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Friday, January 25, 2008

Weekly Report, TOG2 Week 10

The title is deceiving because we haven't used TOG this week. I decided we needed to take a week and get acclimated to using ETC and focus on language arts. This week all we've done is

Bible (read aloud and answer questions, pray)
LA workbook: work on using commas
ETC: work on present/past tense with -ed and then a lesson on -all, -alk
SWO C: worked through a lesson this week
Reading: Black Beauty, Stepping Stones Classic (IR), The Door in the Wall (RA)
Math: lessons 70-74 in Horizons 2
Poetry Memorization: The Night by Myra Cohn Livingston

That's all. We just finished The Door in the Wall last night, Camille said it is her favorite read-aloud!

We are not a history-driven homeschool, we are a language arts driven homeschool and focusing only on LA allowed me to see that this week. History and science are just other areas for LA instruction with interesting content.

Once Primary Language Lessons by Lingua Mater gets here, our LA will be:
- PLL, with maybe 1 day of workbook exercises for reinforcement
- ETC
- SWO
- Reading/Poetry

This year I've been very confused with what to do with language arts in 1-3 grades, I pray that I'm finally getting ahold of it. There are a few things I would do differently and will do with Danny.
- Focus on phonics/reading only until child is at 3rd grade reading level- which means K-1st is for phonics & handwriting, oral narrations only
- 2nd grade will be our starting point for spelling and gentle grammar (like PLL) and start written narrations

 

3 comments:

Sheryl said...

I am following your LA thoughts and plans like crazy. My dd will be in first next year and I find it confusing and overwhelming on which path to take. I enjoy your brainstorms and think out louds.

Sheryl

Jessica said...

Sheryl,
I'm floored! Lol, there's just so many different schools of thought out there for what is important, when you're supposed to do what and how! It's so confusing...

I figured I would share a few things that might be of help to you.

Susan Wise Bauer is published a writing program for K-12 in shifts, the first one will be available sometime before June I think. It's called The Complete Writer and it's for the grammar years.
http://peacehillpress.com/

I think if you like The Well-Trained Mind, this will be valuable and there will be workbooks for this to complete it as a program.

I lean a little more towards Charlotte Mason and since we decided to drop First Language Lessons, I'm not sure The Complete Writer would work for us, especially given that we already have a writing path that we're happy with. As you can tell, I'm not even sure about that! Lol.

Just beware following me, I don't either- I'm just doing the best I can with what I see. I am getting the Core Knowledge Sequence K-8 to make sure we're covering the basics each year and I'll probably post more about that as it applies.

Thank you for your encouragement!
:) Jessica

G said...

I too enjoy reading through your thought processes. I realized lately that we've been tending to drift toward a history based education when really I am more interested in my children focusing on language arts, so I am doing some adjusting of my own.