So I got a reminder today of why I am homeschooling. A friend of mine who is a first grade teacher in town was telling me about her new classroom. Two local elementary schools closed last year, including hers. She is going to have 10 more students than she did last year, and her paperwork is swamping her. They are still using extremely outdated computer systems, which crash all the time, and the budget is so tight the teachers are taking forced unpaid furlough days. It is quite ridiculous what is going on in this school system. Most of the kindergarten teachers in the district are new, with class sizes of 23 to 28, no paras in the classroom. Remembering that type of classroom environment makes me really feel like homeschooling is a great choice for us. I know I say this a lot, but it was such a hard decision to make, and I like to remind myself of why we made it.
So today we spent time with the letter R. Eliza was so funny about it during dinner. We were discussing spaghetti squash for tomorrow and she said we couldn't have that because today we were learning R. Woohoo! She knows what we are doing! It was very exciting for me, because it is hard to tell how much she picks up, since she is so much younger than CJ, and less likely to show what she is learning. They both came up with many R words for their letter poster, and were excited all day to identify R foods. We reviewed all the letters we have done so far, reading all our words on the letter posters and writing the letters in the carpet. We practiced holding the pencil and writing lines and circles. They improve a bit every day. I guess the most important part of all of this is to be consistent and provide lots of opportunities for learning. We color or write every day. We have fun with play dough every day. We read books and words every day. We count and sort and have conversations about weather every day. We work in the garden and talk about animals. So even when I think I haven't done a good job with education we have still spent time improving their minds. That makes me feel better.
Their colds are better but we are all still feeling kind of yucky. We are snuffly and cranky from feeling this way. At least they had reasonably good appetites today. We had raisins and rice cakes for breakfast with regular milk. I couldn't think of any good R foods for lunch so we had fruit and peanut butter sandwiches. For dinner we had roast chicken, rice pilaf, roast squash and some yummy non R foods. It took a long time for CJ to even attempt to eat any of his dinner. He got the hiccups and then got really ridiculous and silly. At least they are still happy when they are sick.
We talked about animal types and about animals we will see when we go to the zoo. We made some predictions about what we will see and we talked about what our favorite animals are. We sang Old McDonald with every animal sound we could think of. Their favorite was a frog, because ribbitt starts with R. Our main activity today was reading though, since it is my favorite R thing to do, and it was a good quiet thing to do while they still felt icky. I also needed to get the house cleaned today, so they spent an hour watching Super Why and Backyardigans, since my obnoxious cable box decided not to record Dinosaur Train and Sesame Street.
The really ridiculous part of the day was when the refrigerator decided to overheat the compressor and turn my ice cream into milky soup. It seems to be working now, but now I am worried about having to replace it. Not fun. R for repair person? Certainly not a word I want to deal with.
My brain has turned to rice pudding, and I need to rest my weary eyes and body. I am going to read a novel with a ridiculous plot, something to relax me. Hopefully tomorrow my brain will have switched back on and I can provide a more interesting read, in the mean time, thank you for visiting!
No comments:
Post a Comment