Ok, so Maggie's school. First, we do reading. I made a change to her reading several months ago after reading a great article. The woman who wrote the article was a substitute teacher. She was going to be a long-term sub for a woman going on maternity leave. She went to the class one day with the regular teacher to observe. She said the kids hated reading and she noticed that when they read aloud, if a kid got hung up on a word, the teacher would make them sound it out and basically jump through hoops to figure out the word. Which, as one might imagine, was demoralizing, embarrassing, and frustrating. So the next day, when she was in charge of the class, she made a new reading rule. If you don't know a word, just ask. No hoops, no sounding out, or looking for blends or endings or "little words." Just ask and she'll tell you. And, of course, the kids became prolific readers and cured cancer.
Point being, I implemented this rule. What a difference it made. Maggie enjoys reading and reads all the time. Signs, anything on the TV (she loves to announce the titles of shows), my texts (as I'm writing them, she can keep up), she read my home study report while I was typing it. And there's just no frustration anymore. She's not on guard wondering when she's going to hit a scary word and have to struggle through it. So, there's that. So nice. The only thing I make her do is repeat the word after I tell her. Genius.
We're reading a chapter book version of the Disney movie Bolt. It's a lot more difficult (word-wise) than I thought but she's doing great. And it has very short chapters so she's not reading for an hour.
We're working our way through a few books. We're reading The Chronicles of Narnia, which we both love. It's such a good story and I'm a big fan of having an excuse to do a British accent.
We've started a full writing program. I actually purchased it while I was pregnant with Ruby but never got around to starting it before she was born. We've been working on it for a while now and I really like it. It has several pieces to it. One part is memory work. So we work on memorizing things like birthdays and addresses. Eventually we'll do states, continents, oceans, things like that. We also are reading Charlotte's Web and discuss the grammar in the book. She does copy work based on the book to help her understand how grammar works within writing and to practice her handwriting. There are a few more pieces we haven't added yet. I'm trying to add everything in slowly so she doesn't feel overwhelmed. I add a chore here, a piece of school work there, and she doesn't notice how much more she's doing.
She drew this picture while we read the chapter in Charlotte's Web where the goose talks Wilbur into escaping and then he gets scared and doesn't know what to do. I love it. All the animals and the details. Fantastic.
We're still doing Spelling. We were playing games with the words but Maggie didn't like them and, as far as I could tell, they did absolutely nothing to improve her spelling. So I basically test her every day. We do five words a day and she copies only the wrong ones two times. Once she's gotten the word right three times in a row, it's gone. She's a pretty good speller. We've worked our way through the first Dolce list (~300 most commonly used words).
For math, we are working our way through a first grade textbook. She's making great connections in math. She's able to see it more logically. It makes me happy. We're practicing counting by 10s, 5s, and 2s and we do Bedtime math (which is a short story and corresponding word problems) every day. We still count her allowance to practice with money. Speaking of that she currently has several dollars but hasn't asked to spend it on anything. She decided she didn't want a Kindle (because she has an Xbox) and hasn't asked for anything else.
For history, we're reading The Story of the World. We're on volume 1, which deals with ancient times. I try to find kid-appropriate videos to correspond. It's fun to read about, say, the Nazca lines and then watch videos of them.
For science, we have a topic (right now, we're studying the three states of matter) and we read books, watch videos, and do experiments or activities around that topic. We watched a YouTube video and a Magic School Bus episode and Maggie did some experiments with her Nana and Uncle Steve.
I found some podcasts for kids that Maggie likes and we try to listen to one or two a day. She likes the science ones and the story ones. The story one is where a kid writes a story and then they have actors act out the story. She loves that. We also listen to fables on audiobook through our library.
We have Kiwi crate, which is amazing. We've done an arcade, race cars, treasure maps, and magic. There is so much to do in every box. There's another subscription box for cooking called Radish. It seems very cool and I think I might get it for Maggie for her birthday.
I want to also mount a world map on cork board. Then have three colored pins; one, for places we've read about, one for places we want to visit, and one for places we have visited. It'll have to wait for the new house because we don't have the wall space here.
We're also watching bit of educational TV every day. I've rented Mythbusters because I've heard good things about it and we're watching the documentary, Frozen Planet. I want to watch Life and Planet Earth, as well.
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