What We're Working On

I think I need to develop some goals that I would like my children to achieve. I'm reading on one of my groups that identifying the skills you would like to work on in your children and then working backwards from there to find all the ways to teach that skill. That sounds so much better than going to the school supply store and browsing around to find out what 2nd and 3rd graders are supposed to know. I've done that and it's such an incredible waste of money. Once I spent $500 on a first grade curriculum for my then Kindergartener, it concentrated mostly on teaching reading skills. Mom's were promised that at the end of the school year your child would be able to read "Red Robin Fly Up!". Well, my daughter was interested when the packaged curriculum came in the mail. She immediately pulled out the book with the bird on the cover. Look Mom! "Red Robin Fly Up!" Then she read it to me.

I would like to work on Life Skills with my children. Manners, taking proper care of animals, keeping yourself and your home "clean" (I have a unique definition for this), maintaining a conversation and staying on topic, using proper tone of voice when expressing themselves (not speaking Whine-ese, etc.) Riding a two wheel bike for Josie. Swimming with more confidence, hopefully both of them learning to swim in the deep end. All of our close friends have pools.

I would also like to try working on Math skills. I'm going to attempt to do a lot of this math without worksheets or curriculum. Some skills need paper, but my kids do very well without it.
Today I began teaching Jake "Fast Doubles". 1+1=2, 2+2=4, 3+3=6 etc... all the way up to 10. I will teach them in numerical order for a few weeks, then I will begin to ask him to solve these problems out of order. I also made silver dollar pancakes this morning. There are three of us, and I made 21 pancakes. How many can each of us have? Josie raised her hand (how cute). "Seven!" Now Jake knows some division too.

We are also going to do the summer reading program with the library. There is a kick off celebration at the World's Fair Park in June, and we'll go to that. We have the reading logs already and read three books each yesterday.

One book Josie was reading is called "Wormology". There are lots of projects that kids can do with worms and dirt and things you find around the house. I need to go buy some mason jars. A lot of these experiments in kids science books call for them. I also need some ammonia, supposedly worms are attracted to it and I'd like to see that experiment for myself.

So far I've covered Life Skills, P.E., Reading, Math, and Science. Surprising that I haven't gotten around to art. Josie wants to make pinch pots I know. So maybe we'll do that. Weaving is fun and good for fine motor skills. Jake needs lots of those activities.