I give up! There's no point tracking our weekly progress now. We're in the midst of spring break, and then we're in the last 2 months of school. I'm just going to throw in a smattering of things we've covered over the past few weeks with the photos and videos I managed to take….
A little fun building in Minecraft. It goes without saying that this was a hit.
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| up close on Great Wall of China |
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| great wall of china and pyramid from above |
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| great wall of china and a pyramid in mine craft |
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| passport and dragon for China study |
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| practicing Chinese calligraphy |
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Egyptian pharaoh - he's mad because his workers created
such a small door for his pyramid he's not going to be able to fit :) |
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| practicing endings on the wipe board |
And our poetry unit project, memorizing and reciting a poem. This was fun to watch because as we practiced it, he kept it straight and just focused on knowing the words. Once the camera was rolling, he played with it more and made it his own!
I'm planning on mixing things up a bit after we get back to work next week. We've managed to cover all the material for 3rd grade for Social Studies and Math. He tested at a 4.4 grade level in a recent math test we took through Mobymax. He was extremely pleased about that, and it definitely boosted his confidence! We also took one for English, and he scored at a 3.5 grade level. I'm not so convinced of the effectiveness of this test in evaluating his level, since certain key aspects of ELA were left out (like reading comprehension) and you could click on an audio of each question so he didn't have to do any reading. It was good for him to take a test that wasn't created by me though, and have a sense of accomplishment. I have a few other assessment tools I may use towards the end of the school year to get him used to other testing platforms and questioning styles (this one was a non-timed computer test).
I'm going to try and get him reading and writing more, and thinking about what he's reading. His reading comprehension continues to be great, while his fluency is slowly progressing. He's got the basics of a paragraph down, but I'd love to get him to work on expanding more on what he writes and putting those awesome ideas he has in his head down on paper.
For the last few months, we'll keep on with Barton, an essential part to our day that he doesn't love but we do it first we get it done right off the bat! We'll follow this up with some math review. We'll focus a bit on multiplication and division practice, combined with some online activities. This will hopefully reinforce what we've covered and let us expand a little on topics that he seems to enjoy (like doing problems in his head!)
The tricky part will be the middle of our day…I want to take a unit study for each week based on a social studies topic that's interesting to us…I'll give some choice in this since we finished the main curriculum - (ie. great buildings of the world, WWII, US geography…) and then include aspects of ELA in that topic… This would've been a great thing to do throughout the year, but I wanted to get far enough along in Barton so that he had more tools for reading.
He really loved reading Story of the World, and I love how it was more of a narrative of historical events than just reading facts. It had quite a bit of biblical stories in it, which took some getting used to. But interestingly enough, he loved the bible stories most of all! Another goal is to find some fun stories from other religions…
Science will end our day, and I'm hoping to focus on the scientific method and experiments. I've been trying to do this all along, but it just hasn't come to fruition the way I've wanted it to. I'm going to try and use our experiment notebook to write out the parts of the scientific method for each activity with a goal of reinforcing the fun of experimenting and failure in any path to success! :)
Suppose I need to get planning now since it's Saturday already!!….
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