Novmber Update

Yes, it's been awhile.  Let me tell you a little bit about what we've been up to for the past few months:

First off, I've been doing much more writing, including NaNoWriMo.  This has made it a bit more challenging to keep up to date on my blogs.  However, I'm about 29,000 words into my second first attempt at NaNoWriMo (if you're curious why it's my 2nd attempt, follow my blog 1hundredthousandwords.blogspot.com). 

Second, we've been very busy church shopping...again.  I'm  happy to report that we've found a great contemporary service that we're settling into.  Let's hope this works out!

Ok, and now for homeschool.  I continue to use the Saxon Math grade 3 for my little man.  He's in kindergarten, but he's very good with numbers so I find myself working with Saxon and supplementing with fun online worksheets, or homemade activities.  We're up to our 5 multiplication tables and I show him the School House Rock videos each class to help get him reciting the tables a bit quicker.  Saxon has us doing temperature, money and fractions in addition to the multiplication.

He loves to play math baseball with some really simple paper bases I made.  An addition problem answered correctly lands him on first, a subtraction gets him to second, a multiplication is third and a word problem or fraction lands him a home run.  Since he's an only child, I usually play along with him asking me math problems, or we use his animals (he asks his animals questions and cracks up when "they" get them wrong.)

We've taken a detour from Saxon K Reading.  It's all basically a letter a day, which we focused on in preschool, so I'm making it up as I go along.  Should I admit that? :)  I have a bunch of workbooks, just really basic things you can get at Target, that introduce parts of speech and types of literature.  Then I went online to see what my state's common core guidelines for grade K state, then I basically just go down the core list and teach it off the top of my head.

This method has actually proven rather effective.  We've learned nouns, verbs, couplet poems, and the difference between non fiction and fiction.  We've mapped a few stories with Venn Diagrams, also.  In addition, I make him read all the instructions whenever we do worksheets.  He's not a fan of reading, and I don't want to over push, so unless he asks to read a book, I usually read during story time.

His reading has improved on it's own.  I'm not sure if I mentioned this, but over the summer we created a 100 Book Read challenge.  If, as a family, we collectively read 100 books over the summer break, we'd have a big family sleepover.  Our son loved it and that's really when he started to pick up on sight words and sound blends.  His reading blossomed over the summer so I'm not as worried about it as I once was.  I'd saw that he's right on track with his grade K peers.

I also do health, a bit of science and history, although I'm looking for a really good history curriculum.  Any suggestions?

As far as my organization skills go, they've completely gone down hill.  I used to grade everything right away and mark the grade in my planner.  Now, once a month, I sit down to a pile of his work and grade it in one night, then mark it in my planner.  But I figure as long as I'm keeping track, does it really matter if it takes me a few extra weeks?  :)

So that's where we are.  My only suggestions at this point is to explore co-ops if you haven't already.  We've been loving ours!