WRITING: Batman Story, Part 1

Another superhero story for us, the first serious effort after the Christmas Superman story, where O just copied what I wrote.

This time, Oliver was writing from hearing semi-independently.  I keep reminding him to keep to line discipline and remember this Capitals, which he seems to be improving at, and also I'm starting to ask him to write his letters smaller in size, which can but doesn't necessarily want to do. All in all though, I'm very happy in how his writing is progressing, but will need to look into the whole spelling game and figure out some system soon.

 I'm trying to stick to the correct spelling of words we encounter in his reading  or in those, which crop up all the time, even if they not phonetic and very bizarrely inconsistent with the way they sound e.g. 'Right', the word fitting all of the above criteria more or less.

This half way compromise I decided to settle on because: A.  it's quite tricky to 're-learn' spelling afterwards, but B. it will be very difficult for O to make sense of things if he can't just write what he hears unless I explain to him why not ( he's particular like that ) and I can't possibly / wouldn't want to explain the logistics behind every word.

So that's us.  We'll see if it works.  I'm a bit worried that it might confuse him even further but then with the randomness of phonics and spelling relationship in English this way or another, it might just work!   Fingers crossed :)

I'm finding that working alongside whatever it is we covering in his reading sessions, really helps.

Start of Term ( Belated Combined Entry from Last Week, Incl. another Fun Science Vid)

At the moment we are following school holidays because it seems easier , and if there are some holidays we are having outside normal holiday times, we make up in days around it.  The plan is, however, to try 6 weeks on 1 week off, as two weeks off are proving to be a bit boring and harder to fill out for both myself and the boys.

Another thing I'm always couscous about with having two weeks off is that O will forget everything we did before his weeks off, because that's how it seemed to have gone with Jazz half the time, but it's less so.  On one hand he's forgotten a bit his 60-1 and 80-4, the concept he only just started grasping with his number before we 'went off', I will make sure not to start anything what's proving to be a bit 'fundamental' or at least not to bother persevering with anything harder to understand for him, right  before the holidays.

He did perfectly well with Maths otherwise.  Some things clicked it.  Before the holidays we had done  25-5 , 20-5 etc where  I found it worked better if I didn't explain to him why it was easy but let him get on counting on his fingers or in his head to quickly figure out that there's a pattern that makes life easier. After the holidays he just picked up where we'd left off with this one.

On the plus side, and a complete bonus, O seems to have much less confusion with his 'Lake with silent 'e' kind of words.  It seems to have settled itself in within his head over the holidays some way or another!

So, back to first week.  On the first day I did my absolutely best to make everything super fun and praised O a lot for everything.  So no cards with our reading and his favourite activity of making words with 'word wheel'

This seemed to have worked and 'back to school' in our home this time round was really really smooth and lovely, actually!