WRITING: Very Useful Spellings

This week is a time for a new list of spellings and I googled 100 most common words in English, which brought about a very neat, VERY useful list, not to mention , quite easy in spelling terms.

These are our first 20 out of this one, and I am very happy with them, as they are useful generally,  and we can use them in his story writing too, to make O sees his spelling exercises as a helping hand, a useful thing, not some pain in the ass.

go
do
have
to
the
be
he
and
it
of
for
that
on
with
as
at
this
but
his
by

NUMBERS: All 20 of the Same.

As the title says we tried a new thing with this, tried  to do all 20 of the same instead of variety with a bit of latest addition to our program, just to give O  more practice in one session. It brought about no miracles, but did no harm either, as whatever he learned before is being used with these, too, and he is totally comfortable with everything else we'd learned about numbers except this tens and adding and deducting 5s without using his fingers.

Back to this one,  although he seems to slowly improving, he's still struggling with the whole jumping from one ten to another with single digits involved.  Oh well.  We just have to keep trying!

READING: Songbirds Phonics , Starting Stage 5

Oliver is very excited to be starting his stage 5, as I told him that by the time he finishes it , he will be 5 YEARS OLD, guaranteed! So yes, he couldn't wait to get stuck in. So, come his first first book, he finds it quite easy...until he realises there are  now 24 PAGES instead of 16!

He wasn't all too pleased about it, even when I told hims it was a natural side effect of getting older.  But, in effect , the amount of the reading material was more or less the same, just smaller letters and more pages, so when he finished it , he was more or less, along the lines, 'oh well, no big deal'. 

On my part , I expected it to be a little bit more complicated, but whatever, we'll just move onto the normal books after these.  Songbooks worked wonderfully for Oliver, as well as they did for Jazz, so I expect Jo will be starting on them, too, when he's 4. 

NUMBERS: More of the Same this Week, Except...

Numbers.  We're doing nothing new this week. Nothing at all! However, we have a new dedicated 'doodle pad'  for our hardworking little student. Doodling helps Oliver think and hopefully, it will stop the rest of the house stealing pages from his workbooks!

READING: Revision, Loving it This Time Round!

This week we are doing  end of stage reading revision. Oliver does no cards but reads 4 books a day, a mix he pics himself, more or less.  He never used to be mad on the reading revision week, as each next book was fun and novelty for him, but this week he seems to really enjoy it.  It might be because reading is so much easier for him these days!

WRITING: Story Time NOT much fun

Story time sounds like fun, but it isn't, really.  Oliver finds stories quite difficult and we stick to one small page at the time ( once a week is plenty ).

I can understand why it is, of course. He simply doesn't know how to spell most words.  As I mentioned, we will, at least partially, address this in his spelling exercises.

As to the rest of the words he doesn't know, I'd given it a long thought and decided to just tell him how to spell the words he doesn't know / can't sound out.   I'm not sure if this is the right way to go, but I really don't fancy re-teachig him how to write the words if he gets used to writing them incorrectly.   Watch this space.

As to the rest, although he doesn't like writing stories, he takes a great satisfaction in the fact of having done so.  He insists on showing his story to whoever is around including his brother and telling them all about it.  He doesn't do this with anything else, and everything else is much easier for him as a rule!

READING: Last ( and quite touching ) Book of Stage 4

Last week O was reading his very last book of Stage 4.  It was called 'Tadpoles' and there was this bit, where on a way to growing up, the bunch of baby tadpoles got raided by a big fish, at which point the book stated mater-of-factly,

 'The fish eats some of the tadpoles'


I was quite surprised to see Oliver get quite sad over this bit!  He even stopped to discuss and take it in.

The thing is, normally he doesn't appear to take much of what's in the  book in (including on this occasion up to the big fish bit)  with the exception of some funny bits and bits where someone is a superman or naughty, drops things,  etc,  and even then it would be, up to now, more or less superficial acknowledgement.

 But with this one, it was more of a thought provoking moment for our O, and it was very touching.

 Books make imagination work much better than other media, you add a bit of yourself even to the best of books, don't you,  hence the great potential of them that should not be under-estimated!

WRITING: 20 Spelling

The variety of O's writing includes writing STORIES ( hard ) , writing words BY HEARING ( was very hard but is getting easier, slowly), copying words with the same patterns as he learns to read them from PHONICS ( easy ) and SPELLING ( easy).

I'm thinking, that perhaps it would be an idea to stop doing phonics words for now and just do consistent spelling lists, because it seems like the tasks are targeting the same knowledge base, but with both, it could get a bit too much as well as a bit confusing.  So. Yep.  We are doing spelling only. Oliver loves them and finds them very easy.  I found that with the variety of writing he does in a week, one week of the same 20 words to spell is not enough, so we have the same list for 2 weeks. Nothing like nice easy and agreeable lessons which are also very useful and necessary!

Next on the list, I'm thinking , will be the easiest and most common words in English.  I'm hoping that it would really help him with his stories, for example!

( ...with brother's doodles of approval! Jo-Jo is dying to start 'reading /writing' he keeps mentioning it and butting in!) 

NUMBERS: More of the Same, Happily So.

Last week we were going over more of the same, in terms of numbers. 

O still gets confused over these two topics, adding and subtracting in 5s and going up or down to next 10 in chain.  He often gets stuck on things like 62-4, going back to 69 after 'two steps down' , instead of 59.  No rush, we'll get there.  

It always amuses me how he sometimes just 'gets' really tricky concept in numbers, yet struggles with the easier ones. Without looking back at my notes, these  two are his 'stickiest' concepts to date, though! 

