I am so glad I did not purchase a curriculum. So glad. I have had to scale back my expectations so much, even in the past three weeks. School stresses him out so much. I tell him what to do and he starts whining and says he can't do it. Once I took it away and said he didn't have to do it then (it really was too hard for him), and he started for-real crying. :( So we focus a lot on breaking down even the smallest tasks, and even after a horrendous job, I try my best to smile and compliment him on finishing. The only rule we have is "Don't Give Up!" I think that is for both of us.
So here were my goals, and here's the reality so far:
Math - our first page was adding simple things with little dots he could count. The second page I eliminated the dots and he drew them in and counted them. The third page I had one problem where the number was > 10 and it was too much. I tried a number line and anything above 10 is meltdown city. We tried doing "which one is bigger" and it only works at numbers below 10. I asked him to fill in the blanks like 22,23,24,__, 26, 27 etc. Nope. He can orally count to 29, then it gets spotty. So now, we're practicing writing the numbers - 5 at a time, all the way to 100 - and then play a math/number game like Uno or something.
Reading Practice - we started out reading Little Bear - the same story every day, and by the end of the week he could get most of it. He was actually memorizing it, which I didn't mind, but then he wasn't watching the page, and memorizing it wrong so not really practicing reading at all. The few times i have tried to encourage him to use phonics to sound out a word, has resulted in meltdown. Now, we read out of a Beginners Reader Bible book that I had as a kid, and I assign him one word to say when we get to it. I try to add words from the previous days so he has to pay attention. I do want to start doing phonics again, but I'm still thinking about a way to make it fun. I have the 3 R's by Ruth Beechick - I think I might check that out again. Also www.starfall.com has been good.
Writing - this is going really as I expected. I'm still trying to decide whether it matters to make the letters in the correct order or not. Not spelling, but the natural way of writing like the little arrows in handwriting books. I can't really think of a good example. I really have to cheer him on with a sentence more than 3 words - it looks like too much to him. So we take it one letter at a time.
Spelling was tortourus for both of us, so I scrapped it completely.
Bible, History, Science, Geography - most of these involve me reading a passage, answering his "why" questions throughout, and then afterward he tells me what we read about. It is hit or miss, really. The passages are getting shorter and shorter, and now that he knows the gist of what we're reading about, he just repeats that part every day - ex. "He wants to become a knight!.... uhm that's it" Actually he does really well in Bible stories (and that's the one with no pictures at all - hm) but the rest are eh. I try and coax it out of him, but when I see we're approaching frustration I just smile and say, "thank you, good job" He seems to like reading the books, so, I'm not sure what we're going to do. I think I need to re-think narration, or do some listening exercises or something. I am sure this is ELL issues.
Bible verse, poetry, and song memorization - going well. He likes it, I like it. We just stay on the same passage until he gets it. Actually we're still on the same passages that we started with, but I think next week we'll move on.
Sign Language - he loves this. We have no trouble doing this. We need to work on manners around deaf people, but that will only come by doing, I guess.
Art Appreciation. With Charlotte Mason art, the child would look at an art piece for 10 minutes, and then the parent would take it away and the child would describe it. I set our goal at 3 minutes. After about 1 minute he's done. So I think we'll continue with this, slowly working up the time. The goal is to increase observation skills so we might also add one of those I Spy book things more often.
All in all, this is not how I imagined. If I see a system and really like it, I don't like to deviate, so this has been difficult. We had a 'meeting' after a particularly bad day, listing what he liked and didn't, and he said he like most everything we did. Under 'not like' he listed Little Bear, and Scary Movies (?). Under 'maybe' he listed "Numbers, because it's hard but I have to try anyway" that suprised me.
And we plug on.
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