Weekly Wrap-Up

So! This week, in school, we've done some fun stuff. Monkey and I played several phonics games. I made tried out my first file folder game, and we're getting the hang of playing it. This game is a capital and small letter matching game. Happy Phonics has 8 steps. We're working on steps 2 and 3 (big letters & small letters match; letters have sounds). He's had the sounds of the letters down for a while now, but the matching of the letters is proving a little difficult, once they are separated. Particularly those pesky b's and d's. I made another folder game for this and after only playing once or twice he's doing better. This is good since he's starting to show interest in step 4: blending. One thing that I love about the Well-Trained Mind is this:

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Many of the phonics programs we examined insist that you combine writing with reading. In other words, teach the child the consonants and the sound of a, but don't go on to the next step until the child is able both to read and write sat, cat, fat, bat.

We think this tends to frustrate very young readers. Remember, you want the child to read quickly, easily, and early. Many children are ready to read long before they have the muscular coordination to write. Why delay reading until the muscles of the hand and eye catch up? (Well Trained Mind, 38, emphasis added)

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That's very much been the way of it at our house. Monkey loves to read, and he likes to play the letter games. If the interest is there, I say do it. The folder games are extras for more practice and variety; we also did some of the "official" games from the program. In addition to the intended use of the folder games, we have discovered that they double nicely as "computers" and he's been "typing" lots of "letters" to various family members. Oh - and we've very nearly finished up our "D Book." I'm running short on good d words, so if you've got a good one, leave me a comment please! Monkey keeps gluing them on pages that already have a word or two, so it's taking lots more words than I anticipated to fill the book.

For math, I'm struggling to come up with any particular plan. This doesn't seem to bother Monkey much at all. He's getting pretty good at counting to 10, and regularly continues on past 10: "11, 12, 14, 16, 17, 20, 30, 40..." What I want is a copy of the text my Mom uses in her Kindergarten classroom. She loves it, but she didn't think it was available for homeschoolers. I need to check on that. I don't know that I'd use it in a sit-down-and-do-page-3 sort of way, but more in a turn the principle into a game sort of way. Monkey's too little for worksheets! But I'd like to do some more math with him.

We didn't do any outdoorsy nature study things this week. Well, he did go to the orchard with his daddy to pick up more apples for me, but they were just deer apples, not the ones that you pick yourself, so it hardly counts. However, he DID do an impressive amount of apple peeling in the course of my canning!

Mom's Ed:
I spent some time this week working on my study of Sumer, which is interesting, but not as interesting as Çatalhöyük. That was pretty much all I did toward my own education though, as I spent a HUGE amount of time canning apples with my friends. Yummy.