In terms of fives, I think he pretty much understands it, but doesn't yet know how to count up, and , particularly down in fives, not fluently.  We working on it.  It seems easier to wait for the concept to settle after all, instead of waiting for him to count up or down.

WRITING: Starting on Spelling.

I'd briefly tested on how O will react to doing spellings, and he seems to quite like them.   Certainly, he prefers these to writing random words on hearing. The words I'd given him are the simpler ones from the words he's been learning from his reading cards (ball, pool) , or the ones he comes across a lot, again, in his reading ( go , like ).  I'd found them online but they pretty much repeat what we'd been reading.  Today was the second time we did the test, and the words which were the same, were a breeze for him, so, of course, he loved being so fantastically clever as compared with something more difficult he gets to do.

I have high hopes for spelling, in general.  Firstly, O seems to have quite a good memory.  Secondly, he just likes to record things 'how they should be'. Here's hoping, maybe I'll eat my words.

Anyhow, we will be going to the book shop to find some early spelling books, that we could build on.  Yes.  The book shop.  Our local Waterstones looks so inviting to both boys, that it's one of the most fun parts of our study journey for all of us, who doesn't love shopping,  after all!

20 words at the time , for a full lesson,  is about right, we found ( we do half - lessons, alternating , when we add on Russian or General Knowledge in process, with Geography in the pipeline )

NUMBERS: Little Plan

I don't plan small particulars of our study,  as such.  Generally, unlike somewhere in secondary school, the learning at this age is basic, and there are many basics that definitely need to be learned this way or another,  at slow but regular pace, in our case, which works just fine for us.

Generally, I make a start note or a first example on the next lesson's page, unless I know I will remember 100%, what we will be doing.  Or sometimes, I make few weeks' worth of plan in a note like this ....

...as long as we do do it, it will do the job just fine! 

 And this is another beautiful thing about HE, there's very little need for non-student paperwork, and no need at all for bureaucracy, except perhaps this little blog, which I'm keeping, for the most part, in case LEA wants to know what we up to.  Not that I resent LEA for trying to do it.  I don't belong to HE 'hate LEA' team.  They are only trying to do their job after all! It's hard to say if this kind of job  is necessary or not on average, and one can find endless arguments for and against, depending on their passionate position,  but it's not they, they LEA who decide on it, certainly not the actual people who do it, is it? 

WRITING: Making Writing and Reading Work Together

Should there be some kind of a system to start O off on his spellings?  The plan is just to go with the flow as he's quite young and , in my opinion , his cognition will only take him so far, seeing that logic is totally missing in a large chunk of English spelling.

One thing does seem to make sense is to write the words with particular letter combination , included in the week's reading book.  It used to be too much for O, but now a lot of it would work, I think .  We tried it a couple  of times, and it seemed to make sense to him.

I guess we'll just start on the spelling game by mere repetition of common words and patterns when reading and writing , and hopefully most of them will slowly sink in over time.

Oliver likes doing these lists of 10/ 20 words , much more than doing a story, though much less than doing a spinning plate! ( Short list if when we do 2 haf-subjects instead of 1 full one.)  He also really enjoys counting down the numbers , and ticking things off.  I'd say it's a bit of OCD on his part, but then again,  I'm  a Pinterest junkie and with all its 10 best blah blah racking up a storm with P's audience all over the place, it's must be a very common kind.   Maybe liking to have a simple clear structure is fundamentally built into even the sloppiest of us, after all?

READING: New Book Today, Phonics, Level 4/6.

O's new book this week.  One before last in his Level 4 Birdsong Phonics' Set. These books are brilliant and are definitely working for us.  Oliver is trying to read everywhere at the moment.

I have O's reading recorded every week or two and post it on Instagram.  It's @almost_science

NUMBERS: The Challenge of the Week ( or Two).

We'd not yet done our numbers for today, so it should be interesting to see if weekend had any effect on this, but prior to the BH weekend we had a bit of story with bigger numbers with quite a nice ending to it.

 O really struggled with notions like 40-1, or 39 + 2.  We tried few different strategies over the course of 2 weeks with 2 weeks of holidays in-between, and finally it's definitely sinking in, it seems. Not sure if there was one strategy , that worked, but the feeling that O is trarting to firmly undestand the above concept is a really great one!

READING: The Easiest Subject

As per title, reading is by far the easiest subject for Oliver at the moment.  On Mondays O choses new book from his phonics set, which is always a highlight for him. On the first day of the week he doesn't have to do his cards with tricky words, which he finds boring, so that's another bonus for him.

I think I'm just starting to notice that he is starting to understand what he reads, too, which is fantastic.

The first day of the week used to be quite a challenge, but now it's the easiest. It's a great feeling.

In terms of cards, we have accumulated quote a few of those.  Sometimes O celebrates by tearing the ones 'done with' but half the time we keep them for an occasional revision, as they have proved to be a very very good, old-fashioned aid to reading the chaotic English. I found that 10 2-sided cards per session is the number that works the best for us.

WRITING: getting used to 'ing' and 'ed'

Oliver found writing his story understandably demanding last week ( 2 small pages in 2 sittings) ,  but it was nice to see the progress he'd made, from just copying the words , which had at the time seemed an immense achievement, to actually sounding all of them out, some independently and some with only a bit of help.  We will definitely try writing stories more often now. 

The new thing in terms of writing we did last week, was to write our regular list of 20 words with the same endings 'ing' and 'ed'.  The aim is for O not having to think of these at all at some point, as his writing progresses.  It's just a beginning, but I think it's nice to get some ready automatic patterns for him, to ease off his writing load a bit, like it's starting now to be happening with reading. 

O finished his story