Don't know why I've been MIA, really. Been quite busy but also just got out of the habit of blogging, I guess.
I really don't think I've got this HE thing quite right for our family, TBH, but not really got time to work out anything much different to what we are doing. We have Sonlight K, which officially we started in January and we are currently on Week 6!!! Obviously we get very sidetracked. I've been trying to stick to it more recently, just to see what it's like to have a definite programme to follow and to see if it works for us, and I'm not sure that it does. We are doing a fair bit of non-SL stuff, e.g. Story of the World, and Miquon maths (which isn't listed in the schedule even though a maths programme is part of the SL plan) plus all sorts of other bits and pieces I have picked up here and there, and yet I feel a great pressure to do as much of the stuff listed for each day as possible, regardless of whether it's working or not. I'm not sure what I'm going to do about this yet, except keep a kind of 'watching brief' on it. I do feel I'd like to get significantly further into SL K before dropping it. Maybe we will find a way of using it without me feeling so compelled to either follow it or feel as though we are 'behind'. I do feel it is helping us (Jade and me in particular) to get into the habit of sitting down and doing a bit of formal work each morning, and then I feel more relaxed about just letting the rest of the day unfold.
Anyway, after all of that preamble, yesterday we started some Miquon simple addition and subtraction. Now, we've done this a few times before, but there's been quite a gap since we last did much maths. It's amazing to me, though, that a girl age 6y who has a reading age of somewhere between 9 and 10 (last time I checked) has such trouble with very simple numbers. For example, at one point today I asked her 1 + 1, and it took her a good 5 seconds to work out the answer! After coming up against this problem yesterday, though, I got out the Cheerios to use as manipulatives. Maths is much more fun when you get to eat the answer when you get it correct! We were just doing very simple addition and subtraction up to 10. I think doing this for several days in a row just for 5-10 minutes at a time should help, and she enjoyed it so much yesterday that she actually asked to do it again today! She really does seem to find the simplest mental arithmetic surprisingly hard, though.
We then went on to do three pages of 'Beyond the Code', which she has no trouble with at all. We did a couple more pages of that today too.
At lunch time yesterday we continued with her current passionate love of all things horsey by showing her the 'Join Up' video with Monty Roberts, aka 'The Horse Whisperer' - the original! It's absolutely stunning, and I would have thought that even the non-horsey couldn't fail to be impressed and amazed at the man's learning of equine body language, and what he does with it. It always moves me to tears when a wild horse moves towards him to 'join up' with him - it really is almost spiritual and deeply powerful.
I also attempted to make her a 'woollie' horse (link supplied by Sally) which came out looking more like a giraffe, and she wasn't motivated to have a go on her own!!
In the afternoon we went out to do a bit of food shopping and visit the Post Office, and she nagged me into buying her a 'Pony World' magazine because it had a free 'angel pony' on the front, which she has played with ever since. After we got home, it was time for next-door-neighbour L to come round and play, so that was that!
Today we've done the Cheerios/miquon maths, a bit more Beyond the Code, I've read a library book 'Tarquin the Wonder Horse' and looked at a Trains book, both before we go to the library this afternoon and change them. I've also got her whizzing quite quickly through one of the free Letts workbooks picked up free through that St Ivel Advance Milk promotion - oh I see that all the free books have gone now but you can still get 50% off Letts workbooks. I got an age 5-6 one seeing as she finds it such a struggle, and also to check if we'd left any gaps in her early maths! She did 9 pages of that this morning, and most of it was pretty easy but there's nothing wrong with making her feel that maths is easy!!
Meanwhile, Shannon was sitting with us at the table, looking through her BBC Toybox magazine, doing a bit of colouring, a bit of playdough, and a bit of being a nuisance!
They're currently watching Tom & Jerry and we're off swimming this afternoon, and then to drop in to the library on the way home.
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4 comments:
lovely blog. exactly why i couldn't use sonlight as I would totally panic over getting ehind. so I have bought almost all the non religious read alouds and stry books, and we read them separately. obviously we then miss out on the directed questions, but...
As much as I am an advocate of using the IG as a tool and not feeling like a resentful slave of it, I do know what you mean about Sonlight. The way I do it is by pro-actively crossing out the bits we don't do, rather than leaving them unticked. I know it sounds silly, but psychologically I can then forget about them and don't feel that they've been overlooked as it was a conscious decision not to do them. And voila; we are not behind any more. Sometimes I even write in something else that we've done instead. (I do that mainly with the poetry.) Oh, and I can go for over a week without even getting out the file because we're busy doing other stuff too.
Actually, with K I think I had completely given up on the IG well before week 6 anyway.
So you'd recommend the "Join Up" video (Katie is horse made too) - I'm looking for ideas for her Christmas pressies. Katie will be pleased you checked out her "woollie" website! Elle
Yes, definitely suggest the video. It's aimed at adults, of course, and most of it went over Jade's head, but I still think it's a lovely thing for them to see, and I love it too.
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