first quarter report

Since we've finished 9 weeks ...

I'm going to shift to a 6 weeks on, 1 week off schedule to see if that works better. I had originally planned to just plow through with no breaks blocked out, see how long we could go and take a break when we needed to. I also want to get a routine established and ha ha ha ... like THAT is going to happen around here any time soon. Anyway, I think it might be better to have the breaks blocked in ahead of time. We finished 9 and ended up taking 2 weeks off. Kind of. The first week, we didn't do anything at all because I needed to step back and take a breather to think about things. This week, we went to Texas for spring break and I'm counting 4 school days because we had 4 outings that most definitely count as field trips. The zoo, the science museum, and two history museums.

I've been maintaining my daily log and a separate reading list in Word docs, and I like how this record keeping is going. I make it up as a "sticker chart" assignment sheet - when Sunny completes the assignment in the box, she gets to put a sticker over it. At the end of the day or the week, I go back into that page and switch things around to indicate what we actually did and voila! My daily log! It's my planning and reporting all efficient.

As for the subjects that I have in our Grand Plan for the year -

Math: The Horizons program is going all right but it needs to be supplemented. It's not spending enough time, in my opinion, to drill on the basic addition tables. Memorize the ones, the twos, etc. The book just gives random addition problems to practice and they're not clicking with Sunny. She understands the general concept of addition and she can do the problems with the help of a number line, but she needs some kind of manipulative for most problems. The memorization is not happening.

Language: Oh boy. Sunny HATES the copy work in the Language Lessons and there's a LOT of copy work in this book. This is not going well. I've supplemented, I suppose, with the Words are CATegorical series I found at the library - by Brian Cleary, very funny, love them. We read them and talk about the "kinds of words" there are, and I also found the old Schoolhouse Rock grammar songs on YouTube. That's been our language section for the past few weeks when I didn't feel like fighting Sunny on the copy work. We also haven't done spelling lists for a few weeks now. Need to get back into that.

Literature: I'm not sure what I was picturing for my author study and at first I didn't think it was going that well. But we've learned about 2 authors in less than 3 months so we're on track with how many I wanted to cover. I need to do better activity planning ahead of time (we did great with Seuss, not so much with Milne), and make sure to find short biographies about the authors because the attention span isn't there yet for longer ones. We've done A.A. Milne and Dr. Seuss. The Laura Ingalls Wilder book was too long and besides, the Little House series is basically autobiographical. For Sunny, a full biography seemed redundant (even though it wasn't). We were very excited to find out that the nickname of Dr. Seuss's sister is the same as one of our sisters. If we continue to follow the birthday months of the authors, Beverly Cleary and J.M. Barrie are next ... we'll see what I can find at the library about them.

Spanish: Heh. Never got off the ground. Dropped from the list until I get it figured out myself.

Science: We made a list of 20 animals the girls wanted to read about and started on that with books from the library and videos online. I'd like to do one animal a week and we've been taking 2-3 weeks because if we don't get to a subject, this is what gets dropped first from the daily task list. We went to the aquarium in New Orleans in December, and just went to the zoo in Fort Worth for spring break. We're starting our garden next week. Sunny likes to do experiments from a book, but that's very sporadic. She does like to go around outside with her little magnifying glass and look at things.

Social Studies: We've done nothing with history, and geography has been sporadic. I've tried to introduce extra activities that I think would be interesting but they're not catching on so far.

The Arts: Dance class for Sunny and Posy, piano lessons for Sunny, and crafts. I have an artist and composer curriculum bookmarked but we're not ready for actual art appreciation lessons. Just bring out the paints and other craft supplies and we're good. Dance class is running a little long for my girls - they're getting tired. They've been doing it since last August. But the recital is coming up and they're excited for that. They're dancing to Mary Poppins music, and it's so cute to watch Posy practice her dance routine every time Spoonful of Sugar comes up on our computer's playlist.