Starting a New Year

Looks like we’re getting ready to start a new school year!  

I finally got around to putting away the last couple of months of Georgie’s completed work into his Core Subject binder.   The fullness of the binder had me looking at where it started (last September) and reminded me that despite schooling year round, my intention was for our “school year” to run September through August. 

We took an unscheduled 2 week break thanks to a Hurricane Irene-induced power outage and the subsequent clean-up so this seems like a good a time as any to start fresh.  Of course, none of our curriculum is actually changing since everything Georgie’s been using has been going very well and we move on to the next level whenever he finishes the previous one.   But for record keeping purposes , it makes sense to have an ending and a new beginning.  It will also help us keep track of his grade level.  We are going by what grade he’d be in school if he started at 5 years old (even though they didn’t want him until he was 6) so he is currently beginning 1st Grade.

One thing that has changed is I am doing more structured work with Vicki.  This is by necessity since she has been demanding to “do school” and she’s no longer satisfied with the wide variety of independent activities I have available to her.  I’m choosing to start our day by sitting down with her, hoping that after a little mommy time, she’ll be happy to play more independently.  To keep Georgie in school mode while I work with Vicki, I set up a basket of activities for him to do independently.  This includes things like word searches, mazes, Mad Libs, graphing activities, word dice, cutting pages,  magnetic words to build sentences and books to read.

Our first week back wasn’t a full week since we still had some interruptions thanks to the hurricane (we had a new fridge delivered since ours was fried from the power outage, which necessitated a lot of rearranging and organizing), but we had a pretty good week regardless.

I started each morning with Vicki, hoping that a little one-on-one time would lead to her playing nicely by herself afterwards (it mostly worked).   She did a few pages from Get Ready for the Code, a few math sheets from Evan Moor Teacher File Box – one on counting and one on big/little.  Those went very well.  I printed off a modified Domino Parking Lot for her with spots for the numbers 1 to 5 and pulled out the appropriate dominos for her to work with.  She had a lot of fun doing this for a little while, using her purple pen to count the dots….

but it didn’t take long for Georgie to join her in building with the dominos.

We also used her Capital Letter pieces and cards to work on some phonics.  I pulled out the cards for A through E and asked her to build the letter that makes the sound at the beginning of a word.  We did B, C and D before she balked and told me “Let me build what I want to build!”

Still, not a bad start.

Georgie enjoyed his independent work but was a little resistant to the rest of his work this week.  We still managed to get done quite a bit of math.  I usually do a lot of the writing for him, especially in math since his ability to do the problems far exceeds his ability to write that many numbers.  He was giving me a hard time about answering the problems, randomly yelling out numbers for things I knew he could do, so I handed him the pencil, told him that if he was going to play games he could do it on his own.  And I walked away (but not too far).  He did two pages, including one with a fairly tricky puzzle on it, on his own before he decided he wanted to cooperate better.

We had the most fun getting back into AAS.  I took this week (and probably next week) to review all the words from Lessons 12 to 15 to make sure he knows them well before we start with new lessons.  We had the usual playing around with the tiles but he was doing well spelling the words.  Then I offered him the option of using dry-erase markers to write out the words.    I’m thinking a nice little list of words.  Instead I got bubble letters…..

and pictures.

Other than “ribbit”, which isn’t on any of our lists, he spelled all the words correctly so I guess I can overlook the adornment.

He did draw me a nice picture on our first day home when the power came back.

We should have less interruptions next week so I’m hoping to have a more productive week and get back into our Prehistory study.