Back to it, with a new member

**I wrote this back in January but never posted it!**

Our fall season ended rather abruptly with the surprise early birth of Miss Olivia Noelle. I told Anya, "Olivia gave you an early Christmas present--it's Christmas break now!"

I had planned for a week or two of December calendar time (singing Christmas songs! reading Christmas poems!), some human body review activities, etc., etc. But... I'm sure Anya thought it was much more fun to have Christmas break and a new baby sister.

Now, we're back to school with the baby tagging along. She's been well behaved so far as long as she's having a bottle or being cuddled.

We jumped back into it with a January calendar song (cold and rainy weather... will it snow?) and a few days of math and reading review, but Anya hadn't seemed to have forgotten much after the extended break. So now we're forging ahead with:

- Math: playing "bean store" to add and subtract multiples of ten. I pretend to be a customer looking for specialty beans for soups, and Anya sells me beans in bags of ten. It was kind of fun to see her balk at an equation of big numbers like "40 + 20" but then quickly realize that it was much easier to solve than it looked.

- Reading: "nk" and "ng" consonant teams. She somehow became a much faster reader by taking time off! We have both been amazed by how she can read quite a few words now without sounding out each letter.

- Grammar: singing the verb song (to the tune of "I'm a little teapot"), reading some cute picture books about verbs, and doing some verb worksheets.

I would like to add in our writing curriculum too, in a week or two.

Comments

And, that's a wrap!

We finished Anya's first grade school year about three weeks ago, with a little popsicle celebration on the porch. We paged through a little book I've kept throughout the year of various projects; skimmed through some math workbook pages; looked at the first short story reader she started with back in September. It was fun to be reminded of where she started, and how much she's learned this year. I’ll share some photos. Math: where we started Math: where we finished up Handwriting/writing: where we started Handwriting/writing: where we finished up (Paragraph mapping) (Rough draft paragraph) (Final draft paragraph) Reading: where we started (This was review from kindergarten since we switched programs) Reading: where we finished Beyond all of these skills, and much more important, I am so pleased and proud about the girl she's becoming. Our family experienced a lot of change this year, as we welcomed and adjusted to anothe...

The start of a new year

I'd like to share semi-regularly about what we're up to at the Colton Family Schoolhouse--our schoolhouse being not only our school room in the loft, but the school of life with our girls. We're in the start of our third year of homeschooling with Anya. We have grown from using a tiny preschool table in one corner of the loft, to now a big desk and a whole half of the loft for our daily lessons. And, we've grown from short and hands-on preschool activities and books to six formal subjects. We're now going into week six so I'll share a little about our regular routine. Breakfast: We are meditating on Gentle + Classical “morning virtues: joy.” This isn’t school time but just part of our regular morning routine. We’re learning the verses to Joyful Joyful We Adore Thee, memorizing some scripture about joy, and reading from Luke. Morning lessons: Morning circle: This is quick and mostly for Alina but it’s a nice way to open up morning lessons. Each girl ha...

Homeschool reflections

School has been in session for a full month now, and it has flown by! I have started a blog post about it several times and never finished. There seems to be too much to say, as there is a lot going on here for the second-grader and preschooler. And for me! The summer was a time of learning and processing for me, and now I get to experiment with what I absorbed from multiple books on homeschooling. I read: - Family Matters by David Guterson - The 4-Hour School Day by Durenda Wilson - Homeschool Bravel y by Jamie Erickson - parts of The Well-Trained Mind and Writing with Ease by Susan Wise Bauer - I’m starting Teach Your Own by John Holt The biggest takeaways? One of the biggest benefits of a homeschool education is that it is, in fact, not school at all. This is a terrible paraphrase of a really good quote in one of the books I read. I think it synthesizes what I learned about how a lot of what I think of as "school" or "educ...

The Colton Family Schoolhouse

Search This Blog