Summer school update

In what should only take an hour a day, we have been working through Writing With Ease Level 2 (both older kids), Growing with Grammar 3 (Child #1), Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons (Child #2), A Beka Arithmetic 1 (Child #2), and reviewing math facts using games/flashcards/etc (Child #1).

Unfortunately, it has not been going well lately. The whining and complaining start even before we sit down to “do school.” Anything that has to do with a pencil causes complaints with Child #1, so WWE & GWG are both resented. Even the small amount of writing that each calls for is lamented loudly before, during, and after the lesson. We are on Week 5 of WWE and Child #1 just finished Chapter 1 (of 5) in GWG 3.

Swimming at the pool usually follows the completion of our lessons for the day, but only if they have them done at a decent time. Getting up late or fooling around rather than completing chores causes the schedule to be moved back – and back – and back. It doesn’t look like there will be any pool-time today because they both have refused to take their schoolwork seriously today (breaking a pencil lead out on purpose and sulking on the other child’s part). ‘Tis sad because they really have had a great time at the pool this summer and made marvelous strides in their swimming abilities.

The cloud cover has been on and off all day, so perhaps that is contributing to their (and my) gloomy moods. I hope for a more upbeat blog post another time.

Summer Session: Day 3

We took a two week break after the official “end” of our school year. We started back up on Monday for a light summer session of schoolwork.

I start out with Child #1 & Child #2 working together on Writing With Ease Level 2. It is primarily for Child #1 who just finished second grade of our homeschool. I determined that she needs to have steady practice in copywork, narration, and dictation. Knowing myself, I won’t give her daily practice in such things unless I have a curriculum that has it all laid out for me. So, I purchased the workbook for WWE2 to do this school year.

Child #2 just finished Kindergarten but she loves to write and does a pretty good job writing in cursive. (I started teaching cursive to them both last summer with sidewalk chalk and continued this last school year with Cursive First.) She needs help in cutting her “narrations” down from a retelling into just a couple-sentence summary. The copywork is a bonus and I don’t expect her to keep up with the dictation as she can’t read or spell well at all yet.

The WWE2 workbook is laid out so that Day 1 is narration. Day 2 is copywork. Day 3 is dictation. Day 4 is narration and then dictation. Days 1 and 2 went pretty well. Day 3 was horrid. I didn’t think Child #2 would be able to do dictation, but she did pretty well – with lots of prompting of how to spell the next word (which she pretty much remembered). Child #1 remembered much of the sentence but showed a lot of frustration when I gently tried to help her with her misspellings (flattery was spelled fatery, off was miswritten oof, guard was gard, etc.) or when she left a word out (your). She quit with three words to go and refused to continue. Eventually, she did write the last three words. But she had to take a break first. I am not looking forward to Day 4 or future Day 3s. I could take her back down to WWE Level 1, but I really don’t think it is necessary. She just needs more practice and more patience! (And I need to continue to have patience.)

My up & coming (pencil-phobic) third grader also started Growing With Grammar 3. It went fine the first two days. She even said she kind of liked it. Today, however, the writing got to her. There isn’t that much, but she was asked to rewrite run-on sentences into two complete sentences. There were about eight of them in the lesson and she balked at the first one. After two separate bouts of crying an hour apart, she took a nap. She’d gotten up at 5 a.m. and I decided she needed to lay down because the histrionics were more like Child #2 than Child #1. She completed the lesson at around 5:30 p.m.

I picked GWG because it is supposed to be easy for the child to do without much direction or teacher-time while also being comprehensive, spiral, quick, and not involve much writing. I have had to go back through the lessons with her each day so far. I will say that it doesn’t take long once she applies herself to the lesson. I find myself spending the time explaining things to her from the student manual and correcting her work as she goes along because she doesn’t seem to “get” the concepts when she puts them into practice. Her sentences frequently don’t end with punctuation and they definitely don’t all start with capital letters. This is why she needs a grammar program. We will continue and see how it goes in a few more weeks.

My little first grade not-wanna-be (she would prefer to stay in K) continues in the Teach Your Child To Read in 100 Easy Lessons book. We left off on Lesson 44 before Christmas due to extreme frustration on both our parts. We lent the book out to a friend in the spring and when it came back, my child actually got the book out on her own initiative and started to “read” the stories. We started back up at around Lesson 15 just doing the story section of each lesson. We finished Lesson 31 today and she does really well. I plan to continue until we get to another roadblock. Then, we’ll switch back to Spell to Write and Read (SWR) phonograms and spelling lists. To be honest, she hates SWR right now, so it is doing us good to take a break.

