Progress Report

We are coming to the end of our first scheduled "term" of the 2009-2010 school year. It is a good time for me to sit down and review how things have gone.

Reading: I had originally scheduled the Pathway readers for Grades 2 and 3. Next week he will be finished with the last 3rd grade reader. We already have the 4th grade reader, Building Our Lives, and we will probably start on that one. However, I am concerned because the type is smaller and I don't want to overstrain his eyes. He's probably already read the book on his own, so I may be concerned about nothing. My husband and I talked about getting a magnification page to put over the book, but I think that would be aggravating to my K5-son. Maybe I need to look at other publisher's grade-level readers. A friend lent me some Bob Jones and Abeka readers and he has been reading those on his own. However, I do still want him to be challenged with harder material.

As far as his reading goes, he's doing great sounding out words and getting them from context. One area he's particularly shining in is his inflection and really making the text "come alive" as he's reading.

Literature: Between both me and my husband reading aloud, we've pretty much already read through all of the Simply Charlotte Mason's Year 1 reading list - plus some. I think we're set for the next few weeks, but after that I have to come up with something else. It seems that we are blowing through what I had planned at the first of the school year. This is good though, as it is showing me how fast we are moving through stuff and how I should plan for next year. Somehow, I don't think the world will run out of books. :-)

Penmanship: I've noticed a vast improvement in his handwriting as well as his diligence and patience in going slowly so as to write the letters just right. While we are further in the Handwriting without Tears curriculum than I thought we'd be, we aren't finished with capital letters yet.

Memorization: We've not really done anything with Scripture memory since beginning the "year" in July. He's doing well with the one poem we've worked on from Robert Louis Stevenson. I'm making it my goal for this to be more of a priority come January.

Science: This part of his education is going really well. He loves observing things outside and his garden has been one of his favorite things to work in. Now we're getting ready to package some seeds we harvested and share them with friends. He doesn't think this part is "school" (and I'm glad), so if you asked him his favorite part of "school" he probably wouldn't say "nature study" or "science". However, based on his enthusiasm, I think this is probably his favorite part.

Fine Art: We were really doing well with our study of Van Gogh's work, but that has tapered off in the last weeks. Still I'm pleased with where we are and how he has grown in observation and remembering the names of the works and some of the elements.

History: We've taken a break from the 50 Famous Stories for a while. He was very excited about it at first, but here lately I have not been too involved with it and I think that has affected his interest. We will start back up next term.

Music: The last few weeks have been hit or miss, but prior to that this study was going really well. He's retaining the theory information and incorporating words like "rythym" and "beat" and other musical terms into everyday talk.

Bible: Last night we were reviewing some of the men in 1 and 2 Samuel and he shocked both my husband and I in how much detail he remembered. I could barely remember some of the names and he remembered what the person had done and how they had interacted with King David. Of course, for our Bible time/Family Worship we want much more than head knowledge, but we are trusting God with the heart and taking every opportunity to point back to heart issues in the characters we read about and in ourselves and our children.

Math: This is the biggie. We've been faithfully plugging away with Miquon Math until a few weeks ago I noticed a definite drudgery in his step when it came time to work on our Math Lab sheets. Albeit, they are getting more difficult...definitely more abstract. I put them aside for a day or two and just played some games to make sure he was getting the concepts of addition and subtraction instead of just learning how to compute and get the right answer. I don't think he has a firm grasp of the concepts. Without certain tools and things written in a certain way, he's very unsure of himself. So, we are going to change things up a bit. The materials we were using are for First Grade anyway, so I'm O.K. to just wait a year before continuing if that's what we need to do. I didn't want to take the time to figure out activities to do on my own, so I looked at Ray's Arithmetic. Their "scope and sequence" for First Grade looked very doable. Right now, I'm planning on using their suggestions as a track to run on. I'm getting rid of the worksheets and going to hands-on games with manipulatives etc. I've made a list that I plan to use in my weekly planning so that I don't have to scramble for something every day. I need to make some of the games...and I don't know if that will get done right now. It helps to have a list of "objectives" as I can incorporate what we already have in teaching that concept. We'll see how it goes.

I've also started to chill out about the whole "180 days" thing. That was really stressing me out, especially as I do not feel like doing much nowadays and our schedule is about to be turned upside-down. After much reading from the Home Life Academy site and talking with my husband, I think/hope I've come to a settled place on how I feel about the school "year". I definitely want our home to be a learning environment all the time, but I was feeling pressed to really "schedule" something on "school" days and then if we didn't get x-y-z done felt like I couldn't count it - even if we had spent 8 hours learning something that wasn't on the schedule. This year is definitely a learning experience. I hope to keep on learning. It will be interesting to me to compare next year and this year and see how I'm handling things.