Totally Flipping Brianna's Math

Brianna has several issues that are just part of her life. She has Sensory Processing Disorder, Central Auditory Processing Disorder and probable Dysgraphia. Such is life. We deal with it. Now, however, we are looking at the probability of Dyscalculia.

Brianna is a smart child. Regardless of her alphabet soup of letters between her diagnosed disorders and her probable ones, she still excels in many areas of life. Except math. Math has always been her sore spot. In a sea of straight As in everything else, the highest grade she's ever gotten in math is a C, but most often it's a D or (currently) an F.

While she seemingly has no issues with grades 1 through 4, grade 5 hit her like a lead balloon. It took her 3 tries to make it through Gr. 5 math. She is now on her 2nd try through Gr. 6 math. And yet, she's doing Gr. 8-10 in most other subjects.

Going into the high school years and the fact that she needs at least Gr. 11 math for the college course she wants to take, we obviously need to figure something out.

What we're going to do first is have her do almost all of the chapter tests (thankfully no test anxiety here) from grade 2 to 5. That will hopefully pin point the specific areas she's struggling with.

From there, we're going to spend extra time with Khan Academy, drills and randomized math questions in problem areas. Hopefully we will go back with Math Mammoth in a few months as both she and I enjoy it. We are also looking into Life of Fred and MobyMax.

Weekly Wrap Up - End of the Regular School Year

We school year round but we do move to a much lighter schedule in the summer. In part because Brianna has several activities (Park Leaders and swimming for example) but also, simply because it's summer! However, even our last few weeks of "regular" school are much slower. Partially because of just having a busy time this June, but also just because the weather's getting warmer and we want to be outside! So this weekly wrap up is a couple weeks

After a few months of refusing, I finally convinced her to write in her notebook. Here we worked on her name, drawing 4 shapes and writing our phone number

We did our Iceland country study.

Brianna moved into volume in math and pouted that the world wasn't full of little cubes (a la Minecraft?) to count. After spending 10 minutes whining about not being able to figure out volume without the cubes, she finally read the instructions and asked "is it really just area times the height?!?!?!" Insert mom giggling in a corner.

She finally finished her Gr. 5 Math Mammoth curriculum (as said in earlier posts, she repeated it due to not fully understanding and shoddy work ethic). I base our homeschool on Mastery, which we view as 80% or higher. Brianna got 74% on the curriculum's provided final test, but as the last time she got 51%, I passed her because of the fantastic improvement!

Olivia is more and more interested in time. She knows what the clock looks like for morning snack, lunch, afternoon snack and supper, but doesn't really understand how that corresponds to "time". We're also working on the span of time - yesterday, today, tomorrow, ect...

Brianna occasionally joins me for my walks. This week we did a 3.5 mile walk and enjoyed some of the beautiful scenery in our city

Brianna did her final English essay as an argumentative essay on her bedtime. After explaining what she needed to do (on her choice of topic), she ran away with it. She did fantastic!

By the way, she won. Her bedtime was moved :)

Brianna loves Report Cards. I don't "issue" one at specific intervals, but I do generally at least provide her with one at the end of June, before we move into our summer schedule. Not surprisingly, she was very happy with this one!

Olivia chose to do Pirates for her next unit. We got some great printables from Homeschool Creations, 1+1+1=1, Over The Big Moon and Homeschool Share.

She LOVED this pirate game I found

"Ps are eeeeeeeasy"

Olivia is not completely ready for the You Can Read program. She enjoys the work but doesn't seem to grasp the concept of remembering that this specific combination of letters = this specific word. No biggie. We'll give it another go in the fall. As she would only be going into Senior (or 5 year old) Kindergarten this September if she were in public school, I'm not at all worried about her "lack of reading".

Linking up with Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers

Day in the Life

I haven't done one of these in a while (last one was here)

This Day in the Life starts at midnight, since I was still up, dyeing (is that a word? lol) and cutting my hair. Yeah, I'm a night owl. Thankfully though, I'm lucky enough to have a hubby, a morning person, who happens to get off work shortly before the other morning person (Olivia) gets up. Meaning me and the other not morning person (Brianna) can sleep in.

