5 days down: 175 to go

1.True/False: My student has to complete every activity within every single lesson. FALSE

2.True/False: My student has to complete every lesson within every unit. QUESTION OF THE DAY: here is the point of contention for me. There are so many lessons 'available' each week that I can not find time to do the things that I think make homeschooling fun. Going to the Children's Museum . Going to the Aquarium or the Zoo. Going to the Pearl MFA or Jesse Jones Nature Park. Using cooking and double recipes to make math fun. Grocery shopping to teach money and banking. How to find out that 12 biscuits for $2.99 is really $.25 a biscuit and that a case of 144 diapers for $32.99 are $.23 each. We tried to reduce the busy work by skimming through some of the math, and doing only even or odd problems because he obviously knew the answer, skimming through and letting him answer questions orally rather than write them down in a journal, was still very very time consuming and so very intense.

3.True/False: If my student understands the concepts taught in a lesson I need to have my student take the lesson assessment and move on to the next lesson. TRUE

Materials for 08/24/09 to 08/28/09

Math 3
BENCHMARK ASSESSMENT (2 days) - done
lesson 1 – hundreds – done
lesson 2 – comparing and ordering – done
lesson 3 – skip counting (opt) – done
lesson 4 – thousands (opt)

Language Arts3
Spelling 3
lesson 1 – list/ABC order – done
lesson 2 – syllables - done
lesson 3 – sentences
lesson 4 – dictation
Literature 3
lesson 1 – wind and sun - done
lesson 2 – bundle of sticks - read
lesson 3 – why larks flew away
lesson 4 – why larks flew away
I read the first 18 pages of George Washington to him as a change of pace, surprisingly he got up and walked away, bored with the story.
Language Skills 3
BENCHMARK ASSESSMENT (2 days) - done
Vocabulary
lesson 1 – word wise – done
GUM
lesson 1 – sentences – done
lesson 2 – sentences – done
Vocabulary
lesson 2 – word wise (opt)
GUM
lesson 3 – subject / predicates – done
Analogies
lesson 1 – actions (opt) – done

Social Studies
lesson 1 – communities - done
lesson 2 – community needs - done
lesson 3 – community people - done
lesson 4 – community laws
lesson 5 – maps
lesson 6 – where is your community – partially done

TX Science
lesson 1 – life cycles - done
lesson 2 – insect life cycle - done
lesson 3 – metamorphosis - done
lesson 4 – fish life cycle - done
lesson 5 – amphibians life cycle - done
lesson 6 – reptile life cycle – partially done
lesson 7 – bird life cycle

Art 3
Many Kinds of Art – we modified this and did a watercolor of the Chihuahuan desert that we visited on our summer trip.

Music 3
lesson 1 - we watched the first 3 videos on lets learn music, it was so boring we gave up. We put in a pop music CD (Hannah Montana) and used a flashlight on the wall to imitate the bouncing ball for the beat.
lesson 2

PE3
lesson 1 – we have Wii sports resort, a mini trampoline, razor scooter and played flag football this week
lesson 2 – pedometer – done

Health 3
lesson 1 – bones / muscles/ nerves – done
lesson 2 – respiratory

Introduction to online learning
lesson 1 - scantron - done
lesson 2 – organize - done
lesson 3 – math - done
lesson 4 - language art – done – writing assignment<--------- OMG, this was so painful this week. I tried printing vacation pictures and letting him write about them, he couldn't think of a thing to write or even know where to start. I tried printing out the questions from the Intro OLL and he couldn't write a sentence and I had to prompt him to even come up with a list. Finally I gave up, and started dictating and I would write down the first half, and he would dictate the second half of the sentence. I am at a loss, he appears to have no creative writing skills. He would have rather given bone marrow than write compete sentences. I do not understand this as a concept, anymore than I understand his not wanting to read. It should be a genetic marker in his DNA, he is the offspring of two voracious readers, he has acquired our math and science aptitude but he seems to have completed missed my writing genes.
lesson 5 – history (no this we have incorporated something that we found FUN. We have a PBS DVD set called LIBERTY KIDS and watched a couple of episodes to change the pace.

Today is FUN Friday. It is almost noon and we have not done anything but eat breakfast so far. We are going on a bike hike for 2 miles.
Later we could work on Health, Spelling, Social Studies and maybe vocabulary. While we should rewrite the questions for Monday, I am dreading it.

*update*
we did our 2 mile bike hike. we did two lessons in social studies. got home and did one session in study island. won a blue ribbon. we did two lessons in health and two lessons in literature and then we bagged the rest of the day.