Wrap-Up

We’ve been plugging away at school in dribs and drabs, in between getting the house straightened up after the storms and preparing for the holidays.

Vicki is doing really well with reading.  We’ve been using the Hubbard’s Cupboard word family readers.  I highlight the words I want her to read and I read the others.  I did it this way because I wanted her to have practice with the word families but she was having trouble with sight words.  She’s doing a lot better with those now and can read can, see, yes, no, the, and and possibly a few others.   She can read most of the short /a/, /e/ and /i/ word families.  I’m going to start pulling out our Cat in the Hat-type beginning readers for her to work on.

She had a few days recently where she didn’t want to do any school and kept complaining that things were “too hard”.   After a total melt-down over writing the number “3” on her math worksheet, I started writing the answers in highlighter after she told me them and letting her trace.  That ended the melt-down and she ended up doing three days worth of planned work at once.

Vicki has also been enjoying using her 100 chart to practice counting, and we’ve been playing some of our printable games from Kelly’s Kindergarten to work on reading. 

Georgie is continuing to do a mix of complaining that things are too easy and are “baby questions” or deciding they are too hard and not wanting to try.

Math is easily his best subject but it’s also the one he tries to get out of doing the most.  He loves his Algebra Readiness Made Easy puzzles but otherwise, he’s constantly trying to make deals to do less math.  I tried to have him play Carrot Sticks Math for some extra drill practice but he would just plug in numbers until he got it right instead of actually solving the problem.  He definitely needs more drill in subtraction facts.

Language arts aren’t going as well as math.  Mostly because he doesn’t want to take the time to read the instructions so he knows what to do.  We’ve been working on commas in Grammar, and describing words in Writing.  I’ll definitely be printing out some extra pages from Evan Moor to give him more practice in both of these.

For Reading Comprehension, we are using pages from Evan Moor Skill Sharpeners Reading Grade 4 and Evan Moor Read and Understand Leveled Texts Grade 4.   He does okay with the Skill Sharpeners but the Leveled Texts are giving him some trouble.  The passages are longer and he doesn’t want to take the time to read them carefully.   I’ll probably take a step back to the Grade 3 level or chose shorter passages for now.

Spelling is coming pretty easily to him, at least so far.  We are up to Step 8 in AAS2 and have been working on reviewing all the words before proceeding to Step 9. 

The holidays are coming so we will be spending more time doing crafts and fun activities, while concentrating on math and reading practice.  After the holidays we will be reorganizing (again!) to set up dedicated school areas, which will hopefully lead to smoother days.