Been awhile since I’ve posted a summary of what we’ve been up to homeschooling wise. After a month of minimal homeschooling in Japan and Korea, and a summer of play, we’ve been making some progress so it’s time to document.
Rather than detailed listing of what we’re doing, this time around I’m going to try and summarize.
Thumper
After a summer of working on her English, we jumped from Guided Reading level K to about M/N. I don’t know why I continue to be surprised that when you have the comprehension you don’t have to worry about learning to read late. Because I keep worrying!
We’ve been working with Explode the Code to get the basics of phonics down more. Right now, she can slough through The Odyssey by Mary Osbourne, which is about Level S. I’m breathing a sigh of relief that she’s now close to 3rd grade English reading level and almost caught up.
In Chinese, she started with zhuyin version of Harry Potter, then went ahead and just read the other two without zhuyin. I’ve having her wait a year till she reads Harry Potter #4, as content-wise she’s not mature enough for it. This is the biggest thing occupying her life right now. Everything is about Harry Potter. She dreams about it, she does her Chinese sentence composition about Harry Potter, her first country in our flag study is England.
I need to figure out how to milk this.
After reading each book, she watches the movie in English and also can listen to the English audio. I can’t say enough how happy I am we’re traveling with Fleur’s kids. Thumper has a friend to go on and on about Harry Potter, in Chinese with. It’s so important to have that other person to practice what you read, to pull out, so to speak, the language you’re receiving.
We seem kind of stuck in math, reviewing multiplication. We’re starting on fraction addition with different denominators and also decimal addition.
I’ve managed to squeeze in one science, learning about the rotations of the earth and the reasons for the seasons. Hopefully, after we’ve settled into our homeschool routine, we can do other presentations. I’ve been so focused on getting her to read at grade level English, we’ve mostly dropped everything else to minimal level for now.
Astroboy
Being the opposite of his sister, Astroboy’s big jump is in math. While we traveled, we used Montessori Math app to learn addition/subtraction facts and operations. By the middle of this month, he’s mostly mastered those and suddenly showed an interest in multiplication.
So we’ve been doing different multiplication work, like more Montessori Math and skip counting. One night he whizzed through all 12 of the skip counting worksheet I had for him, then asked to do it again the next morning. Another day, I showed him the Montessori Multiples tables a and b, where you fill out the multiplication tables up to sum of 100, and he insisted that he stay up to finish those two tables.
I’m trying my best to make the whole thing interesting and not just worksheet filled or make him memorize the multiplication tables the Chinese way like I did Thumper. I asked her to do so because she’s an auditory learner. For Astroboy, we’ll weave the Chinese memorization into our work instead.
I will probably go the route of how he learned addition/subtraction: no stress work using apps, supplemented by Montessori concrete materials. But, he’s always jumped quickly through the concrete materials and prefers to play with abstract numbers on paper. It’s quite different from Thumper, who would do much better having the concrete material in front of her while she learns.
In the English front, we’re working through Explode the Code and All about Reading. With AAR, we’re on learning our short vowels and have daily reading practice of words. Similarly, I ask him to read to me in Chinese daily. But next month, I think we will go back and focus on zhuyin. Without that work in tones, I think he’s stuck at his current level.
Plus I really need to read more to him. He just has this tendency to read without understanding what he is reading.
Whew. I know I’m forgetting stuff. But these are the main obsessions of the children this month.
