The school year is winding up and the weather is finally starting to show some promise. After the wettest winter in recorded history, the Pacific Northwest is beginning to dry out a bit. Although I’ve typically ended our “formal” school days in May, I extended it into June this year for a few reasons. First, DJ’s homeschool co-ops and piano lessons don’t end until mid-June. Second, the local schools don’t finish until late June due to all the snow days…
I’m practicing patience this year and letting DJ set the pace. I suggest school time three days a week and then let DJ choose what and how much work he wants to do. Because we have added piano lessons, which require daily practice (albeit for only 5-10 minutes), I’m going easy on the rest of the academics to allow DJ to get used to piano practice. It helps that he really loves music and can already play Hot Cross Buns…
Well, it’s unofficially official – DJ has started pre-kindergarten. Although he is beginning his third year of Montessori at home and he will be 5 years old in just over a month, with a November birthday he would not be able to start public school Kindergarten until next year. I’m somewhat hesitant about assigning grade level since homeschool can be so fluid, but I love the “first day of school” pictures each year. DJ loves all things math, so when we…
DJ is beginning to get back into the rhythm of doing school each week and he’s been doing really well writing his numbers. So I presented static addition with the stamp game. I printed a page of problems for him, making sure that none of the columns added up to more than 9. In the picture above he is working on the problem 1,521 + 3,407. He builds the first numbers with stamps, a green thousand, 5 red hundreds, 2…