The school year, both for my home schooled son and my public schooled daughter, is coming to a close. I'm looking forward to summer fun with the kids, especially our outings to the pool. But we'll still be working - just in a much more informal way.
My daughter wants to learn cursive and will be entering 4th grade. With all the studying for the standardized testing, there was no time for cursive to be taught at school. So, I'll be teaching that at home this summer because I believe not having cursive writing as a skill is a big disadvantage. She'll also need to keep practicing her math facts.
For my son, we need to keep him writing and keep him studying his math facts. My son wants to continue our educational field trips and to continue to watch educational videos and to read. He's really loving to read and sometimes he goes to bed with a book.
Both kids want to learn to write computer programs. My son says he wants to program DS games. I explained to him that he just might do that someday but in the beginning he might be programming some smaller tasks. So, my husband will be looking into one of those kid friendly computer codes.
As we end our home schooling year, I am breathing a little sigh of relief. I would do it again if I had the decision to make again, but it was challenging working full-time outside the home and homeschooling one kid and keeping up our involvement in our daughter's education too. At the same time it was rewarding and both children ended up with some really enriching experiences.
Next fall, we will send my son back to public school and I'm hoping it works out better for him this time. If not, we're always ready here to home school.
If I was a stay at home Mom, I think I would have pulled my daughter out too when I pulled my son out, and we wouldn't be putting either back in this coming fall.
On a last note ... given that both my kids are now reading very successfully, I'm not sure whether to change the focus of the blog going forward or not.....
Congrats on your kids' reading progress!
ReplyDeleteI'm also looking for ways to teach programming.
How's school going this year?
Hi! I'm doing ok. My son is back in school and we're really crossing our fingers. We're getting the occasional notes from the teachers claiming that he might have problems attending. So, I'm really not sure what I want to post right now. I'm also reading and reacting to the common core issues going on in our state. I think its going to be a failed experiment but in the meantime its going to cause havok.
ReplyDeleteWe were starting to use Scratch for starting to learn programming. It's at scratch.mit.edu. We haven't had a chance to do much with it this fall given the new homework requirements, etc.
Another interesting program that we've run across is called Dragon Box. It is a program that teaches algebra in a game format. It's available online for $5. I've played it myself. Very interesting.
I meant...havoc.
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