It’s been a long time since I’ve written a school day post. A combination of technical issues, being busy at work, a 4 year old not wanting to do school and the reappearance of the sun conspired against any blog posting. Looking back at last year’s post, this year is certainly very different. DJ was going gangbusters with school last year and I could hardly keep up. But this year, he is more resistant to anything that looks like school. Or so he thinks. He still does a lot, just not when I suggest it.

In early March, DJ did the Hundred Chain again on his own. He has been SO proud to be able to count all the way to 100, he even does it sometimes without the bead materials. It’s helpful when he can’t sleep to suggest he count sheep.
 Language work is at a near standstill. I tried this activity with him trying to reinforce middle sounds in words which is something he does struggle with. He did the first row of objects okay but then began claiming to not know or just answer wrong.

So I haven’t tried any new language work (aside from handwriting) in over a month. But then, out of the blue about a week ago, DJ was playing card games on my computer. Then he switched to pretending to type in Word and suddenly said, “I’m going to write card game. C, c, c-ard” and he proceeded to type it out, only struggling with the fact my keyboard is in uppercase and he really only knows lowercase cursive.

 Then one weekend while I was watching TV, DJ began playing with his cursive writing app on the iPad. He’s never been a big fan of tracing sandpaper letters so I was surprised with how long he continued with the program. Then I hear him exclaim, “Hey! This game is helping learn to write my letters!”  Hah. Well, yes, it is. Go figure.

 Then be decided randomly to practice writing his numbers. Note that this is not school time. He’s just doing free play and has a paper and pen and this is what he decided to write. He first drew the grid, maybe because I had been showing him the Stamp Game paper that uses a grid format. His 2 is kind of wonky and his 4 is sideways, but otherwise his numbers are pretty good.

 With the sun coming out, we’ve been spending more time with our homeschool social group. We invited some of them to DJ’s yard to play so I decided to fill the sand & water table with sand. It was a HUGE hit with all the kids. There were a total of 7 kids and they all spent a good amount of time at the table that day.

 I attempted to repeat the success of tracing our puzzle maps, this time tracing the South America map. DJ did most of the tracing and he colored in Chile, Uruguay, Ecuador and parts of Argentina but as you can see, I did most of everything else. I had hoped he would finish the other countries later but he wasn’t interested.

 He did attempt the 1000 chain again but we made it to 320 and he came to a dead stop. He began pretending he didn’t know what the next number was, or didn’t know how to read the numbers on the labels. I said that was fine we could do more the next day, but even the next day he wouldn’t count anymore. I’ve tried 2 or 3 times more since and he will not go any further. He says he can count to 100 but counting from 300 to 400 is just too much!

 We celebrated spring break at the zoo with friends. DJ was more interested in climbing the rocks than seeing the Penguins in the display behind him. But that is okay as that’s what they are there for.

 DJ has been noticing time a lot more recently. He’ll ask what time of day it is, or how much time until we need to go somewhere. He likes to set timers to have “just 5 more minutes” and lately he began carrying his “Teach Me Time Alarm Clock” around at night, because he can press the button and it will read him the time. So I invested in this Learning Resources Student Clock to begin teaching him the parts of a clock, hour hand, minute hand, etc. So far we’re only focusing on even hours so 1 o’clock, 2 o’clock and so on as DJ is getting used to looking at the shorter hand to know the hour. Once he is confident with that we’ll had half and quarter hours.

 And finally, he wrote his full name in cursive for the very first time. He messed up on the y so just wrote a correct y next to the error. But I think this is really impressive for his age. And he was so excited shortly after this that he needed to give a get well card to a friend and knew how to sign his own name on the card. Seeing practical uses for what it learned is always a huge hit!  The friend’s mom was surprised when she saw he had written his name in cursive and was amused when he read the letters to her by phonetic sound rather than letter name.

So this may be all he’s done in 6 weeks, but it is all quality work and the rest of the time has been filled with a lot of play time. He’s right where he needs to be.