Friday, June 11, 2010

And Thus Ends Second Grade...

I almost wrote "not with a bang, but with a whimper..." Except really, it's been a very good last week of school.

I had thought we'd wrap up our school year last week, but the sweet girl has been going strong, especially in math. She wanted to keep going a little longer. And since I felt like we hadn't really had a chance to do a lot of review and wrap-up, I agreed.

It turned out to be a good week for review. It's poured rain -- often! -- and we've had some true humdingers of thunderstorms. S. is terrified of electrical storms at the moment, so even a hint of one makes her want to stay in. And staying in, at least most days, wasn't a bad thing at all this week.

I'm having some slight pangs of "I wish I'd made us keep better notebooks" across the board, especially with our art and music appreciation studies. We essentially didn't notebook for art and music this year, which is fine, except when we got to the end of the year we didn't have that neat little stack of pictures to go through and I missed it. Wait till next year (the mantra of many a baseball fan works for homeschooling parents as well!).

It was fun hearing what the sweet girl especially remembered and enjoyed from her studies. In science, she named our studies of the atmosphere her favorite. In history, she chose Magellan and Queen Elizabeth I as her favorite historical figures. In Language Arts...well, this completely knocked me over, but she told me that this year she especially liked spelling. She liked spelling!! After the spelling debacle that was first grade, I felt like throwing my apron over my head (if I owned one) and yelling "Glory be and the saints be praised!" And she really is becoming a better speller. She's not an intuitive one (and I am, which makes learning to teach it a challenge) but she's getting there.

I was so proud of the leaps in her reading skills this year. She progressed from reading picture books and readers on her own to reading longer chapter books. Though she will always be a picture book girl. Me too.

In math, she told me she especially liked Roman numerals. And she continued to love our daily read-aloud times. Those and math will both continue, albeit in highly relaxed form, as we head into summer.

And here it comes! We've got so much coming up: a visit to my parents in Virginia soon; the sweet girl's 8th birthday with an "under the sea" theme (for which we made the invites today); the beginning of summer camps; VBS planning.

I've been on a writing deadline and have been having major computer problems, but I hope to return you to your regularly scheduled blog posts soon. Happy summer!

6 comments:

Erin said...

Sounds like it was a great year! Congrats on the completion of second grade!

Janet said...

You truly seem like someone who does homeschooling right, Beth -- sometimes I want to scream when I deal w/ homeschooled kids who can't write a decent sentence and know nothing because their schooling consisted of preprinted workbook pages shoved under their noses all day..... Your curriculum sounds wonderful, though!

Congratulations on the end of 2nd grade! (If your daughter were at our elementary school, she'd be graduating upward to "big girl" uniforms... quite the major step.)

Do you know how long you expect to homeschool?

Beth said...

Thanks Erin! It does feel like an accomplishment...for both of us!

Beth said...

Janet, thanks for the encouragement! I really love homeschooling. And the longer I do it, the more I realize how diverse the motivations are that inspire people to do it. I don't mean to speak critically of anyone who chooses it but it does seem to me that there are people who get into homeschooling primarily for what it's NOT (i.e. it's not public school, and they view all public schools as bad) and then there are those who are mostly inspired to do it because of what it IS, or what it can be...a whole way of cultivating a learning life. I think and hope that I am solidly in the latter category.

My curriculum is pretty eclectic at this point -- I really have put it together from bits and pieces of things, trying to make it work best for us and our family and the goals we've set for learning. I need to do some curriculum posts soon, partly because I'm processing how things went this year and planning ahead for next.

Lord willing, we'd love to homeschool the whole way through. A lot depends on our ministry and work situations though. We're still pretty much on mission in our little town. Our finances are precarious (to say the least) which is causing some real anxiety and exhaustion. We're struggling to pay bills, especially health insurance. And we're stretched to find ways to purchase books we need each year, though we're doing all we can with good libraries and the blessings of generous friends who loan us things.

This could easily turn into a post-length comment about the ways we're trying to piece all this together work-wise, so I'll stop! :-)

Unknown said...

I know what you mean about the notebooks. We take seasons where we love to e-notebook everything we do and in other seasons we take it off of our plate. We always wish we had made them every time in hindsight though. They are so much fun to look back through.

Greg and Melody are all grown up and enjoying adulthood. Timothy will be in his junior year of high school next year - I must admit to dreading teaching calculus next year. Being an artist, the more creative subject areas are more appealing. But he has a gift for math (scored in the 96th percentile on standardized tests for many years running now), so we do math with gusto even if it isn't up my alley personally. lol. Like Sweet Girl, Zachary will be in third grade next year. He is my plodder child. All the others really loved everything about homeschooling. Zachary has been harder to keep at it. He gets frustrated very easily and loses motivation as soon as the fun is gone or it gets hard. He loves science though. Even beyond his own science,he hangs around while I teach biology to my online students at the high school level each day. He answers the questions as fast and accurately as they do. Science is the one subject he never hits frustration with, so I plan on making it a theme in other subject areas next year to see if the enthusiasm will bleed into reading, history, and math. He loves watching Myth Busters, histories of inventions, and looking at books such as Castle. So that gives me some good ideas for history hooks to start working with. Math will be easy to turn in to science. Reading will be more of a challenge. I hope to find a list of good elementary fiction and non-fiction books about inventors, inventions, and other science-oriented topics. If you have come across anything to recommend, I am all ears.

Beth said...

Tammy, so good to connect with you! I can't believe your two oldest are grown. I think the last time we saw each other (if I'm remembering rightly) Melody was very, very little. We were at John's mom's (my aunt Myrtle's) for a meal, and I remember Melody was wearing a kitty-cat mask through most of it. :-)

S. loves both math and science. I'm fine with arithmetic, and even enjoy teaching it, but I shudder to think of the years of higher math coming. Praying the Lord sends lots of math loving friends into our lives!

I struggle sometimes to know how to teach science creatively. It's not my cup of tea -- I'm a history nut, and of course I love anything to do with language arts. S. likes history, and will willingly let me enjoy my hobby horse, but she reserves her greatest and truest enthusiasm for science. :-) I tend to teach science through literature mostly because I teach almost everything that way! We do lots of narration. But next year I'm determined to do more hands-on experiments as well. We're going to be using Book 1 of Adventures with Atoms and Molecules.

Have you heard of Beautiful Feet Books? A friend gave me a copy of one of their guides called "A History of Science" -- it's a "literature based introduction to scientific principles and their discoverers." I've been pilfering from their booklist, especially as I consider doing an intro to some scientists and inventors in the modern era, which will correlate with our history studies next year. As I look into some books (picture books, chapter books) I'll pass on any interesting titles I find!

Oh, and you may know this title already, but David Macaulay (the one who wrote Castle) has done a book called "The New Way Things Work" which might be a good book for Zachary.