More productive, more relaxed

After the craziness of the last few weeks, I found it necessary at the very least to plan for one exercise per day every day of the week and do my best to stick with it in order to be sure that we made enough progress in as many areas as we could. Without a vague "lesson plan," our busy non-school schedule was monopolizing all my energy and making it possible for Theo to imagine that he got to decide what work he did--which meant all he ever did was Math.

It's amazing what scribbling a few rough plans into my weekly planner did for the sanity of our week and the amount of progress we made.  I took me all of 5 or 10 minutes to write it out and it dramatically improved my focus for the week. Which means we were more productive AND more relaxed.

Of course we were still very busy all week. Monday and Friday we had our usual outings. Friday we had to spend the morning baking for a Saturday children's event at church (Saint Nicholas day--which is technically on the 6th). Tuesday we had to go to Langley to see my midwife in the afternoon. Wednesday we had to make a trip to the library and Thursday was a much needed cleanup day. So it's not like our week was any less packed, but a little planning helped me keep the school progress going.

Monday morning, before we went to the mall for tea, we reviewed grammar and introduced verbs. Theo doesn't seem to have trouble understanding the concept of common nouns, proper nouns, and verbs, but he does seem to be having a little trouble identifying them in sentences. I get the impression that he is half guessing so we may try some Montessori exercises to help illustrate those concepts for a bit. We also introduced word-building. I'm not sure how helpful this will be, but I got him an exercise book for Spelling/Word Building. He copies out words from the grade one master spelling list three times for each word as an aid to memorization and then is tested on the spelling of those words later in the week. Most of them are phonetic however so they aren't very challenging-- they do increase in difficulty though.

Tuesday we worked on his Geography book where he is learning the map of Canada and the capital cities. He doesn't seem to be having trouble with the map itself or remembering familiar places or provinces, but he needed to review map directions. It had been too long since we learned them and he couldn't remember how to find them--a good illustration for why we needed to stick to some sort of lesson routine.

Wednesday we did Math--lots of it. He learned counting backwards by tens, drawing inches with a ruler, adding three numbers vertically, and continued our work in fractions. He continues to make speedy progress in Math without any trouble. Wednesday was also library day and we discovered that there is actually a limit to the number of books one can have out on a single library card. I maxed mine out, so we got Theo one and he immediately maxed HIS out. This led to a complete rearrangement of the school shelves again to make room for the ludicrous number of library books we took home which Theo has been reading to us repeatedly ever since. We got books on weather, on lizards, on sea creatures and on bugs. Did you know that horned lizards actually shoot blood out of their eye sockets to deter predators? Now you do...

Thursday I was planning to do some drawing with him but he wanted to do more Math so we did a little more word building and then I let him do Math while I took care of various chores. He got to start subtraction that day-- which was why he was itching to do more Math. He knew that subtraction was coming up and he couldn't wait. He'd already done lots of subtraction in one of his other Math books, but Horizon doesn't introduce it until quite far along-- well after he's started more complicated addition questions.

Friday we did a new activity which I introduced and hope to keep a routine of doing: a weekly journal in which he writes about what he did that week in school. He had no trouble writing the sentences at all and only a little in spelling. Most words he wasn't certain how to spell he was happy to look up in books he knew he'd read them in, which showed some terrific independence I thought. But he was unsure how to begin or what to write about. I asked him to write about his week and what he did and what his favourite things were and I made lots of suggestions about what to write. Hopefully once he's been in the habit of keeping a journal he'll be more independent in this area. He is always a little uncertain how to proceed with things if there isn't a specific formula or set of instructions. Once he was finished his short paragraph he drew and coloured a picture to illustrate it-- and then titled it. Very good.

We also baked a ton of cookies that afternoon-- which he helped with. Saturday was our Sunday school/ little kid St. Nicholas event in which they learned all about Saint Nicholas and made Christmas cards and decorated cookies and made some ornaments. I am not sure if he quite understands the difference between Santa Claus and Saint Nicholas. He interrupted the Saint Nicholas lesson to inform us all that OUR Santa lives at Guildford Mall. Funny, but uh...

In any case we had a very full but very productive and ultimately more relaxed week than previously. Sometimes I am truly amazed what a little planning does to keep life from becoming completely chaotic.