Friday, March 15, 2013

Homeschooling Journal 3/15

I've become an accidental homeschooler.  And by "accidental" I mean that my son just got expelled.  He's in second grade.  Awesome, right?  At least he got expelled from a private Christian school.  If he'd been expelled from the public school, we would be in much deeper kimchi.  As it is, he's just continuing the 3-generation family legacy of getting kicked out of Christian education establishments.  (Don't ask, the stories aren't as illustrious as they sound.  OK, maybe they are.  Some day I'll write about them.)

Anyway, this kiddo has some behavior "issues" that make him a little tough to handle.  (OK, at *lot* tough to handle.)  And one of his issues is difficulty with transitions.  It takes hims 8-12 weeks to acclimate to a new school or environment.  And during that time, there's a lot of stress and chaos and visits to the principal's office.  So, with about that much left of the school year, it didn't seem like a good idea to plop him back into public school, just so he could spend the rest of the year getting in trouble and trying to catch on to a different curriculum.  So, we're homeschooling until June unless I blow a gasket and hit the panic button; which I'm giving myself carte blanche to do, if I'm totally losing it.  Then (If I need a break from him) he'll go back to public daycare school for the rest of the year, so I can take a breather.

Homeschooling started off this week with a real bang.  For the purposes of this blog post, "bang" will be defined as the worst stomach and intestinal bug that I've experienced in 20 years.  Three out of the five of us have been hit so far, and not much schooling was going on.  But despite all that, I'm not deterred.  And today is the first day this week that everyone is well, and the two girls are both at school.

So, today, we are trying in earnest.  But since this wasn't planned, I don't have much in the way of curriculum going on, so I'm going to log some of what we're doing here.  These posts will probably be pretty boring, as I'm going to use them as a journal of sorts.  So, feel free to ignore the "Homeschooling Journal" blog posts.  Today, we

-Worked on understanding simple division using a worksheet (which he didn't understand) and finally using raisins on the table.  Jacob still confuses division and multiplication.  Using the raisins helped a lot.  Then, Jacob created a Lego scene, and used Legos to demonstrate division into groups.

-Found a free typing tutor online.  Jacob loved this, and worked on it for 45 minutes.  He is on the Home Keys.

-Did PE outside with the dog

-Started reading The Wheel on the School

Earlier this week (when I was sick) Jacob also:

-Played with a Wild West sticker book, and created a "Bank Robbery at High Noon" scene with the stickers.  Then, he wrote a paragraph about the bank robbery.  First he created a "sloppy copy" and then we did corrections, and he rewrote a final draft.

-He played a Lego battle with his brother, who was also home sick.  Then, he wrote a 4 sentence paragraph about the battle, including a rough draft, corrections, and final draft.  We are starting to talk about the "hamburger" paragraph concept.