I just impulse bought Hooked on Phonics' Master Reader for Milo, because it was $30 with a half off coupon code (originally $199), and it sounds like it will be a good thing for him for this summer and next year....for 7 year olds and up to work on fluency and speed. AND it's mostly on CD-roms, which means he can do it without my help! I love things Milo can do without my help, and I'm excited about the list of such things expanding beyond Explode the Code next year.
Milo, speaking of Milo, is suddenly a voracious reader. He's upstairs right now finishing up an Arthur (the monkey, not the aardvark) book that he started less than an hour ago. It's a Level 2 I Can Read book, around 60 pages long. I'm so incredibly impressed with how far he's come in reading this year. He's just started reading regularly at bedtime over the past few weeks, and I keep finding him reading on his own during the day, too. Milo's transformation into Milo the reader is definitely near or at the top of the list for this year's biggest homeschooling accomplishments. I went through a period where I was worried he'd never like to read; that maybe I'd pushed too hard too soon or somehow it would always be a struggle for him. And now, ironically, he's my kid with his nose in a book while the others play outside. So hooray. This week he's torn through much of the library's collection of Arthur books and worked very hard at a graphic novel that Ari checked out and already read, Into the Volcano by Don Wood.
Ari's bedtime reading, on the other hand, is driving me nuts. Now that's he's through with Harry Potter, it's a constant struggle to find books that Mr. Picky will read. Dave reports that right now he's reading one of Milo's Arthur books. Sigh. School reading is not a problem, as he'll usually read whatever I assign him with relatively little complaining. But left to his own devices (and his own giant bookcase filled with books, not to mention many hundreds more to choose from at the library), he sighs and moans dramatically about how he has "nothing good to read." I am not sure what to do about all that. Andrew Clements is usually a hit, but we'll have exhausted his catalog before long. And of course, he reads very quickly when he does read, so an Andrew Clements book might last him 2 nights and then we're back to the search. Series books would be great, but he gets bored with them after he reads a couple. He read the first two Percy Jackson books then got tired of them. He might get back to them sometime, but there's no telling. He took long breaks between Harry Potter books, too. I blame the stars; Geminis are difficult, fickle little people.
So there's my weekly report for reading. I will not be so wordy about the other stuff, I imagine. We've started on WWII in history. We finished the Time for Kids Franklin Roosevelt bio and now we're reading Eleanor's. And the American Girl book about Molly and life in 1944.
Milo's still working on Singapore 1a. It was a little trickier for him this past week, with adding and subtracting stuff like 13-8 and 7+5. I explained the Singapore making 10s thing, though, and it seemed to click with him pretty quickly. We'll see how next week goes.
Ari finished a review section in 4B and started a geometry section (symmetry and whatnot). He may finish the book next week if he's feeling especially motivated.
We're finished reading in Sentence Island, and Ari's just working on a few more writing assignments. We still have maybe 3 or 4 stems to go in Building Language and quite a bit to do in Music of the Hemispheres.
Ari's last Spanish class for the year is on Monday. Board game class is still going strong. I'm trying to give some thought to next year's extracurricular stuff, but it's all a bit up in the air. Dave is planning to run a Math Olympiad club/team, so that's in the works. I'll probably sign Ari up for Spanish again. Gus wants to play soccer. Beyond that, I have no idea. I would like to be a little more intentional about where we spend our extra time/money, so at some point I will sit down and really think it out. But not tonight, for it is the weekend, and we have homebrew beer tasting and Mad Men watching and a very special cookie from the Publix bakery ahead of us tonight!
Friday, May 07, 2010
Sunday, May 02, 2010
April 26-30, 2010
I am feeling very homestretchy this week, despite the summer of math and writing and Practice Island that lies before us. I am, also, however, feeling very writer's blocky about this post, which is why it's coming on Sunday night even though I started it on Saturday night.
Week before last, as predicted, we spent a lot of time hanging out with my sister-in-law and her offspring, Benjamin and Louis, and only a little time on school. We went to the top of the tallest hotel in the western hemisphere!
We went to the park!
We went to the Nature Center!
Then they flew home to California, and we got back to work. I feel like there is not a great deal to report here; we continue to work feverishly at finishing up Ari's Singapore and Milo's Explode the Code and to come to terms with the parts we won't finish. I suppose the biggest academic news of the week is that I am waffling about Right Start with Milo. I pulled out Singapore 1A, which he had gotten maybe 2/3 of the way through way back when before hitting a wall with it. The wall (with 2 digit subtraction) has evaporated; he did a few pages this week, and it was sort of magical in that he could do it by himself; while I did something else with another child. I have many conflicting feelings about this whole math thing. Here they are, in no particular order:
1. The idea of doing Right Start with Milo AND Gus next year kind of makes me want to claw my eyes out. I've gotten to where I really dread doing math with Milo because it's so slow and painful.
2. I hate to jump ship on Right Start just because we've hit a rough patch. I was talking today to a friend whose son is in Right Start C, and she said he had trouble with the same part of B and eventually got through it.
3. Said friend also says she routinely spends an hour and a half a day on RS with her son, and that makes me want to cry. I don't think I can do that, and yet I fear Milo might need to do RS for that long for it to really work for him.
4. Jumping ship when we hit a rough patch, on the other hand, is exactly what I did with Singapore. So would it be so wrong to decide THAT was the mistake and go back to Singapore? IIRC, Milo started 1A when he was still 5; he may well have just been too young for it. If all the message boards are to be believed, kids in Singapore don't start 1A until they're 7. Milo won't be 7 until the end of the month.
