As the weeks pass by, we’ve been making steady progress with DJ’s school work. Not much new to highlight in a post, but building slowly on what he already knows. 

As DJ has been working through the Addition Tables booklet I could tell that he was rather frustrated in his inability to write several of his numbers well. So we’ve been practicing writing them to boost his confidence. This photo is a candid shot of his glee at how well his #3 came out. As much as DJ tries to avoid work that he struggles with, he sure gets a huge thrill out of doing good work. 

For DJ’s letter writing practice, I decided to purchase the New American Cursive curriculum. Although DJ recognizes all of his letters, when it comes to writing them, he would rather make up his own way to do it. Even with his name that he had been somewhat proficient with, I found him writing the d (lowercase) by drawing the line, then the circle, then picking up his pencil to add the lead line and finally picking up his pencil again to add the trailing line. Huh?  So my hope is the workbook will be a more systematic approach with less direct instruction from me to guide him in the right direction. 

For writing with the movable alphabet, DJ  is making strides and gaining confidence. He’s finally beginning to “hear” all the sounds in a word, beginning, middle and end which had been an obstacle to his writing and reading progress. 

DJ still really enjoys math. He’s done some more work with the snake game – creating a colorful snake with random bead bars from 1 to 9 and then converting it to a golden snake by counting out 10 beads at a time and replacing them with golden 10 bars. 

I decided to show him the verification phase the last time but I should have waited. You’re not supposed to introduce verification until the child is proficient enough for their exchanges to be accurate. I had thought DJ had been careful but unfortunately his count was off by 5 and I could see the disappointment on his face even though he didn’t say anything. 
For verification, you line up each of the golden bead bars from the completed snake. Then you arrange all the original colored bead bars in order from longest to shortest. Finally, you match the colored bars to each 10 bar, making exchanges as needed. So for the first 10-bar, you choose the longest colored bar (for example an 8) and then select the shortest bar that will make it a 10, so 2 ones or a two). If you don’t have those, you’d need to exchange and three, etc. If you completed the snake properly, every 10 bar will match to a combination of colored bars with none left over or short. 

Although I sometimes think DJ is basically done with the Sensorial materials he still occasionally surprises me by selecting them to work with. During a recent conference call for work, I found DJ pulling the Brown Stairs off the shelf. At first I was disappointed because I expected he would just use them as ramps for his cars. But instead I watched in awe as he meticulously built the stair vertically, measuring each step with the thinnest prism. When he finished, he interrupted my call to show off his work, he was so proud of his achievement. 

On another day, he selected the Constructive Triangles, thinking it would be “easy” work because he had done it before instead of a “hard” new project I was trying to show him. So I took the chance to add some vocabulary work we hadn’t done before and I was pleasantly surprised by how interested he was in it. 

Although DJ has worked extensively with various triangles and other shapes, I hadn’t before taught him the words equilateral, isosceles and scalene or acute, obtuse and right angles. Those are the types of new words that usually would send DJ running for the hills, covering his ears. But this time he stayed engaged and even turned to the Geometric Cabinet to find other examples to compare to. He particularly liked the word acute – as he loves “cute, little things”. 

Science is where DJ has been placing most of his focus in very unexpected ways. I’ll have to write another post on our progress with the Building Foundations of Scientific Understanding curriculum. But in the meantime, DJ has begun to ask very deep, thought-provoking questions – like how did the universe begin? And – where did the first humans come from?

Thanks to a very helpful Facebook homeschooling community, we discovered two amazing beginner books for these topics. Older Than the Stars is a simple, lyrical introduction to the Big Bang theory, the origin of atoms and elements, the formation of stars, suns and planets and the beginning of life as we know it. Grandmother Fish tells a very basic tale of evolution from fish to reptiles to primates to humans and ends with a great “family tree” that also includes plants, invertebrates, amphibians and birds showing how all life on earth is interrelated. DJ ate these books up with immense interest and was thrilled to have a deeper understanding to his questions. After a few weeks of reading them over and over and over (and over again) he finally seems satiated for moment. 

But I have to take a rest when I can because who knows what questions he’ll start asking next!!