Successful First Week

We made it through the first week with no major issues, no break downs, and lots of fun. The software I bought for covering Doug's high school course seems to be working out just fine. I was a bit worried about that one. I am happy to as it takes a load of my shoulders and allows me more time to spend with Maverick my four yr old. We do a 4 day book work schedule with the 5th day being left open for hands on learning, field trips, and extra time to work on projects. In the four days of book work Alyssa completed 8 grammar lessons, 4 voc. lessons, 4 reading comp worksheets, 4 spelling lessons, 36 review worksheets, 4 handwriting lessons, 9 math lessons, read 3 chapters of elemental science zoology, read 5 science related living books, completed 6 notebooking pages in science, completed 1 lesson and 2 labs in science Odyssey, read 3 living books on Colonial times, read 2 ch in history text, completed the first section of Colonial times lapbook, watched 5 science videos, watched 4 history videos, 3 art lessons, 1 cooking lesson, and she has worked half way through her state unit on Alabama.Maverick has continued to spend about an hr on educational websites like abcmouse, starfall, and pbskids. He has started to trace letters and numbers. He doesn't like this so I bought these dry erase boards that have the letters and numbers to trace hoping this makes it funnier for him. We started the basic of adding blocks like 2+3=4. He has read 2 phonics books and learned the words, DOG, HOG, FROG, CAT,RAT,SAT. Other than that he sits in when he chooses to on science and history . 

I did notice a few areas that we need to address. We will be going back to daily multiplication practice. I will be adding in more writing projects. Plus we will be doing more handcrafting projects in the afternoon time to give them more of a natural Waldorf  learning experience. We do not completely follow a Waldorf style education but we do try to incorporate many Waldorf aspects. We do keep subject notebooks and add art to those notebooks. We Do use a lot of hands on learning. We also want to add in handcrafting. If you are not familiar it simple are things made by hand. Like crochet , sewing, wood working, ect..I think we will switch up the schedule to a block schedule which will allow us to give more focus to the subjects on any given day. Monday and Tuesday will be science and cooking while Wednesday and Thursday will be History and crochet/sewing.So we will have 3 Blocks a day. Block one- 1 and a half hrs long, will be language arts and daily review- this will cover grammar, reading comp, spelling, voc, and daily review practice. Block two-1 hr long, will be math only. Block three -3 hrs long, will be science and cooking or History/geography/ crochet/sewing.  By block scheduling it will keep us from having to change subjects so many times and allow us to dig deeper in the ones being covered. 

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