Monday, February 15, 2010

Another day home

I really think I'm getting a taste of homeschooling other than actually doing curriculum prep. The kids seem to have had so many days off of school, and today was yet another one!

Usually I make the boys sit down and do their work first thing--it seems to work better or has in the past. But today I decided to let them play in the morning and do their work right after lunch. We had a great morning of playing. Playing with my kids really allows me to work on some character issues with them that I know don't get addressed at school or preschool. Tim and I spent a couple of hours working on a Lego creation from a book he has. He's really getting into Legos but he still needs some help to see exactly where the pieces need to go. In other year or so I think he's going to be one of those guys building national monuments out of Legos. :)

After lunch, the girls laid down on the couch and listened to an audio book while the boys settled in to do work. Both of the boys did a good job on their work although it's clear that Tim is doing a lot more playing than listening at school. I know...he's a boy and it's only kindergarten. And we recognize that but he's still got to be able to do the work if he wants to go into first grade next year. He's smart enough to do all of it, he'd just rather be playing. :) :) Alex is getting much better with writing sentences. I haven't started working with him on verb tenses so if anyone has any suggestions for teaching ELLs verb tenses I would love to hear them. And for the record...I love that "read" (present tense) and "read" (past tense) are spelled the same way. He gets his sentences correct and he doesn't even know it (it would actually be wrong the way he's trying to say it).

I was sad to have to tell the kids they couldn't play in the snow yesterday. We had about 4" but with the windchill it was only 12 degrees outside and that's just too cold for them.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

My youngest son had the same kinds of problems as Tim when was in kindergarten, and he turned 6 right after the school year started. He couldn't/wouldn't pay attention, read, write - anything not involving "fun" was not on his agenda. However, suddenly, in the last 6 weeks of school it all fell into place and he went from not reading at all to being above his grade level. It might have had something to do with being told by me, as well as his teacher, and finally realizing he wouldn't get to go to 1st grade - he called it "real school" if he didn't get his act together.