5. He has a lot of trouble with the visualization RS wants him to do (they're big on "seeing the abacus in your head") I've always thought of him as more of an auditory learner. So it's possible RS just isn't the best fit. It's also possible it's a maturity issue, and he'd do fine if we slowed down for awhile. But if he'd do fine with either curriculum if we slowed down for awhile, maybe I should go with the one that doesn't make me want to claw my eyes out. I need my eyes!
6. I worry a little bit that my reluctance to spend an hour and a half on a RS lesson is just my own pro-language arts/anti-math bias. I mean, not an actual intellectual bias against math, just an I-don't-wanna-do-it-as-much sort of bias. I think perhaps we need to win the lottery, so that Dave can stay home and take over math for me.
Anyway. I don't know. My inclination at the moment is to go back to Singapore for the summer and see how it goes. If it's still awesome after a 2 month trial, I'll probably stick with it in the fall.
So there you go. Math! What else? We're still reading about the Great Depression, and we watched the Kitt Kittredge American Girl movie last night as an accompaniment. It was surprisingly not bad. It had an all star cast! Abigail Breslin! Joan Cusack! Stanley Tucci! et. al.! I'm thinking of getting The Journey of Natty Gann for next weekend. I haven't watched it since I was a kid, but I remember liking it a lot.
Oh! And re: history, we're planning our annual trip to Cape Cod this summer. We usually fly, but I want to drive this year so that 1. we can bring our bikes and 2. we can stop along the way for exciting educational enrichment. So far I'm thinking the Smithsonian American history museum, maybe the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, and a couple of days in New York City. I want to see Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty and then maybe the Tenement Museum, and I'm not sure what else. We are already too late to get tickets to the crown of the Statue of Liberty, sadly (or maybe not so sadly, seeing as I am kind of claustrophobic and afraid of heights). I'm not sure what else in NYC yet. I'm excited!
Week before last, as predicted, we spent a lot of time hanging out with my sister-in-law and her offspring, Benjamin and Louis, and only a little time on school. We went to the top of the tallest hotel in the western hemisphere!
We went to the park!
We went to the Nature Center!
Then they flew home to California, and we got back to work. I feel like there is not a great deal to report here; we continue to work feverishly at finishing up Ari's Singapore and Milo's Explode the Code and to come to terms with the parts we won't finish. I suppose the biggest academic news of the week is that I am waffling about Right Start with Milo. I pulled out Singapore 1A, which he had gotten maybe 2/3 of the way through way back when before hitting a wall with it. The wall (with 2 digit subtraction) has evaporated; he did a few pages this week, and it was sort of magical in that he could do it by himself; while I did something else with another child. I have many conflicting feelings about this whole math thing. Here they are, in no particular order:
1. The idea of doing Right Start with Milo AND Gus next year kind of makes me want to claw my eyes out. I've gotten to where I really dread doing math with Milo because it's so slow and painful.
2. I hate to jump ship on Right Start just because we've hit a rough patch. I was talking today to a friend whose son is in Right Start C, and she said he had trouble with the same part of B and eventually got through it.
3. Said friend also says she routinely spends an hour and a half a day on RS with her son, and that makes me want to cry. I don't think I can do that, and yet I fear Milo might need to do RS for that long for it to really work for him.
4. Jumping ship when we hit a rough patch, on the other hand, is exactly what I did with Singapore. So would it be so wrong to decide THAT was the mistake and go back to Singapore? IIRC, Milo started 1A when he was still 5; he may well have just been too young for it. If all the message boards are to be believed, kids in Singapore don't start 1A until they're 7. Milo won't be 7 until the end of the month.
5. He has a lot of trouble with the visualization RS wants him to do (they're big on "seeing the abacus in your head") I've always thought of him as more of an auditory learner. So it's possible RS just isn't the best fit. It's also possible it's a maturity issue, and he'd do fine if we slowed down for awhile. But if he'd do fine with either curriculum if we slowed down for awhile, maybe I should go with the one that doesn't make me want to claw my eyes out. I need my eyes!
6. I worry a little bit that my reluctance to spend an hour and a half on a RS lesson is just my own pro-language arts/anti-math bias. I mean, not an actual intellectual bias against math, just an I-don't-wanna-do-it-as-much sort of bias. I think perhaps we need to win the lottery, so that Dave can stay home and take over math for me.
Anyway. I don't know. My inclination at the moment is to go back to Singapore for the summer and see how it goes. If it's still awesome after a 2 month trial, I'll probably stick with it in the fall.
So there you go. Math! What else? We're still reading about the Great Depression, and we watched the Kitt Kittredge American Girl movie last night as an accompaniment. It was surprisingly not bad. It had an all star cast! Abigail Breslin! Joan Cusack! Stanley Tucci! et. al.! I'm thinking of getting The Journey of Natty Gann for next weekend. I haven't watched it since I was a kid, but I remember liking it a lot.
Oh! And re: history, we're planning our annual trip to Cape Cod this summer. We usually fly, but I want to drive this year so that 1. we can bring our bikes and 2. we can stop along the way for exciting educational enrichment. So far I'm thinking the Smithsonian American history museum, maybe the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, and a couple of days in New York City. I want to see Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty and then maybe the Tenement Museum, and I'm not sure what else. We are already too late to get tickets to the crown of the Statue of Liberty, sadly (or maybe not so sadly, seeing as I am kind of claustrophobic and afraid of heights). I'm not sure what else in NYC yet. I'm excited!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)