Friday, May 1, 2009

Revamping our home school

The boys and I had a nice chat about our home school today. Here are the notes from that chat (note that in parentheses I put the initial of the boy who came up with the idea. A= the Artist, E=the Explorer)

This was prompted by the Explorer coming up to me this morning and telling me he had a great idea for our home school. He suggested we have a time for drawing every day.

Now our list:
(E) Drawing time every day "Everybody grabs a book and draws a picture from it."
(E) More Max and Lewis stories
(A) a few different types of math problems every day instead of all one kind
(A) more copywork (this surprised me!)
(A and E) More crafts
(A and E) More science experiments
(E) The Explorer is not a big fan of Circle Time. The rest of us really enjoy it so we are brainstorming ways to make it more fun for him.
(E) The Explorer doesn't like the little homemade workbooks I used to make (haven't made one in a long time, but "Friends, he was making sure")
(A) The Artist likes spelling, but he would rather say his sentence than write it. (I pull words from his writing that he misspells and I make a list of it. He works with five of them a day writing them 3 times each and then writing, now saying, a sentence with the word. Every so often I give a quiz and any words he misses go back on the list of words to learn.)
(E) The Explorer does NOT like copywork. He is willing to try to copy one or two Star Wars related words instead.
(E) "Every day there could be a time where we go outside and do homeschool."
(A) More gardening (Frankly, I don't know how this will happen as I don't have the energy for this. I think I will provide him with pots, soil, seeds, and plants and let him have at it on his own. I do have plans for a wormery in my brain. Does that count?)
(A) "Pick out an animal and learn about it all week and at the end of the week do a report." (Something that has been in my brain for a few weeks and has been mentioned to him more than once.)
(A) The Artist wants to learn about the different types of caterpillars.
(E) "We make books with drawings in them."


I also have some ideas about organizing so that we can do work lying down, outside, or on the go if needed. Basically revamping some things I used to do. Don't worry, the file crate system plays a part in this.

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