August 18, 2011

Progress and Planning

We are nearing the end of our second week of homeschooling and I'm just so happy with how everything is going! It's not perfect by any means, but it's working out far better than I imagined a first two weeks would. I think that's thanks in part to having a main curriculum to follow! That keeps me from doing too much too fast!

One of the greatest achievements I've seen so far is that Little Britches can connect his lowercase letters to their matching uppercase letters VERY well! We've practiced with the ABC Game cards from the MFW curriculum--I "deal" out the letters we are working on and he has to make a stack of the pairs. He was pairing them up as I dealt them out today--not even waiting for me to get them all out! I'm so happy about that! And now, even little b and little d don't even phase him. If he gets in a hurry, he will match the little q with G...but as he looks at it he usually figures out that he has it wrong without me saying anything. He does it on paper too...I used one of the $1 bin workbooks from Target and photocopied the page where he has to draw a line from the capital letters to their lowercase counterparts. He didn't mess up on ANY of them! I think that's a great achievement in just 8 days of school!

I'm in the process of working on my lesson plans for the next two weeks. We start Unit #1 in the My Father's World curriculum so I'm pulling all my materials together for our unit which will include information about the Sun, space, the letter S, the #1 and the sound that S makes. Laying it all out on paper allows me to see what subjects aren't being covered so I can fill in where I need to. AND I won't have to flip back and forth in the Teacher's Manual for MFW--something that CAN be confusing if you don't know how it goes together.

We will be finishing up our row of Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel next week too, so I need to get together what I need for our new row. I am hoping Madeline shows up by Tuesday so we can row that one next. I want to save the other book I own (Katy and the Big Snow) for winter if possible. I know the library has 4 of the books that I can borrow too, but I'd like to do Madeline next since the book is on it's way.

You will be able to see our row of The Story of Ping shortly...just getting the photos uploaded!

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