Weekly Update

Since we started school in July, we are almost half way through our required days for the year. I am transitioning to a year round school so it is a little difficult to divide our year out.  while keeping with the required time set by the state.
We are just a bit behind from where I was hoping we would be due to illness  and a couple of weeks of specialty unit studies that were related to field trips. To help make up ground, we did something a little different for school last week.  We did one subject a day, in order to review and catch up to where I was hoping we would be.  I wasn’t sure how it would work; I was afraid Kiddo would get bored spending so much time on one thing but it went amazingly well.  I let him pick which subject we were going to work on each day.  The only day that was hard was math and I have to agree, hours on math is enough to give anyone a headache.  I will definitely try this again.
Since we are almost at the half way point and only have a few weeks to go before our holiday break, I have been reviewing our curriculum to see if I want to make any changes over the break.  I am happy for the most part with everything except Language Arts.  We are using First Language Lessons and it is just not a good fit for us, he does not like repetitive work and FLL is nothing but. I have read some good reviews for Shurley English and I am looking into switching to that after the holidays.  I will be looking at some other programs also. If there are any great English programs that you have used, please let me know.
I did want to comment on Singapore math: this is our 2nd year with Singapore and while I like the fast pace nature, I have been concerned about Kiddo not learning his math facts to memorization.  What do I know, the Singapore program is working. We are working on addition and subtraction with renaming and he knows his facts.  He has no trouble adding single digits together.  I was surprised. We are using the textbook, workbook and the word problem book. 
So far we have had an excellent year and are making great progress. Kiddo (and I) can’t wait until we get the first half of the year wrapped up. We are looking forward to our Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks. Hopefully, we will fit a vacation in there somewhere. 


Bonus – He learned to tie his shoes this week!