I have our year set up with 28 4-day Lesson Weeks and 8 Exploration Weeks. During our Lesson Weeks, we do the basic skill subjects: math, logic, phonics, spelling, grammar, reading, handwriting, and writing. We don't do all subjects per grade and the subjects each child does are planned to be completed in just those 112 days. On Wednesdays during these weeks, instead of lessons they play educational games like chess, Cosmeo.com games, various logic and math games, Blocus, Othello, and puzzles. They also do art projects and painting. They play with our globe which has talking quiz and information settings. They also play more outside with sports and build onto their forts in the woods. We also catch up on TV shows I've recorded on anything educational that interests us and Magic Schoolbus episodes. This day is also for field trips and Cub Scouts.
Exploration Weeks include our content subjects we don't stuff into lesson weeks: Science, History, Heritage, Geography, Art, Music, Character Building, and Biographies. This coming week is our second Exploration Week and we're studying prehistory and evolution. Our first week was on Africa. So far I only have a basic World Geography week planned next then I might do ones of each of the other continents.
Richie, our 7yo 2nd grader, has about 2 1/2hrs worth of work per lesson day. He does a 5 problem mini math test, a math lesson or activity, 3 pages in his logic workbook, 3 pages in his phonics workbook, 15 minutes of reading aloud to an adult, and a writing assignment. We also throw in vocabulary, difficult sight word cards, and language lessons whenever we get to them.
His writing assignments change each of the 4 days. On Monday it's copy work from his classic language book. Tuesday he makes 2 well thought out sentences with word blocks and we go over them for correct grammar, he then copies them to his notebook. Thursday is copy work usually from whatever book he finds interesting because they include quotations. Both copy work assignments are usually 5 or 6 sentences long. Friday is dictation. I am now a firm believer in dictation. It's a spelling, capitalization, punctuation, and grammar test rolled into on one! I read the sentence then slowly read each word as he write them. We do about 3 or 4 sentences.
Kit, our almost-6yo Kindergartner, only does about 1hr worth of work. I make sure we cover something for phonics, often his Explode the Code workbook plus some kind of activity like word building with letter blocks or word card games for first, middle, and ending sounds of words. If his Explode the Code pages didn't include a lot of writing, he does 4 short sentences of copy work that I make up from his phonics words he's learn at the time. When he's ready for it, we'll add in reading practice. He's just at the beginning of reading c-v-c words. Every lesson day he also does some kind of math related activity with manipulatives and some times writing numbers and basic number sentences from his counters.
Hope that makes sense! We're all loving this schedule and I am more consistent with it because I only have 2 hectic lesson days back-to-back before either game day or the weekend. Plus with content subjects taken out of the usual rotation, it's not overwhelming for me.
ures to represent them, compare them, and change improper fractions into mixed numbers. I figured it'd be an easy progression to toss in a decimal
. Not so, but I am so glad to be done with pizza analogies! We also just worked on place value so I really thought this would be a simple next step, but I guess this is this string of concepts' stopping point for now. We'll pick it up again in a month or two and see if he's able to understand it then.