2:08am - I go to bed

6:52am - Olivia wakes up and calls for either me or Lee. Thankfully I hear Lee talking to her so I can go back to sleep

8:59am - one minute before my alarm goes off, the phone rings *grumble, grumble*

9:02am - ship Lee off to bed and try to figure out why Olivia shirt is sopping wet

9:04am - I sit down with a coffee and discuss with Brianna whether she's really still sick or if she wants to just play the DS again all day. Not having to go back to bed wins and Brianna finds breakfast.

9:13am - talk to my sister and find out the my BIL is driving Tanya to school today. He says they're leaving at 9:45... whether that's am or pm, who knows (my BIL is notoriously slooooow)

9:33am - send Brianna to get dressed and do her morning chores and eat a bagel. Olivia's curled up on the couch watching her shows.

10:02am - The girls sit and play the DS together while we wait for Tanya to get here. I get working on printing out school stuff

10:06am - Wooo! BIL wasn't as late as usual and Tanya is here.

10:08am - Olivia tries to bounce her face off the floor so we make things all better by "feeding" the ferrets (shoving bits of cat food through the cage bars)

10:15am - The girls settle down to fixing their longitude/latitude chart for their Mystery Class from last week. Olivia insists on doing her school work too

10:32am - Tot School is ditched for Toopy and Binoo

10:34am - tell the girls that they better get school done so we can go to our field trip (which probably wasn't the best idea cause now they're yapping about the field trip instead of doing school lol)

10:37am - somehow, they lapse into talking about Terry Fox....

10:49am - explaining to the girls about their Mystery Class journal page (in which they predict what their photo period graphs will look like at the end of the month) that that's only 2 weeks from now and not the summertime so they should make educated guesses based on the current photo periods and now much they would move by the end of the month (meaning we probably won't suddenly jump from 11.5 hrs of sunlight to 15 lol)

11:26 am - Finally starting the girls on other school work, Tanya, English and Brianna, math.

11:30am - Olivia demands a red crayon to do school work in her notebook then *needs* to show Grandma her sunglasses

11:40am - Handwriting practice talks about the Wright Brothers so we head off on a mini rabbit trail about the first flights.

11:48am - Hook Olivia up with a peanut butter sandwich and a bowl of yogurt for lunch, big surprise, the yogurt gets put on the sandwich

11:52am - my sister shows up to go to school (I live next door to her college)

12:04pm - set up the girls with their lunches and have them continue school work since they piddled around all morning taking 2 hours to do 30 minutes of work.

12:22pm - argue with Olivia that the sunshine streaming into her room at nap time isn't too dark, but too bright lol

12:28pm - Let Lee know that we're leaving and will be back before Olivia gets up so he can still lounge in bed.

12:36pm - Leave for the Invertebrates Workshop and the Ontario Power Generation Visitors Center

2:04pm - Back from the OPG center. The girls got OPG balloons and run balloon races through the kitchen.

2:13pm - Back to school work. The girls are finally done their review/assessment stuff and are working through actual curriculum.

3:04pm - random discussion on the difference between telescopes and microscopes (which has a lot to do with the math they're working on lol)

3:26pm - Olivia gets up and wants to wake up Daddy and have a snack. The girls hear about Olivia's snack and suddenly fall hungry

3:52pm - The girls each earned an extra page of school work for their dawdling

4:08pm - FINALLY onto this week's Geography

4:36pm - My sister comes back from school and we discuss her class while the girls screw around do their work

6:02pm - Tanya is finally done her work and goes home

6:06pm - Olivia's balloon pops and she's soothed by doing her dinosaur pre-writing page

6:13pm - Olivia switches to tracing her name and coloring Dora shapes and with Brianna finally done she plays with the Canada magnet set

6:22pm - Brianna and Olivia declare snuggle time before supper to watch Backyardigans

6:40pm - supper time!

6:59pm - I reply to an email from The Canadian Homeschooler about putting together a blog post about homeschooling in Ontario

7:03pm - Olivia suckered Lee into watching cartoons in our bed and Brianna slooooowly got started on her evening chores.

7:08pm - actually paying attention to the tv (when it's not Toopy and Binoo on) lasted about 3 seconds longer than it normally did and Olivia's off to the tub while Brianna takes 6 years to do a load of dishes.

7:14pm - discussing with Brianna what 30 minutes of exercise a day really means.... ya know, swinging your legs off a chair while you daydream doesn't count...

