Second housecleaning of the week, kids doing their rotations.
Kieron:
- He was looking ahead in the koine Greek book and very interested in the characters. I think that counted for his narration today as he commented his way through them.
- We read Seabird, chapter 2.
- We read Story of the Romans, about the twins and the wolf, and we discussed it a bit, with Sean interjecting comments since he read it when he was that age.
- I showed him the map of Abraham’s time and a diagram showing the life spans of the early Biblical characters — something he had shown an interest in during our last reading. He pored over it for some time.
- Catechism — read and discussed.
Sean:
- A page of math.
- Legends of Chivalry.
- He has finished Athanasius.
- Catechism.
- Whatever Happened to Penny Candy, first chapter.
- Quia Latin.
- tidied his room in addition to his normal jobs.
No academics for the little ones except that Aidan had speech therapy in the afternoon at the school. This is the first time in two months since the therapist has been out with knee surgery. We live in a rural area and she is the only SLP and then she visits once a week only. He played a categorization game and a receptive/expressive language game. During the first game another student was there, slightly older, and so the SLP used this opportunity to work on both their pragmatics. So I stayed in the background and looked at this cool catalog she had. Just the pictures gave me ideas for things to do with Aidan.
I got out the little Winnie the Pooh books again to see if Paddy could handle them this time. He loves the layout and the pictures and the fact that it is a set of six all different and pleasing colors (4yo’s are so cute about collections!) but still has trouble sitting through the storyline. So we sort of skip through and I answer questions about the pictures, which is a start I guess. He asked me if “there was a game about these guys” (meaning a computer game I think).
This was my planning day and I did plan a lot. It is so fun — something I missed very much while I was unschooling more radically. I put my Early Years — Special Needs plans on my other blog:
For Paddy, there aren’t really any plans besides:
I am uploading my weekly sketch of my plans for the kids but please be aware that (1) these are bare bones, little detail and (2) we don’t do all that is in the plans. I taught CCD for a couple of years way back when my oldest was in kindergarten and I learned that for me at least it worked better to have too much and not get to all of it, than to have not enough. The danger for me in the homeschool is getting into the checklist mentality of “just do it”, rushing through at the expense of enthusiasm and pondering time, but the deschooling time last year helped me to get a grip on the truth that when I get to the end of a day, what makes me feel successful is the richness and abundance, not a completely ticked-off checklist. If I feel I’m losing hold of that truth, I’ll go back to ground zero and completely deschool again, because there are lots of lessons to be learned that way.
(these are pdfs)
- Kieron and Sean Outline
- Aidan and Paddy Outline (based on Mater Amabilis Prep — I just use the daily list as a framework to jot down ideas for projects and activities for them, and we get to the ones we get to)
