Originally posted on October 5, 2009
Here we go on week #8...it's amazing how quickly the time is flying by. In filling in my lesson plan book last night, I marked off two days for Thanksgiving already. Yes, only two days...but you know that the rest of that week is going to mostly be Pilgrim stories and fall crafts, right? :)
Rachael is still doing great with her schoolwork. I've had to let go of a few of my OCD tendencies where math was concerned. Each lesson in the Math-U-See Alpha consists of six pages - three that focus on that lesson and three more that review previous concepts - plus a test booklet with a test for each lesson. I was dividing each lesson into two days in order to do all of the pages...and it was taking forever. Did she really need six pages of practicing writing numbers up to 100? I think not. So, my new easier/faster rule is that she does the first page of the lesson and decides for herself if she needs more practice before taking the test. If she's struggling, of course I recommend that she does one more page. But if not...it's test time, and help is unavailable during the test. Once she finishes, we'll discuss any answers she might have gotten wrong - but those are pretty few and far between. She has much less issue with math now that it doesn't take soooo long! This book, so far, has focused on addition and subtraction of single digits, and solving for unknown. (Algebra at age five!)
We nixed our Book of Virtues unit study last week in favor of reading a chapter of her new Girl Scouts handbook each day. We finished it up on Friday, and that earns her one more patch for her uniform!
And now, on to today's brag... I pull her spelling words each week from a book called Natural Speller. There are several pages of words for "Grades 1-2", broken into columns of 7 or 8. To begin with, I was going in order and giving her one column each week. In week seven, her spelling words included such perplexities as in, if, it and sit. What utter nonsense! She could spell in she was two. So I devised a brilliant new plan. Rather than giving her spelling words on Monday, having her copy them all week, and then testing her on them on Friday...I would give her a test on Monday. That's right - I'd just start reading through the words and having her do her best to sound them out - and when she got up to eight that she had spelled incorrectly, I'd stop and those would be her eight spelling words for the week. That way, she would be working on eight words that actually presented a little bit of a challenge.
Well. We sat down today and I started reading through the words. She wrote...and wrote...and wrote...and finally started complaining, asking why she was having to write ALL of these spelling words? The child wrote 56 words and only missed FIVE. So much for my goal of eight! The words she missed were: block (bloke), start (sart), third (thrid), stir (str) and shirt (sirt). I chalk the last four up to the fact that they were so near the end, and she was sick of writing by then! So, those are our spelling words for the week. All five of them.
In case anyone is interested, here are the words she didn't miss: got, hop, drop, shop, top, not, hot, on, dog, fog, box, stop, mop, sun, cut, us, fun, run, up, but, such, club, much, cup, rub, jump, running, arm, farm, car, far, hard, harm, are, card, cart, star, dark, part, apart, bird, first, girl, birth, born, more, for, or, fort, corn and horn.
Yep! Still proud of her. :)
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