Ramblings...

So we have come to the end of our first full “official” year of homeschooling. Since our last post on our weekly plans we have finished up the Saxon Math 1 materials, which marked the end of our formal “regular school” lessons. We are still doing school, just not as intensely.

We’ve gone over some of the lessons in First Language Lessons, we are currently memorizing the first poem, and Child #1 has almost completely learned it.

We took a few days off from schooling just to enjoy a break and have some none school fun.

We picked back up today with six spelling test! Child #1 did amazingly well with them just by sounding out the words. The test were taken from the first grade spelling list on THIS website, which I found thanks to my friend Wendy over at Athena Academy. The list are easy to use and allow us to pick and choose which ones to use based on where we are phonically.

Speaking of phonics, we also started our one phonics lesson a day right before our short little break. We are using Saxon Phonics 1, and we had already been using it at the start of our term back in September. We stopped using it because Child #1 had already learned a lot of the material previously and I thought it would be best if we just focused on applying those concepts to actually reading. This way we were doing more than just a dry and sometimes boring formal lesson.

That made our work load a lot easier and Child #1 has done very well with his reading. Now we are using these lessons to teach phonics concepts that may be a little more difficult *mostly for the ease of spelling in the following year since he can, almost/always, figure out the words while reading on his own*. Saxon Phonics deals with actually learning spelling rules, so my hope is that spelling complex words will be a breeze once the boys have mastered the “rules” of the game so to speak.

For the rest of the week we are going to continue chugging along through First Language Lessons, Saxon Phonics 1, and hopefully *weather pending* we will enjoy a field trip as well.

We will work in some Math and Science starting next week, once I figure out exactly what those lessons will encompass and how we are going to work them in. I’m not shooting for anything formal outside of our phonics work, but I want to keep the material fresh so when we move back into the intense phase of schooling things flow smoothly.

Homeschooling poses its challenges we have learned that over the year, but the challenges bring with them a lot of enlightenment as well.