Needless to say Theo has been reading non-stop, and in addition to reading everything he can get his hands on, he's been learning plenty.
The battle over the Monday morning Spelling and Word Building routine resulted in my forcing him to do it every morning last week until he could get through without constant arguing. Not something I wanted to have to do really, but I was tired of fighting him to get him to do something that was neither difficult nor time consuming, simply boring. I chose this exercise as a part of our weekly routine mainly because I was tired of him asking me how to spell words that he already knew how to spell, but was too lazy to try to remember or work out on his own. However, once a week was obviously not often enough for him to get the hang of it as part of the routine, so last week every lesson was prefaced with a spelling and word building exercise-- meaning every lesson was slightly less valuable when it came to learning or getting projects done, but useful in driving home the discipline message. The less time he argued or dawdled about getting his spelling done, the more time he had for Math. I know this makes me sound like a heartless task master, but I decided at the beginning of this thing that I was perfectly happy to dispense with lessons or subjects that Theo was not ready for--I have no intention of forcing him through stuff that's really too hard--but if his only reason for not wanting to do something is that's it's boring-- that's not a good enough reason. Plenty of things in life are boring.
Our usual Friday and Monday appointments have been altered or cancelled for various reasons the last couple of weeks so I have decided that I have no intention of making my kids "do school" on Fridays until after the baby comes and we've had a chance to settle back into routine. Friday is shopping day, and if we get anything else done it can be a bonus. On the 1st I think I let them watch documentaries for the afternoon after a lengthy shopping trip and last week I decided to use the morning to shower (something I will not get to do alone for a long time after baby comes) and the afternoon to treat myself to mommy-time while Grandma had BOTH kids for a Chinese New Year craft session and trip to the playground. If the baby doesn't turn up before this coming Friday, I think it will end up being another shopping day followed by telly-till-daddy-comes-home.
However, we did do QUITE a bit in spite of the extensive lesson in spelling discipline and my own inability to last till the end of the week. We managed to fit in a trip to the aquarium on January 31st after having finished all our little booklets indicating the parts of different classes of animals. Having completed that part of our "Zoology" unit in Science I decided to expand on it and make one large booklet with different classes of animals. We took our parts of the animals charts and sorted them into the different classes, then made collages out of various animal pictures we'd cut out and coloured for each class of animal. This project is still underway. When it is done each class of animal will have a section with a coloured collage of animals, a title, a couple of drawings done by Theo from his Draw Then Write, and a list of facts about that class of animals. We've finished Birds and Fish so far. He drew and coloured a bird and a duck for the "Birds" section and a shark and a fish for the "Fish" section. Pictures to come. We still have to work on Mammals, Reptiles, Amphibians, and Invertebrates as well as the cover page which will be entitled "My Classes of Animals Book." He really really likes these projects and so do I. They use Writing and Art as well as teaching him science.In addition to these projects, he's been working through his Grade Two Phonics, which has required a bit of drawing here and there as well as creative writing. We are taking that fairly slowly however as I normally tack it on at the end of Spelling and Word Building. He enjoys it because it's workbook stuff, but it's still really too easy for him. Math has been chugging along, though not at the pace I would have liked because we've had so many outings that I haven't been able to give him as much time with it. However, I have no doubt that he'll be through his grade one book by Pascha or possibly earlier. He is now doing 3 digit addition, learning about dozens and bar graphs, and is about to commence with subtraction-without-the-number-line.
He has also started a bit of French! Now, I really have no intention of turning French into a formal lesson until next year. I know Theo would love it if I started teaching him French regularly, but what with doing first grade Math, second grade Phonics, first grade writing, and slightly more advanced science than he really needs to be doing in kindergarten, I think we have enough on our plate. Especially with a baby coming. The advantage of his being able to read at an increasingly advanced level is that he is already learning a LOT more than I'm actually teaching him myself. We have have some very fun little books and CDs which teach some basic French vocabulary. Technically they're Georgie's, but Theo loves them too and has managed to memorise the French days of the week as well as most of the numbers to 20 and some other basic vocabulary as well. I have now got him writing the day of the week on our calendar in French as well as English and including a little French vocab in our conversations during the day.
One thing which has taken a back seat for now is Creative Writing. Normally Friday was Journal day. He wrote about his week and drew a picture. He WANTS to do this kind of project. Whenever his colouring books or reference books have some exercise asking for a story about something he really wants to do it, but I think Creative Writing for him is like talking: too much information for him to get out at the speed it's spinning around in his head. He still has a minor stutter when he talks, and I think that with writing it's the same. He isn't physically capable of getting all the information out before something distracts him from what he was thinking and the exercise is incredibly frustrating for him. My husband is like this too. Incredibly focused when working with his hands, reading, or solving problems, but easily distracted from his train of thought when trying to talk or write. The result is a very difficult session during which he asks me to tell him what to write about repeatedly because he can't remember what it was he was planning to write after telling me verbally several times. So this is one of those things I've decided to retire for a while until he seems ready for it again. In the meantime, he gets plenty of writing practice in his other work--thank you letters, for example, are easy enough because they are formulaic. And we may just add an extra Math day on Fridays to replace the usual journal lesson since he's had less time to do it lately.Because he just keeps reading and reading I really can't tell you everything he's learning on top of all this. This week he has been reading aloud to US from a large junior reference book about Space. He can't put it down. Other interests include science books about matter and density, reference books about punctuation and basic grammar, and we've had several conversations about the tooth shapes of different animals and how they show a carnivorous, herbivorous, or omnivorous diet.
So it's all going well and about to be interrupted any minute by the addition of an infant. Whether he turns up this week or next I have no plans to update the blog for quite a while. When I do I'm sure we'll have a lot of accomplishments to show you!
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