Monday, May 30, 2011

Day 90 - Last Day of School

Today's Activities:

  • Art - The girls painted their O'Keeffe inspired art. They experimented with using washes, wet-on-wet, and wet-on-dry painting techniques.
  • Writing - Madelyn finished her cursive book. In many ways, I credit this book with being the seed that started our homeschooling journey. Had I not gone to the local teacher store and come away aching to teach, we may not have taken the plunge into homeschooling.
  • Semester Summary - We did a plus/delta exercise. First we reviewed all 90 days of homeschooling to date, then we discussed our favorite things and the things we would change.
Pluses:
  1. Catherine – Clay, Strega Nona books, painting, writing stories about ourselves & fables, bread tasting,
  2. Chloe – watercolor paintings, Lilly's Purple Purse book, reading about faith, Santa Fe Trail, journals
  3. Madelyn – watercolor paintings, Allen Say books, E.B. White books, crafts at home, journal writing
  4. Mommy - I am so proud of all of the hard work we each did. I feel like our first semester was successful in many ways. Of course, I'm blessed with three highly-motivated students. I feel like the girls were exposed to some great literature and I'm a big fan of Singapore Math. I'm firmly committed to giving our children a 'contextualized', well-rounded, multi-lensed, and multicultural education.
Changes:
  1. Catherine – more spelling, more Faith Like Mine books,

  2. Chloe – more science & spelling, more journal writing,

  3. Madelyn – more journal writing, fewer math tests,

  4. Mommy - I feel like we need to add more science. The classes the girls took were great and got them excited but I feel more needs to be done to give them a working science vocabulary. I also want to focus more time on writing, especially teaching minilessons on specific topics, such as commas. I feel we did a fair number of writing assignments but there needs to be more of an every day element to writing as well.



No comments:

Post a Comment