Second Quarter Notes
Hmmm… I never blogged about our second quarter did I? Meant to. ‘Course I “meant” to do a lot of things in December. Well, I DID a lot of things but there were a lot more I didn’t. *sigh*
Where was I? Oh yeah. Second quarter.
I did more paper testing this time than last. He did well… or my tests weren’t hard enough. LOL! No, he did well. If I were keeping letter grades, he’d be all A’s and B’s.
Math is… well, still a sore subject but he does enjoy applying it so I am still hopeful.
Latin… doing well here. I think we’re going to be looking more closely at latin derivatives during the remainder of this year. We’ll definitely finish Minimus 1. If money allows, we’ll do Sugundus also.
Grammar… pretty automatic. If he reads the directions well, he does… well. ;))
History… tried to get him and his friend A to do a Greek tragedy during December. They’ve lost all interest and I don’t think I’ll push it. So we’ll go back to reading our spine as usual.
Spellling… kinda let this one go a bit but will be getting back to it. I read something from “Connect the Thoughts” about having the child pick unfamiliar words from their required reading books. So we’re doing that with our evening read aloud… LoTR. Then using “The ABCs and all their tricks” to look up spelling rules that apply. Just studying the rules seemed to be missing the mark.
Art… Sam found some of my old sketch books and excitedly asked me to teach him to draw. So, since money is freakishly tight, I’m checking it out from the library and we’ve begun using the suggested lessons in that. So far he likes it. I’m doing them with him.
Writing… towards the end of the year we did mostly dictation and now that we’ve got that dialed in, it is going very well. I am constantly amazed with his progress. He’s not enamored with Writing Strands but I think we’ll stick with it for now.
Looking forward…
We’re going to be doing a little Spanish at the end of this month with a couple of homeschooling families. I’m teaching it. Yikes!
Sam still wants to become fluent in Japanese. Perhaps we’ll take a brake after the first Minimus book to focus on Japanese for a year or so.
As I mentioned above, Sam is jonesing for art lessons so we’ve started using “Drawing with Children” this year instead of next. I’ve even applied the “warm-up” idea to our math sessions by starting him off with a simple warmup page before moving on to our usual work.
For science we’ve started our human body lapbook. I hope that goes well and that he wants to do more. I’m printing out copies for Jessie also. She mostly colors on them but she and I have also been reading books about the body.
I’ve been writing on this post for several weeks now. I’m sure I’m forgetting something, but I’m going to go ahead and hit the publish button and get the kids into bed.