Day 45

A beautiful COLD day, with ice on the puddles around our house.

We are well into our review week, but this is the first day we really reviewed. I remember my first year homeschooling (with a 3rd grader!) when the correspondence program I was using told me to review the material for tests the next week.

I didn't have a clue what that meant so I ended up just dividing the pages of the workbooks already covered into five sections and then covering a section each day.

Since then I haven't really gotten much better at planning review...sigh. I have figured out that it makes life easier to just focus on one subject per day. Today, since we've been skimping Logic recently, we went through several of the past chapters of the logic book and discussed.

In addition:

• 5 more pages of Legend of Sleepy Hollow
• started reading The Lady of Shalott (led to a discussion about rhyme schemes and emphatic phrases in poetry -- I don't know the real word for the emphatic phrases, but we are noticing them quite a bit "Don John of Austria is riding to the war..." ).
• a bit more of Christ the King -- I had Kieron read the rest of the section independently because the grown kids and DH and I were discussing the election ; -).
• Then, I'm counting the election discussion because Kieron is listening in on it and learning a lot about different povs, etc.
  

(Kieron told me that yesterday when Paddy went outside he was reciting bits of Lepanto. This thrilled Clare who is a huge Chesterton fan.)

Then:

• Next section of History -- from here -- World History 1, unit 11 Renaissance Reformation (PDF)
• A section of science reviewing the states of matter (he knows all this pretty well by now). -- from here -- Integrated Science Unit 2 (PDF)
• Math -- dividing by decimals, and mental division of larger numbers. Here is where my goal-setting this summer with him has paid off. I decided that conceptual problem solving was a priority, because he is such a natural at it and was hating "mechanical math" so much. I can't say he jumps for joy every day with math but once or twice he has said this is FUN! Today for example there was a way to quickly divide by halving. For example 224 divided by 4. If you can half it twice you're set. He actually did some extras with 8's and 16's.
  
• Latin - - a translation exercise.
• Grammar -- more filling in verbs in Peter Rabbit. This seems to be quite interesting.
  

I did something different with Paddy -- I asked him to choose 2 of the books from his "school box" and then those were his academics. Sort of a workbooky Montessori, I suppose.

He chose

• MCP Math A
• Handwriting without Tears.

So we did an addition review page and then a page on "S" -- writing them and then reading some words converted to plural by "S".

I think in future I will try this "pick your own workbooks" and then add in some choices for other things I want him to get to occasionally -- fun things I just never get around to initiating like piano play or drawing, etc.

Aidan

• worked with his word box and made a bunch of words.
• He also rode in the wheelchair to the post office with us.

About the PASS download volumes I linked to above. ... this is dry stuff in several ways, folks. It is basically online textbooks geared for high school students with special needs. Not really enough in itself, but I was floundering a bit without some sort of minimum or base from which to springboard. So I am testing these out on Kieron as a sort of review device, for now. They are dull and as CM said "stultifying" on their own, but they seem to be working OK in the context of all the other things we are reading. And they are standards-based, so I can find all kinds of online things to support them. If I had known about them last year I might have had Sean go through some of them last year to get him used to the high school mode of learning ;-) -- but maybe it's just as well we spent that year reading good books, since that is what his new mode of education lacks most right now.