7:27pm - Brianna's turn in the shower, she's on a 10 minute time limit or she stay in there til the water runs cold.

7:42pm - after braiding Olivia's hair she wants to play her game (ReadingEggs). She's still stuck on a sounding out lesson  so we switch to StarFall.

7:58pm - Olivia's off to snuggle with Daddy before bed (and con him into watching Cat in the Hat lol) and Brianna is making up her own version of Go Fish!

8:31pm - Olivia come down for "one more kiss" and Lee puts her to bed.

9:03pm - Brianna decides that she's going to exercise before bed and starts running in circles in the living room

9:34pm - Lee leaves for work

9:39pm - I ship Brianna off to bed and explain to Olivia that it's supposed to be dark in her room and no she doesn't need a flashlight.

9:45pm - I sit at my desk to check facebook and try to find Tanya an English curriculum that isn't book based (while I think book based curriculum is great, I prefer ones that CAN be used with books instead of one that MUST be used with books)

10:43pm - No luck in finding more than 2 worksheets for Tanya so far, but I did find 2 French sites (here and here) and a Catholic site for my sister....

10:52pm - Give up for the night and work on some marking from last week

11:57pm - Organize pictures and links for today's blog post

12:52am - off to bed!!

Handwriting

Today we added learning handwriting to our daily school work. Brianna is thrilled. She immediately wanted to write her name. I explained she needs to learn to form the letters then she'll be able to write her name. She did pretty good for the first day. Some wiggly letters, but not bad. She's happy this'll be part of her everyday stuff.

I can't believe the end of this week will be the end of our 2nd term! Right now we're doing 6 week terms for Brianna (and Daddy) to see how she's progressing. That means we've been at it for 12 weeks now! It seems like only a few weeks ago that we started!

She's really liking the new system we started (here and here). So far she's earned 4 stars towards her 20 for a free day, and is liking earning her electronics time each day. We've also decided that if she wants she can save her earned time and add it to the next day to make it a longer period.

Changes

Couple new things going on around here. 

First off, I was tired of hearing what am I doing today? What am I doing next? So I bought a file folder of sorts. It has 7 regular sized file compartments and an extra expandable section that can fit her larger workbooks.

Now I can put everything in order of how it's gonna be done, workbooks or worksheets included. In the case of her larger workbooks, I've put them at the back in the expandable compartment and then left a sticky note on the next file to tell her which book and which pages.

This will also make grading easier as I'll have all the books and papers I need in one spot rather than having to go through all her binders and workbooks. Then, once I'm done grading, I can load up the next day's work.

Second change is for the amount of dawdling. I came across this on a blog I follow and thought what a great idea! Of course, like most homeschoolers do, I found an idea I like and changed it around some to suit our family.

I'm going to estimate how long it should take Brianna to complete *all* of her school work, adding a bit of extra time for the random drink/bathroom breaks and set a timer towards that.

I'm not sure if I'll do an actual bingo sheet or just make it adding up to a specific amount of days. But since we already have a reward system of sorts in place I figured I needed something else as a reward for no dawdling. So I thought, what about a day off with no school once she hits that number/fills her card? She's asked me about PA/PD days like school, so I figure it'll be a hit! 

Grading

I totally slacked in grading this week. Normally I'm pretty good at grading every night or at least every second night. Yeah, not this week. I was 7 school days behind. *blush* Apparently I need to make myself get back into the everyday habit.

On another grading note, Brianna kept coming over to see her grades (she's in love with knowing what she got). So we had a mini lesson in doing your best when I pointed out to her that the 100% she got one day gets dragged down massively when the next day she speeds through her work without even trying and only gets 50%. She went to bed tonight saying how she's gonna do her super best on Monday :)

A Week in Review

I had a crap week homeschooling wise lol I haven't done any marking since last Wednesday (I really should do that). Brianna's also still lacking a report card from the first term cause my laptop sucks (I should just go to the library and print one there). 

Brianna, on the other hand, had a fairly good week.She had a bad day yesterday that involved being separated from the rest of us to do her work. But the rest of the week has been good. We actually got all work done before lunch. 


She also seemed pretty excited about the idea of the reading challenge and picked up several books from the library yesterday. Let's just home the enthusiasm remains.