What's Working...

So I've taken the last few weeks and have organized my thoughts and goals. We have been doing "school" on the days that Parker does not have preschool and I am filtering ideas and finding what works...actually what doesn't work. For example - Parker's attention span to sit at the table and look at charts - no matter how colorful - and do w

orksheets only is about 15 minutes. My original plan was to get some kindergarten materials for now and over the summer and see if he breezes through those. That way wecould begin 1st grade stuff in the fall and spend more time in school. I'm sensing this is not going to work - not because the work is too hard but because he isn't able to sit at the table and focus long enough to learn the material WELL.

I've realized about myself that I want to homeschool a 6th grader - concentrated schoolwork until one or two o'clock in the afternoon. That's not where we are so I'm changing gears. I've decided to do themes or units each week. I think I can incorporate math, phonics, reading and handwriting into the themes every day with gam

es and activities. I can find fun science activities a few times a week and fit in cool lessons about people and real world things to talk about, read about, find videos about, ect.

My goal between now and September is to get him reading. He's really good at consonant - vowel - consonant words and he has several sight words as well. We have been using StarFall.com, ReadingEggs.com, Phonics Pathways and Explode the Code. I'm also trying to read A LOT more than we do now. We just started Charlotte's Web and he's into it. Here are some things that have also been working for us:

This is Lego word builders. I just put w

hite tape on the side of each duplo lego and wrote a letter

on it. I wrote a list of about 15 words and he built each one and got a prize at the e

nd for getting them all right.

This next picture is a sight word game with twister rings. We can connect the rings in any way that we want to make a cool path. We pretended that everything outs

ide of the rings was lava. I called out words and he had to jump to the correct word

without falling off. Then he called out words and I jumped - this turned out to be much more effective because he thought it was hilarious to watch me jump a long distance - he had to get the word correc

t or my jump was not quite as dramatic.

This one is just a word family activity. He was not a fan of this one ha ha. I think it was boring? He did it though...

This last picture is a board game we made up. We rolled dice and moved Lego Ninja's that number of cards. When we landed on a card with a sight word on it, you had to read

it. If you got it right, you kept the card. If you got it wrong, the card stayed out. The game ended when all the cards were gone and the winner was the person with the most cards. Parker really likes to play "teacher" and correct me. I can get him to do work that he doesn't want to do by asking him to "be the checker". He always knows when I've made a mistake.

We are having lots of fun and working hard!