Summer School Summary

With most public and private schools starting school (the local public school starts this week, most schools in the surrounding cities started a couple of weeks ago), we are just wrapping up our summer school. I’m hoping to get in another five days of work – or a week and a half of “real time” for us. (We have doctor’s appointments that will take up one day this week and we are taking a day for a field trip, so we will only get in three days of “school” this week.) Then, I’ll have anywhere from a few days to a week or so to complete “baby preparations.”

We will then be taking a school break for eight weeks or so – until the first part of November, hopefully. The plan is that we’ll start back up slowly, ramping up to “full school” by January. It will be difficult to cover a full year of school in a half a year’s time, but our summer schooling has given us a real head start.

For the eldest, we will be 41% (finishing Chapter 2 of 5) complete in Growing With Grammar 3, 28% complete (Week 10 of 36) in Writing With Ease 2, and 20% complete in A Beka 3 Arithmetic (Lesson 35 out of 170).

For Child #2, we will be on roughly Lesson 75 or 76 out of Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons (100EL). When we restart school, we’ll skip the rest of 100EL and go right into Spell to Write and Read (SWR) which we started during the previous school year. She’s zipping right along in A Beka 1 Arithmetic as she is currently on Lesson 45 of 170 – representing 26% completion of the book.

We have not started our science or history studies yet, but have a plan to complete those by the end of June or so, depending on when we get restarted this fall. By the end of the traditional school year in Spring 2010, we should only have history, science, and perhaps some math still to go to complete our delayed school year.

The children think it is funny when adults stop them to ask why they aren’t “in school” because they have been “doing school” all summer. It will be more interesting to see what they say when they are asked in a month or two why they aren’t “in school.” I am sure they will continue to be looked at askance as the oldest definitely looks “school age.”

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.

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.