Tuesday, February 7, 2012

First Day Back!

Today was our first official day for the year! Brianna has been mostly unschooling since she finished up her Gr. 3 work in November and it's Tanya's first day of homeschool ever.

First off I did a reading assessment on both of them and while I expected them to be "ahead" as they're both big on reading, I was surprised to find out that they are both 3 "grade levels" ahead of where they "should" be! Very impressive girls!

Then we moved onto the "Daily Binders" I made up for them. Each day they have Penmanship and Handwriting Practice, penmanship because they are both sloppy writers, handwriting to learn cursive properly. Next is a math drill to focus on speed. Right now we're doing 5 minute drills with addition and subtraction. After that they're doing Boggle Spelling. I've made up blank Boggle boards, filled them in with random letters and they have to come up with as many 3+ letter words as they can that are both real words AND spelled correctly. The more letters each word has, the more points. Who ever has the most points at the end of the week, wins a prize - this week they're working towards a glow in the dark science experiment. Then they also have vocabulary work and journal work with writing prompts. I may add more to the Daily Binder as we go.

We had a totally relaxed, slow day. We'll focus on review for Brianna and assessment with Tanya for a few weeks and slowly add in more actual curriculum. We are doing the Mystery North geography program (more in another post) as well.

2 comments:

  1. I also use a daily binder with my younger kids, only our binders have about 3-4 weeks worth of worksheets in them as well as some "helper Sheets" (such as a 100s chart for my 6-year-old). It's quite handy! The kids just need to slip in a book to read and they have work to bring with them if we have a day full of running here-and-there or visiting family overnight.

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  2. I never thought of that, great for travelling! I'll have to remember that :)

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