Week in Review -- Snow Edition

Yes, it is finally snowing starting yesterday,  and we finally got some sort of winter schooling momentum going.   All this January, Paddy and Kieron have been reading for hours a day, and Aidan has been immersed in making notebooks, and everyone was doing school here and there, but we weren't back in our typical schedule.  We still aren't, but it's heading in the right direction. 

Schoolroom


This is also the week that will be remembered as the occasion when Aidan learned how to add by 2's in his head.   For years he has known numbers up to the hundreds and can sequence fine but still didn't get the concept of adding.    All fall we worked on Kumon books adding 1's to all numbers from 2 to 100.   Finally he got the concept of adding enough so that he could add 1 comfortably.   But today was a milestone because if you can count 2 past something mentally, you are really doing something conceptually that you aren't doing by adding 1.   

He is also reading much more fluently now.  And the dot to dot books he loves help his fine motor control and his sense of sequence.  

Paddy and Kieron have been reading especially voraciously this week because a box of books came from Barnes and Noble (the books they ordered with gift certificates they got from the man who supervises their altar serving).    Plus we went to the library and found some books there, and plus I finally let Paddy read the last 3 books in the Harry Potter series, now that he is 11.

Planning and Notebooks

 I have finally dug into planning for the next few months.     A couple of years ago I went back to year-round school schedule (we used to do this but stopped for a few years when we had kids going to school or college or enrolled in virtual charters).    And just last year, I decided to run a January to December school year rather than August to June.    It makes sense because (1) most of my kids have winter birthdays and (2) I always reset things after Christmas holidays anyway because our old schedule deteriorates in the second half of Advent. 

I found a super-pretty downloadable Family Homeschool Planner for a good price.    You can find a review here.     It was just the type of thing I needed to boost my motivation to start getting things reorganized in the homeschool.     Yesterday I had a lot of fun taking digital scrapbook pages and using them as backgrounds for the pages I wanted to add to the binder, so that they wouldn't look plain and boring next to the pretty planner pages.   

Printout of AO Year 6 Overview

Print-out of SCM Typical Weekly Schedule

The Rest of Life

In addition to planning, reading and making notebooks, we had our ordinary routines of CCD, Catholic book club and piano lessons, plus our walks to the post office and the trip to the library.   And SNOW!  (I don't like snow but I don't like creepy rattling-dry thirsty looking trees everywhere either). 

Aidan liked my printout of Cindy's Morning Time schedule (I can't find it right now, but it is here somewhere) and made his own calendar using the boys' altar server schedule as a model.  He worked really hard and there is number sequencing, copywork, and creative use of copy/paste all in there! 

He has also been fascinated with pictures of traffic jams and made his own version using all his cars.  The crayon on the top of the blue van stands for an ambulance's siren lights. 

He is trying to put together a traffic jam binder of pictures.  I notice how whenever I am doing hands-on papery things like Montessori cards a few years ago, foldables last year and photo-editing/ scrapbook-planners this year, he wants to do the same things but using his own interests.  Cute.  I hope he keeps it up because he acquires lots of skills while doing these things, even though he also needs lots of help and support too so sometimes he has to wait while I am working on my things to get to his things.