Both children do some math for about 15-20 minutes. The older child is working on making her addition, subtraction, and multiplication facts come more easily and quickly. We play games, do speed drills (timed/untimed), work with Math Wrap-Ups (timed & untimed), and other activities that is not tied to her official math curriculum. She is already 20 or so lessons into A Beka Arithmetic 3 and I think this time will help her when we start that back up.

The younger child is slowly working through the beginning of A Beka Arithmetic 1. We finished Lesson 19 today and do only about a 1/2 lesson per day (and sometimes less). She is struggling with the concept of reading numbers above 10. (It takes her a long time to “read” 34, 71, 14, etc.) She is also working on her addition and subtraction facts for the zero to five families. She does about five minutes of either flashcard work or oral math response per day as part of each lesson.

These activities have taken about an hour total to complete each day once you subtract the whining and delay tactics each child attempts. I hope the whining gets less as they realize that doesn’t help (i.e., they still have to do the work) and when they get back ‘into the groove’ of doing school each day.

The weather has been chillier than it had been with occasional rain. When it warms back up without the precipitation, they must have their schoolwork done to go to the pool. That will hopefully be a motivating factor as well.

Winding Down The School Year & Field Trip Update

Well, we made it to the first field trip of the week, but had to skip the second. (We had two sick!) We were able to hit the third field trip and all had a wonderful time. My spouse used the time while we were all out of the house to reroute some plumbing that involves the main water line. He was also able to get a TON of other things done because we made sure we were gone long enough that there would be water available when we got home!

We are all looking forward to the “end” of formal school work for this school year. We have only one more “official” week of regular work and then testing week comes. That means I have only one week and two weekends to write my “finals” in science, history, and religion! I’ve started scribbling history questions down but have not looked at the others. Better get cracking, eh?!

We’ll take a week off and then start up with “schooling light” for the summer. Oldest will be starting Growing With Grammar 3 and Writing With Ease 2. We will also play some math games or work on flash cards for 10-15 minutes several times a week.

Child #2 will do some light math and phonics work – the nature of which changes depending on the day you ask.

Math: We are trying to cement into her brain written two-digit numerical symbols (such as 34 or 79). She struggles and the concept isn’t coming quickly. Math games and lots of dot-to-dots may be in order.

Language Arts: We may just work on handwriting using sidewalk chalk again this summer. She loves it and I can sneak in reminders of what the phonogram sounds are at the same time. We’ll see.

The Best Laid Plans . . .

I have my book of lesson plans that I refer to daily to see what I thought we would do each day. We have only had three full days of school and already I am glad I am so flexible.

For example, this summer, Child #1 went after the Singapore math books I purchased for her to keep her math skills fresh. It went so well that the built-in review of A Beka’s math program is almost boring for her. I pondered simply skipping the first 29-some lessons completely, but think a little review is good. Besides, I haven’t been doing the mental math with her that A Beka’s program encourages. My lesson plans had us finishing Lesson 5 at the end of this week. We finished Lesson 8 today.

In another example, I planned to ease into Spell to Write and Read. I figured it would take about two weeks to review the 26 (alphabet) single-letter phonograms while doing some other fun games and such. On Day 2, Child #2 remarked that she knew all these so could we go a bit faster? So, the next day, I tested her on her knowledge. When I held up the phonogram card, she was to say the sound(s) as quickly as she could. If she hesitated or got them wrong the first time through (even if she corrected herself), I counted them wrong. She got 25 of the 26 single-letter phonograms perfect. She also knew 24 of the remaining 44 phonograms immediately and perfectly. So, a week early, I gave her a new Learning Log and we started on the Consonant/Vowel reference page.

I have also learned that I might have been a bit optimistic in how many pages we can cover each day in Story of the World I and Apologia’s Astronomy. Child #2 is doing great with Learn to Read in 100 Easy Lessons and is completing, on average, three pages per day of Singapore Earlybird Math (1B).

Happy Labor Day!

I have no plans for anything “special” on Labor Day. My spouse is working and we are getting ready for school to start tomorrow!

Just a note about what we did last week before the official start of school:

History (Story of the World I)- We did some pre-reading from library books – mostly about Egpyt.

Math (A Beka 2/Singapore EarlyBird 1B)- Both older children completed a few pages in their workbooks. We breezed through three lessons already in A Beka Arithmetic 2. The math supplement books Child #1 worked on during the summer kept her pretty much up to speed. I plan to speed through the ‘review’ that is built in to the beginning of the math book. (How do year-rounders deal with this, I wonder?)

Spelling (Spell to Write and Read) – I gave Child #1 a spelling diagnostic test. She scored at the same grade level as her final spelling diagnostic at the end of May. Nothing gained, nothing lost. Still pencil-phobic!

Science (Apologia Astronomy) – I read the first page and a half of Chapter 1 aloud to all the kids to get a jump on that first week’s planned work.