Wed Is The First Regular School Day This Week

Wednesday January 21, 2009

Back to normal

This was the first complete school day of the week. We both needed to ease into it. We started the day (after a Choose & Do playing Mousetrap) by going through some of the worksheets in our basic curriculum book. We did first sounds, last sounds. As usual Rocket Boy was getting mighty frustrated with his letter formation. I decided to try an altogether different tactic. He told me his favorite lower case letter is “n” so I capitalized on that to remind him that if he’s really good at n that means he can easily write all the letters that are part of the n family. “Letters don’t have families!” So I spent a long, long time explaining how n, m, r, and h are all related in shape. That blew his mind a bit and we spent a good amount of time using the dry erase board morphing those letters into one another. We did the same with o, l, and v. I was surprised and impressed at how well he took to understanding the lowercase when I approached it that way. Tonight I might make up a few of my own worksheets that have him writing the letter families.

As a sideways strategy towards strengthening his writing confidence, we did an exercise from the Drawing With Children book that involves some shape copying. If we do those regularly I think he will get a little more hand control or at least we will be able to identify what stoke or movement is causing him trouble. Usually he as fun with those exercises, but this time he was getting frustrated with himself. Each time I asked him to check back with the original and evaluate his work he got upset at his marks. He clearly had had enough of writing (it was lunchtime).

While he was waiting for lunch to be ready he did a few addition worksheets and a counting by 5s sheet. After a delicious lunch (pirogue, applesauce (for him not me), and steamed broccoli tossed in butter and garlic) we had a little quiet reading time – Christmas at Mud Flat and a book about a cat on moving day, but I am just that lazy that I won’t go in to the other room to confirm the title. At that point I was seriously beat. It was all I could to stay awake. No more cozy books on the couch. We moved on to playing card games: alphabet go fish, alphabet memory, and a crazy run around the house looking for the right card game with constantly evolving rules that Rocket Boy made up on the spot. One day I’ll need to read some Calvin & Hobbes to him. He’ll appreciate Calvinball.

That took us to 3:00 and I officially called it day. On went PBS for some afternoon shows and I promptly fell asleep on the couch as Rocket Boy climbed and bounced around me. Tonight I must go to sleep at a decent hour. We did fine today, but would have done better had I not been so tired.