End Week 2

"I can't believe I am 8 days in into the school year and I am NOT behind." - What this post was going to say when I started typing it two days ago..... I am now two days behind!

I hope I can get caught up over the weekend... We watched the dinosaur episode of Magic School Bus and played with our new dinosaur figures, but nothing formal yesterday or today. Tamarin asked me some questions and we searched for the answers online. Mostly an unschooling couple of days. 

The rest of the time we spent loving on these two

I had some people ask what we are using this year so I'll post that today since I've got nothing wonderful to share for this week. I am using Bringing Up Learners (I guess it's not known as Mosaic anymore) as a basic guide to the school year. It covers history and literature with a little bit of geography, science and art.


3 R's:

We are using Singapore Math and Explode the Code.

Tamarin lost ground on math over the summer so I've set Saxon aside for now and letting her review with her sister. I'm not too worried about it since she was ahead of her age group on math at the end of last year. It'll click again.

Lemur has made a good leap in her writing over the summer. She recognizes and writes most of her letters. I may be able to jump her over the next two Get Ready for the Code and go straight to Explode the Code. We'll see over the next couple of weeks.

I've started using this site to make writing sheets. I also bought some of these rubbery things to help with pencil grip. Tamarin's handwriting is about par with mine.... if you know me then you know that's not a good thing :p I hope we can continue to improve it so she doesn't have to concentrate to be legible as an adult.


I'm hoping to get Lemur started on Bob Books after new year. Tamarin is still reading picture books. My goal for this year is for her to happily (the key word) read small chapter books by the end of the year. She is capable, but without the payoff of reading an entire book in a sitting she doesn't enjoy it.

Science:

I'm cherry picking Mr. Q's life science which you can download for free. It is geared for middle or later elementary. That's why I'm cherry picking. Life science is what Tamarin is incredibly interested in. She's ready for some of it, but not all. There are a bunch of science experiments in the parent copy, some of which I'd never seen before so I highly recommend it for that alone.