Weekly Wrap-Up

We didn’t get a whole lot of school done in the past two weeks.  Georgie was very excited about his upcoming birthday and Granny Franny came to visit over the weekend.

HANDWRITING – Handwriting Without Tears is still going well.   We’ve moved on from magic C words to the letter corner starts.  Georgie had his new Webkinz friends helping him out.

READING/PHONICS – We are up to Lesson 57 in Ordinary Parents Guide to Teaching Reading.   I still haven’t had to actually teach any of these lessons yet. 

We are finishing up Book 2 of Explode the Code and moving on to Book 3.   Like OPGTR, this seems to be review for him.  I’m going to have to decide if we are going to proceed to Book 4 or skip it for Book 5 and return to it later.  Many users of ETC say Book 4 is harder since it goes into syllabication of compound words.  

SPELLING – We didn’t get back into our All About Spelling yet.   We continued to do some review but Georgie was so uncooperative for much of these weeks that I didn’t bother bringing out the whiteboard and tiles.

GRAMMAR – We are continuing with Scholastic Grammar, Usage and Mechanics and McMillian Treasure Grammar along with the Scholastic 1st Grade Basic Skills: Reading Comprehension and Reading Skills book that I picked up at one of the Dollar Day sales.  He is having no trouble with the Reading Comprehension pages and once we are done with those, I think I’m going to add Writing With Ease to our days.

I’ve added some simple word search puzzles from another one of the books from Scholastic’s Dollar Days 1st Grade Basic Skills.

MATH – Georgie has continued to do well with Math Mammoth.  He spent some time answering the questions on a blackboard.

Despite the fact that he seems to enjoy math and even loves to do word problems, one day he did describe it “It’s like someone is eating my eyeballs.”

SIGN LANGUAGE – We introduced conversation words from our sign language book but didn’t spend much time reviewing them so we won’t move on from these yet.

Some day I’m going to add an Art and/or Drawing program for Georgie.  For now, he loves drawing pictures of aliens and monsters, like this “tickle monster”.

I did some reorganization of Georgie’s work (yes, again).  I was using a modified weekly workbox type system in a hanging file folder holder where I could pull out a given days folder for a subject, have him do the work, then pull out the next subject’s folder…

but in the literally 3 minutes it would take me to pull out the next folder, he would wander off and it would sometimes take a while to get him back.  He also would frequently ask how much more he had to do, or would want to do things in a different order and the file folders weren’t enough of a visual for him.

After a thread on TWTM forums about using a weekly binder, I decided to give it a try.  We school 4 days a week (theoretically) so I used four dividers.  Each days work is put behind a divider.  Some are sheets that I typed up and will say “Do With Mom”, others are worksheets that he could do himself, but I pretty much sit with him for all his work.  This allows him to see exactly how much is left for that day and he can do it out of order if he wants.

All my workbooks, except HWT already had the pages separated out so this was an easy adaptation.   My hope is that eventually this will make it possible for me to work with both him and Vicki at the same time.  So far he seems to prefer the binder.

Vicki has very strongly requested some additional school stuff to do.  MEP isn’t going well since it requires quite a bit of preparation.  I thought about getting Singapore Earlybird math for her but then realized that there were many, many Math activities available through my Evan-Moor Teacher’s File Box subscription. So, I’ve been working on gathering together some activities at her level.  I’m hoping to start next week with a little bit of sit together time to do Math (from Evan-Moor), Phonics (I have Get Ready, Get Set and Go for the Code) and Handwriting (we already have Handwriting without Tears Pre-K).  In the meantime, she’s been playing with our Tag maps and games….

doing her own “work” with the help of her new Webkinz buddy…

and still loving her HWT capital letter pieces.

This September is when Georgie would have started kindergarten if we weren’t homeschooling.   He is working above that grade level in everything except maybe handwriting (although he is working in the first grade HWT book) so I think it has been a success so far.