Anyway, here I am with our monthly recap of schooling. July has gone wonderfully, we started Animals and Their Worlds and are loving it. We've hit a few learning road blocks but nothing overwhelming and I definitely feel that July was a productive month of learning. If you wish to read further, may I suggest you grab a cup of coffee and settle down as I have a feeling this will be long.
Language Arts - We finished Lesson 48 of First Language Lessons. We've covered all types of nouns and have now moved onto pronouns. Ds has no problem with any of the grammar lessons and memorizes the rules very quickly. He has memorized the poem "Hearts Are Like Doors" by Anonymous and is working on learning the "Monday's Child" poem and the "30 Days Hath September" poem. Math and FLL have overlapped and between the both of them he has learnt the days of the week and the months of the year and has them down with no problems. We started copywork this month and at first this was a huge problem. His first assignment was to copy "My name is ____". This looked humongously long to him and he caused quite a fuss. It took him all day, one word at a time, but he got it done and is now still causing a bit of a fuss but is getting it done in one sitting.
Ds's latest narration:
The Hen and the Golden Eggs
A man and a wife had a chicken who laid golden eggs. They cut it open because they wanted all the golden eggs at once. But they saw nothing inside the hen. They were greedy and sad. (ds, 7yo)
We continue working a page a day in Spectrum Phonics, now finished page 38. His earlier problem of actually hearing the sounds has been resolved and he is no longer having any difficulties and really enjoys working in this workbook.
Word Families are progressing nicely. He also enjoys these worksheets and is reading the words very well.
Reading - We've just finished Lesson 16 of our reading curriculum. This curriculum starts off horizontally and then switches to vertical. We've now moved into the vertical phonics and ds is doing tremendously well. He picks up the new sounds very well and is really improving his reading. He has now learnt all the sounds for long /o/, all the sounds for /ow/ as in cow and all the sounds for /er/. Plus he's added a handful of new sight words. He still sounds out each individual sound when reading but he is starting to read whole words at once without sounding out loud. His main problem is he feels unsure of himself. He will look at me for every word he reads, waiting to hear if he got it right before reading the next one and I am trying to break him of that habit. He has finished the second level box of Bob books and wasn't ready for the second level of Now I'm Reading so he is now working on the second box of level one Now I'm Reading readers.
Handwriting - We continue working in HWT and his printing is coming along nicely. And while he complains at having to print anything else in his schoolwork he never complains about having to work in this book.
Math - We have just finished Lesson 43 in RightStart Level B. Progress has slowed down. We are now doing half a lesson a day and then playing an addition card game for the remainder of the lesson. He understands concepts very well but he just can't seem to remember adding. He gets it, he can do it on the abacus but he just couldn't add anything. 4+1 and he had no clue, ask him what comes after 4 and again he has no clue. So we've been playing this addition card game that was introduced this month and slowing down the lessons while he gets the hang of adding. I'm happy to say that the month has brought some improvement. He can answer many +1's now plus he has 5+3 and 5+5 down. We are working on all the addition facts up to 5+5. We will probably continue with the half-lessons through August.
Read-Alouds - This month we have read aloud: Socks by Beverly Cleary, and the Magic Tree House books Pirates Past Noon and Night of the Ninjas. I continue to read the Beatrix Potter book at bedtime when dad is not home. We have also started reading Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling each day just before lunch and our newest read-aloud which we are 3 chapters into is The Secret Seven by Enid Blyton. Dad has continued to read the Andrew Lost books and has finished up to #8. We will not be continuing with the series due to evolutionary content in the rest of the books but dad is now going to continue on with the reading of the Magic Tree House books at bedtime.
Animals and Their Worlds - We have finished Week 4. Ds has had a lot of fun with the reading, websites, crafts, activities, art and notebooking. I am very happy with it and hope to continue with WP for many years. One thing I really like is that we are always doing something different: reading, puzzles, colouring, craft, drawing, looking at websites, notebooking. It's a different combination every day.
Here he is with two of the crafts he's made recently. A bat magnet and a prairie dog pop-up. We've printed out this photo and put it in his animal notebook.
Every week he works on an animal drawing from a Draw, Write, Now book and here is one of his most recent. Ds loves to draw monsters, aliens and robots so all his animals reflect his style. Here we have one dangerous butterfly!
Also, every week ds fills out an animal sheet for his notebook. We are working on a combination of him drawing the answers and telling me the answer to write down.
Click to enlarge and you can see his answers better. I love his answer to the sentence at the bottom "Cheetahs are so fast they look like rockets or super sonic cars."
