Finding Our Groove

Finding a groove for after school work has not been easy. Homework, friends, outside obligations, and general free play time leaves little time left in the day for any extras. However, we seem to have found the right mesh of time and curriculum at this point*.

*Meaning I will not be surprised if I am back to the drawing board in a few months. 

Working on Life of Fred together

The biggest change has been throwing away all of the math workbooks and trusting Life of Fred as our only math curriculum. My kids absolutely love Fred, but I always felt it was light on math and left it as an occasional "fun" math. I've finally let go (who says we have to work through math in a traditional way!) and the kids and I are finally enjoying math time again. I hope to work through the first 4 books of the series by the end of summer and then re-evaluate. Monkey will probably continuing moving forward, but Boots may need to start from the beginning again to make sure her math skills are solid before proceeding on in the series.

Both kids moved up in reading levels this week!

I also threw all phonics/spelling curriculum out the window. I still think All About Spelling is a wonderful solid curriculum, but it just isn't necessary for my two kiddos. Monkey has proven to be a natural speller. He is a visual learner and simply recognizes correct spelling from all the reading he does. Boots was frustrated with the slow pace of the program and just wanted to spell the words she needed for her notebook writing. She writes all the time and just asks for a spelling if she is unsure. I did add in a handwriting workbook for both kids as I do value neat handwriting.

Other than that, we are just reading, reading, and reading some more. I read to them and they read to me. Greek Myths is a favorite around here right now and we just started the Wizard of Oz.

Painting is easily their favorite thing to do

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