The best new thing we've added to our schedule is PE Plus at Big Easy Sportsplex. An amazing mom of 5 (she home schools them all!) started the homeschool group we connected with and managed to arrange this great 3-hour block of classes every Wed morning. Each hour has a different class, and aside from PE (which he LOVES) this semester has Spanish and cooking as well. I love this time since Oscar gets a few classes with the same group of kids, that all seem to get along well.
For our regular subjects, in Science and Social Studies I'm using the Fairfax County curriculum as a guide for our year, adding projects and experiments with the help of Pinterest and other internet sources. There's a ton of stuff out there, and the hardest thing is actually stopping myself from constantly researching since there is so much available and I'm always finding cool new things! Unfortunately I haven't come across a one stop shop, so each topic is a whole new researching ball game.
For science we worked a little with research. I had him pick animals he was interested in and look up cool things about them and how they're adapted to their environment. He chose jellyfish and sharks as his first animals, and it was fun to see him using some of their adaptations in creating his lego guys! He made a weapon that was based off the tentacles of an octopus (and also created Hades in lego form). This topic will lead us nicely into ecosystems, food chains/webs, and biomes.
When I got confused about when Ancient Rome and Ancient Greece were in time in relation to each other, I realized we needed a timeline for social studies! We worked together to put some interesting facts about both cultures on our timeline, and will build on it as we go through the year.
Math has been a little different. I have the Fairfax County curriculum guide, but also have Singapore Math textbooks to use as a base. He does exercises in IXL on the computer as well. The program isn't ideal to me, since it has a ton of questions to complete for each specific topic, but it's nice to see how he's doing on questions that I don't make myself, get a break from doing worksheets, and familiarize him with the computer as a testing platform (aside from just work in apps which are more in a game format). I also browse the internet for hands-on ways to explore the topics and keep it more exciting, for both of us!
The format I use is still evolving, since I love the activities, but am still trying to balance how many problems he needs to sit down and work on to make sure he's got the topic down. The exercises in IXL and SM workbooks both seem like overkill, and honestly bore both of us! Maybe that's the amount of problems he "should" be doing but it ends up frustrating both of us. I mean, if he gets 10 problems of varying degree of difficulty right, it seems to me like he shouldn't have to do 25 more, right? Anyhoo, I'm still working out that balance and it's evolving… My plan starting next week is to create activities for each topic we've covered, and have "center time" once a week where he works through each activity (of his choosing) to help enforce the concepts we've covered.
So far we've covered money, graphs, fractions, time, and place value. His favorites have seemed to have been fractions with legos, rolling a dice for making numbers for rounding, and making patterns with playing cards. He also has had fun doing some apps, including sushi math and oh no fractions. He's been doing really well so far, although incredibly hard on himself when he gets anything wrong. That goes for every subject though, and an issue we're constantly working on with him.
English is our Achilles heel… His reading has improved, but still is way below grade level. For every 3rd grade topic I've tried to cover, I've found huge gaps in his basic ELA knowledge. Nouns, verbs, adjectives? Never heard of them. Did he learn those in India and forget, or was he never introduced to them? His reading decoding strategies were also non-existent so we started focusing on a few of those. We are also going to have him evaluated for dyslexia next week. There are just patterns that he has that point to it, and after working with him a little at a grade level curriculum, I realized that he can't read any of the work he would be expected to in all subjects if he were in a regular third grade classroom. I was trying to move him forward, thinking that he would start to "get" the patterns if we focused and moved slowly, but quickly realized things just weren't sticking. I did find a program online called "progressive phonics" that works with phonics patterns…well…progressively :) He likes the rhymes and silly stories they have in them, so we'll stick with this for a bit until we find out if he has dyslexia and what should be our next step. To be continued…
Here's the first paragraph he wrote in his journal about a pet he would like to have. When he was done, we talked about his work. I touched on what he needed to work on (spelling and remembering to write full sentences), but I was really impressed with it overall! Again, he's so hard on himself I spent more time highlighting the good things he did - the right paragraph format (intro sentence, 3 different details, closing sentence), a great ending, and even though he spelled some words wrong, he knew (circled) exactly which ones he misspelled!
For our regular subjects, in Science and Social Studies I'm using the Fairfax County curriculum as a guide for our year, adding projects and experiments with the help of Pinterest and other internet sources. There's a ton of stuff out there, and the hardest thing is actually stopping myself from constantly researching since there is so much available and I'm always finding cool new things! Unfortunately I haven't come across a one stop shop, so each topic is a whole new researching ball game.
For science we worked a little with research. I had him pick animals he was interested in and look up cool things about them and how they're adapted to their environment. He chose jellyfish and sharks as his first animals, and it was fun to see him using some of their adaptations in creating his lego guys! He made a weapon that was based off the tentacles of an octopus (and also created Hades in lego form). This topic will lead us nicely into ecosystems, food chains/webs, and biomes.
When I got confused about when Ancient Rome and Ancient Greece were in time in relation to each other, I realized we needed a timeline for social studies! We worked together to put some interesting facts about both cultures on our timeline, and will build on it as we go through the year.
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| Our timeline, vocab walls, and world map on the 3rd floor. |
The format I use is still evolving, since I love the activities, but am still trying to balance how many problems he needs to sit down and work on to make sure he's got the topic down. The exercises in IXL and SM workbooks both seem like overkill, and honestly bore both of us! Maybe that's the amount of problems he "should" be doing but it ends up frustrating both of us. I mean, if he gets 10 problems of varying degree of difficulty right, it seems to me like he shouldn't have to do 25 more, right? Anyhoo, I'm still working out that balance and it's evolving… My plan starting next week is to create activities for each topic we've covered, and have "center time" once a week where he works through each activity (of his choosing) to help enforce the concepts we've covered.
So far we've covered money, graphs, fractions, time, and place value. His favorites have seemed to have been fractions with legos, rolling a dice for making numbers for rounding, and making patterns with playing cards. He also has had fun doing some apps, including sushi math and oh no fractions. He's been doing really well so far, although incredibly hard on himself when he gets anything wrong. That goes for every subject though, and an issue we're constantly working on with him.
English is our Achilles heel… His reading has improved, but still is way below grade level. For every 3rd grade topic I've tried to cover, I've found huge gaps in his basic ELA knowledge. Nouns, verbs, adjectives? Never heard of them. Did he learn those in India and forget, or was he never introduced to them? His reading decoding strategies were also non-existent so we started focusing on a few of those. We are also going to have him evaluated for dyslexia next week. There are just patterns that he has that point to it, and after working with him a little at a grade level curriculum, I realized that he can't read any of the work he would be expected to in all subjects if he were in a regular third grade classroom. I was trying to move him forward, thinking that he would start to "get" the patterns if we focused and moved slowly, but quickly realized things just weren't sticking. I did find a program online called "progressive phonics" that works with phonics patterns…well…progressively :) He likes the rhymes and silly stories they have in them, so we'll stick with this for a bit until we find out if he has dyslexia and what should be our next step. To be continued…
Here's the first paragraph he wrote in his journal about a pet he would like to have. When he was done, we talked about his work. I touched on what he needed to work on (spelling and remembering to write full sentences), but I was really impressed with it overall! Again, he's so hard on himself I spent more time highlighting the good things he did - the right paragraph format (intro sentence, 3 different details, closing sentence), a great ending, and even though he spelled some words wrong, he knew (circled) exactly which ones he misspelled!
