Category:

Promoting Exercise

2/20/2013

Every day we try to get a half hour of determined physical exercise. Dancing to an exercise video, playing an active Kinetics game, going for a walk, building snow men, tobogganing, playing road hockey and so forth. Depends on the weather/season etc.

I've a lad who is quite content to just play or sit quietly in the house, but once I get him going he usually enjoys himself.

Today I got to thinking...it's cold outside and the weather rather inclement do I really want to go for a walk? NO. What can I do to get a boy busy physically? I wanted to do some sight words with him so I decided to use them to get him busy.

I laid 16 of them out on dad's exercise mats and then said Pounce or Jump or Run and Grab the words as I say them. Turn them upside down so when you are done you can test Mom. (he thought that a cool idea).

The rule was...if you don't know the word I will tell it to you and then you must use it in a sentence so I know that you know what it means. AND we will then spell it out loud together. This went over SO well, I will definitely do it again. As we did this I went over some of the rules of spelling. About silent e's and how some words sound different depending on the meaning like Live (live a life) or Live (a live bunny) and such like. He asked lots of questions and bounced around like a crazy lad.

Later we got him out to do some tobogganing.

The size of our hill. Hubby is 2 inches shy of 6 feet. This hill is more than a foot taller than he is.

I built it! :)

Skating, The Basics and First Nations

2/14/2013

We started the day by going Skating. My goal is to skate for 1/2 an hour, more if I can do it. Today we got to 1/2 hr and the lad was done. I skated a bit longer as he learned how to remove his own skates. :) This I've learned works much better if he does it without anyone around.

Did the Regular Basics

I needed to run an errand so we did that first then home to do our regular work. Two questions from Target the Question..which he did a good job at , we did two since tomorrow we are going out for the day. We listened again to regrouping for Subtraction with A+Tutorsoft math he's almost got the gist of it. I"m going to send him to gramma's this weekend with some very basic math subtraction just to give him a bit of confidence that he can do this. Doing the 100's is just messing with his mind. We easily did The Essentials in Writing lesson. Two pages to do today which he was surprised by, but he did the job well and had a basically good understanding as well.

Math - an Issue

Despite me doing a few different things to help my lad learn his basic math facts nothing has really worked so I"m going to the straight rote memorization. To that end today we made some flash cards. i wrote the facts on the front and the answers on the back so they will be self-correcting. He knows the facts up to about the 3+'s, but sometimes he still counts in his fingers (mentally). Though today he told me he figured out how to do the 8 and 9"s.

Mom.. I know they are close to 10 and adding 10's is EASY so I just pretend it's 10 and then I just take away 1 or 2.

I told him Good Job figuring that out. :)

First Nations

We didn't build the sleeping racks in our longhouse yesterday, we're going to build them today but without building the actual longhouse. We're hoping to make it a "see into" type of structure so we can show how it was used. The goal is to put this into our homeschool groups project fair at the end of the year.

And the lad got inspired to do some other building as well. He made some furniture for his angry bird/bad piggies toys. Made from a simple dollar store kit.

Working around weather and more

1/22/2013

Today I had a doctor's appointment so homeschooling was put off for a bit.

Then this afternoon the lad had a gymnastics group time with our homeschool group HOPE. The lad had fun and had an opportunity to practice his gymnastics skills.

The weather played a role in how little homeschooling we got done today as everything took longer to get to and come back from.

When we got home after all the running around we did our math with A+Tutorsoft. We finished up section one. Tomorrow he's going to do some practice sheets to reinforce what he knows.

WOOT WOOT! energy today!

1/15/2013

So today I'm mostly feeling back to normal. It's been a very long four months, but WOOT WOOT!

I was feeling so normal today that we made bird feeders. I had energy to spare and a talkative happy boy at my side. :)

The making of a bird feeder

More feeders made

We did other things as well today

Math. So nice to know he has his place values down well. BUT when I add the factor of money he loses it. SO we'll be practicing with money a bit more.

Reading. He read a bob book from start to finish.

Spelling. I've added the challenge of "the words he didn't know" he has to spell them out. I read about a gal who started doing that with her struggling reader. Giving her spelling words to words that her child "SHOULD" know but didn't, and the act of thinking and having to spell out the words helped that child tremendously and I thought it made for a good way to help the lad out as well.

Reading Comprehension. I read a story and then asked questions about it from our 50 magical stories book. He did well. He liked the story today, it made sense to him and made him ask TONS of questions about it all.

OH>>> and we made waffles this morning. he helped. So we did did home ec and math and listening to directions and all that stuff in the middle of having good food. :)

Phys Ed. We started our day off with a walk around the big block (down to main street and then up a block and back home). We told a game/story as we went and used that story to learn tracking terms. (how to lay a false trail, how to double back, using water to avoid leaving a scent trail and such like).

confusion and amazement

11/13/2012

It amazes and confuses me.

The lad... can do math in his head quite handily.
Ask him to do it on paper and he struggles.
I don't know why.

Lately we are using Xtramath to help him nail down some of those math facts.

He's getting better at reading.
Every night he helps me read. I'm fairly deliberate about choosing books that are somewhat repetitive.

Right now we are using a bible story book geared for 5 year olds but it's written for a parent to read it, and tonight he read a couple of lines completely independently. It was like WOOT WOOT!

The first thing out of his mouth when I congratulated him was ... can I get that bad kitty book yet mom? i Said soon buddy, soon that book will be all yours. :)

Reading

We are continuing to read from our regular four books. it took us a few days to get through "the white seal" but it was a good read. The lad enjoyed it and thought it interesting how the white seal had to beat up the other seals before they would take him seriously...but then again, seals only take seriously the seals that are the biggest and the strongest.

Sight words in context

The lad isn't real keen on just learning sounds, so we've been working on learning sounds inside of words. Today we practiced the PH.... I said it sounds like "FFFFF". he had a hoot with that. :) Not sure why, but he found it very funny.

BUT on some site, I think it was through pinterest but it could have been a link through another site which sends me freebies I found some sight words that are in sentences. The sentences are simple like "my dog is funny". He knows my dog is...but doesn't know Funny, so this way I can just say.. you know these three words buddy... now let me teach you this one. NOW.. see how it looks, listen to how it sounds and then I make a point of letting him read it somewhere else. These words tend to be fairly common so it's really not hard to find them. Gives him that confidence boost that he needs. ah just looked it up, comes from the moffat girls.

Phys Ed

we do try to get in some phys ed regularly. NOT as good at this as we should be, but we're working on it. Lately my health has been a factor. Today the lad had swimming lessons. He thoroughly enjoyed himself today and even independently went down the big slide. I am hoping Hubby can come along next week to see how much he has progressed.

Swimming pics

11/7/2012

i like swimming in Stratford mom. I like the teacher, she helps me learn the right way.

Forward>>

Promoting Exercise

Skating, The Basics and First Nations

Did the Regular Basics

Math - an Issue

First Nations

Working around weather and more

WOOT WOOT! energy today!

The making of a bird feeder

More feeders made

We did other things as well today

confusion and amazement

Reading

Sight words in context

Phys Ed

Swimming pics

Who Am I?

Archives

Categories

2013 TOS Reviews

Other Reviews

Promoting Exercise

Skating, The Basics and First Nations

Did the Regular Basics

Math - an Issue

First Nations

Working around weather and more

WOOT WOOT! energy today!

The making of a bird feeder

More feeders made

We did other things as well today

confusion and amazement

Reading

Sight words in context

Phys Ed

Swimming pics

Who Am I?

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Archives

Categories

2013 TOS Reviews

Other Reviews