Weeks 1 and 2 had only three things on the daily to-do list: handwriting practice, the Five in a Row book, and a literature selection. Like I said on Friday, Sunny has been asking to do math and science experiments so AC and I talked all weekend about how to add them into the schedule right away.
The main question about math was whether or not to buy a full curriculum - he thinks we can do it ourselves with games, other activities, printouts from the internet, and/or making drill worksheets ourselves, at least through 3rd or 4th grade. I'm concerned that we'll miss something somewhere - math is not a subject I'm confident about. There's got to be more to this than just basic addition and subtraction. I found the Mississippi math standards online and ta da! They have a PDF online of the benchmarks for kindergarten through 2nd grade. Sweet! True, Mississippi doesn't have a very good education system (one of the worst in the country) but at least they gave me an actual checklist. Lists are my friend. There are lots of fun things for the kids like shapes, telling time, money, and various forms of measurement. I can do that.
AC has been doing science experiments from Sunny's science kit a couple of times a week, more as a reward than part of a curriculum. They've been having fun messing around with balloons and bubbles and mixing vinegar with baking soda. We're also growing a garden - a big science project that we check on and examine every day. We'll stick with those for science for now.
And since it's summer and warm enough to go to the pool regularly now ... we're starting swim lessons for PE. So I guess we've added 3 subjects for a total of 6.
2 comments:
One suggestion for science with Sunny. Start teaching her the scientific method for experiments. Have her make predictions, "What do you think will happen if ______?" Let her come up with her own way of changing things. Teach her to collect data (this also gets math involved because you are often measuring, counting, etc.) And then have her look at the results of what actually happened. Keep it simple and fun. You may already be doing this, but it's just a thought.
-T
I really like the mathstart books by Stuart J Murphy. They are picture books that introduce math concepts and then provide additional suggestions for learning activities. Our local library had many of these books. Here is his website.
http://www.mathstart.net/
Also Singapore Math makes pretty good inexpensive workbooks I have used before. Here is their website, but I bought mine off Amazon.
http://www.singaporemath.com/
You probably want to keep math really hands-on for now with most of the writing focusing on making numbers and shapes.
Have fun!
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