but I'm seeing some good results in his spelling. It's good for 15 minutes once a week.

Also once a week, I give him a word ladder to do from the book Daily Word Ladders: Grades 2-3 by Timothy V. Rasinski. I think these are good for problem solving and cementing in Bee's brain how each letter functions.

We started our "History of the Universe" unit (history and science in one). We read Born with a Bang by Jennifer Morgan and have been watching How the Universe Works on Netflix Instant. I've certainly learned a lot!