Please NOTE: this entry is put together just for me to quickly organise things in my head and keep a record of our home-schooling for sentimental reasons. It is also a draft to be edited on needs' bases for LEA, should they knock on our Homeschooling door, out of a blue. So, this is NOT an edited copy, and all kinds of typos, missing articles and grammatical / stylistic flaws is a given. If you are reading this because Google catapulted you here for his own googley reasons, welcome to my blog, I'm hoping that you will find it useful but not expecting a perfect flow of written word.
It seems like my entries have become really repetitive over the first 5 weeks of our HE year, so I'm going to reduce them, or , rather I have reduced them and from now will probably do about one a month or even rarer, unless an update is relevant. The reasons for this is not just time, which seems to be wasted but also it would appear harder to keep track of changes and alterations to Curriculum, as we tend to do the same set of 'modules'. It works for us.
So , here goes. We had a week off at half term, followed by a visit from our Cousins , where we ended up missing anther two days, which we are going to catch up on.
SPELLING
Ditching the spelling book and just replacing it with regular 10 news spellings words + a worksheet of spelling patterns ( 'igh' - bright , 'all' ball etc) , where Oliver doesn't have to think hard but I just aim to gently remind him of spelling patters such as br-igh-t / sl-ight-t , lake / home etc . This seems to work really well.
I'm going to continue to work on lists of 10 with him and gently going over different word patterns , this second part being quite relaxed and fun, hopefully, so he just keeps seeing the patterns and getting used to them. This is the only thing that worked for me, as there are too many exceptions to the rule in English, so learning those is a bit of a waste of time, not to mention , quite yawn some.
GRAMMAR and WRITING
We are still using the same grammar book, and as we really started to get bored with the same noun definition it moved on to proper nouns and were you use capitals, the less obvious , to me at least, like days of the week, members of family e.g. Uncles , Aunties , hence 'Cousins' above. So it is starting to make sense again, these small steps. Now Oliver is writing wit much more ease , as in writing the actual words, we are trying to incorporate these grammar elements in his writing.
I'm asking him to write a sentence a day ( which is VERY hard for him) but he does fall on Familiar that we cover in Grammar e.g. 'where we use capital letter because it's a proper noun and here we have full stop, of course.
He loves copyright and would gladly write anything that mostly involves writing letters.
PRITABLE EXCERCISES
For the most part these are brilliant still and make it more fun for O to do exercises that work on grammar, very often, e.g. describe your favourite room, 'read this and tell me where the exclamation mark goes' or what word fits the best in so and so, please choose. So no change here, printable are great.
COMPREHENSION & READING
Recently we found a way to make these more fun. Quite by accident , O really fall into liking 'Jack and the beanstalk' story. It was quite long , but we split it in few parts and really liking it , O did a surprisingly good job of answering all the Qs correctly. Now, via computer games that he plays , O got really interested in Harry Potter, and wants to know what's all the hype. He now reads very well and loves chapters, which he understands reading a simple classic 'Solomon Owl' more or less. This makes me want to try reading Harry Potter with him , but it's not as straightforward and has much discourse in it, so I'm thinking that it probably won't fly. We'd given it a comprehension test, in our comprehension session today and I could tell that O was dying to get stuck into it but it was just a bit too difficult. That said, the beginning of any book is boring so not sure what to do. Might try it as a reading session, as we just finished our reading book, and if it doesn't work , leave it as new bedtime book, in place of 'Charley and the chocolate factory' which we just , finally finished and which he totally and utterly loved.
Either way though, Oliver's reading has come in leaps and bounds he needs less and less cards to learn. He keeps wanting to read every sign and name he sees, though not actually asking for books. His spontaneous understanding is also slowly increasing.
MATHs.
Maths Oliver's best and the most favourite subject at the moment. Somehow we' reached a point where many things about numbers that were pretty much at a. plato for him over the last 6 months , just clicked in. He is very comfortable with increasing and decreasing in 5s or 10s randomly, almost comfortable with what combinations of numbers make 10 , e.g. 10-8 =2 so of course 10-2 = 8 etc, 2+10 = 12 it's easy, 60-20 = 40 etc.
Because of this we started doing things like 81-25 ( one under another ) , so 'borrow 10 as 1 is less thank 5 ...Oliver found it a bit of a shock to start on it, but against my expectations he's taken to it like fish to water and now is wanting to do as opposed to anything else, as he finds it fun.
To me this was a much of a surprise as him loving to learn verses / rhymes or read chapters. O definitely loves being stimulated. The most important thing is NOT TO RUSH OR PUSH HIM when he first tries to understand and get used to a brand new concept as it just puts him off and does nothing whatsoever for learning.
O is naturally staring to calculate more in his head, I'm going to set exercises for him to encourage it. And another thing, now he's more or less used to the fact that 12 is made out of 10 and 2, for example. So I'm going to teach him how to 40-12 for example, - 10 , then -2
Maths Printable ( bite size exercises ) we finished with them, and they were pretty useful, so getting the next book, as soon as we finished working on TELLING TIME ( today we designed a clock with Oliver, which he loved of course but it needs improvement) , and done a bit of a revision.
SOCIAL
Monday
- social meet up with a really large group of kids most of whom he knows a likes , it runs between 3-5 hours depending on the weather
Tuesday
-gymnastic ( sometimes we meet up with one of his 3 best friends before it, to have a catch up)
Wednesday
mostly booked up for one off HE activities, day at 360 Play was the last week's event ( MEGA FANTASTIC , GREAT FUN FOR ALL) and non regular playdate for Jo the week before. Today we are at home , catching up, most of our regular HE group are trying out new play place , but we decided not to go.
Thursday
Oliver and Jo have playdates with their non HE friends. I will look into brownies and similar to compliment it when Jo turns 4
Friday, varies, we try to do something sporty like bike riding, this Friday we visiting nan and will maybe to to the pool.
Last week it was ICE SKATING, ' a pop along' HE activity. It's new and I didn't expect boys to like it but Oliver loves it, so I have to try and arrange for our dad to keep an eye on Jo , while Oliver catches up on ice skating skill to the level of independent , which is where couple of his friends that are coming along to this activity are.
Jo-Jo really loves his pre-school. He never makes much sense when I ask him to tell me what's good about it, but he always is very keen on going.
