After the Holidays....

Gearing up for our first post-break school day tomorrow, and I think I'm actually excited!  Everything is prepped and ready.  We will be continuing our Ocean Animals Research Projects for a few more weeks in Science, and we have incorporated a "Healthy Me" Science portion, which involves menu planning and eating healthy with an exercise/fit element.

The kids are learning about the Oceans, pollution, and the creatures from the deep.

We are also moving on to a lot of new and more directed ASL curricula.  Until this point I've been basing our ASL lessons on the Language Tree DVD set, which has worked great, but as we've exhausted both volumes of Language Tree, I am moving on to Lou and Barbara Fant's book of ASL phrases.  Admittedly, some of these are not really things a child would need to say, but I will be able to pick and choose the vocabulary and phrase options from this book much more easily than I could from Language Tree, which was all DVD based. 

Math still seems to be somewhat of a review, with the kids still working on two-digit subtraction, when they are both quite capable of doing three digit subtraction with regrouping, but I think with so many other intense subjects, taking it a little easier in Math isn't a bad thing.

In Grammar and Writing, we are working on pronouns and their usage in sentences this week to determine the subject of sentences, compound words in Reading and Spelling, and continuing our study of the fifty states for Social Studies.  I'm curious to see how much the kids remember after having a week off.

It might look busy, but we have a lot of fun! The kids are learning about the 50 states.

It was a much needed break, and while I contemplated giving the kids a two-week vacation, I think they will be happier if we wait and plan to take another week-long vacation later in the year.  This year I am contemplating limiting our summer vacation to only three or four weeks, and then starting back up with a Third Grade curriculum.  The benefit would be that we could take more breaks, more often, throughout our school year, but a downside would be that we never truly get an extended break and one year of school could easily blend in with the next year, making it difficult to accurately determine progress and ability levels.  It would also give me less time to prepare.

Our first year of homeschooling was sudden (because we hadn't intended on homeschooling our son, but decided we had to after all the trouble with the school), and it often felt like I wasn't adequately prepared.  Last year went quite a bit better, but with moving and having a somewhat convoluted schedule, there were some difficulties, from not being prepared to having packed school supplies I didn't anticipate needing or wanting before the move.  Overall, however, I was happy with the kids' progress. But this year has been outstanding! The kids are happy, they are energetic and determined, and they seem to really enjoy learning even more this year.  We have only had two truly difficult days so far this year and we're already half-way through our school year.  I'm extremely impressed with their attitudes and progress.

I don't know if this year is going better because I'm more prepared, or if we all just know what to expect from homeschooling now, but this is by far our best experience yet! I'm not saying we don't have the occasional grumping about an assignment, but that is pretty much it, and even grumpiness is fairly rare.  I almost think it's an age thing.  They have just reached an age and maturity level where they no longer 'act-out' in that fashion.

Regardless, this year is going great and I am looking forward to school tomorrow after a week off to have fun and rejuvenate. 

Holiday Cooking!