Friday, June 26, 2009

Summertime Homeschooling

We have finished the French lessons provided by OHVA. I'm not sure why they thought 12 classes would last Lola all summer... So we created our own.
Before the State of Ohio gets a chance to destroy our pubic libraries, I went up to Stark Main and borrowed all of their learn French and Spanish CD kits, I also borrowed some workbooks, easy picture books and Learn French CDs. This next part may not be legal so cover your eyes.... we burnt the CDs into Coco's computer... I created photocopies of specific pages and I also created worksheets of my own and quizzes for Fifi and Coco. Okay... uncover your eyes...
I have hopes that OHVA's nonsummer language classes are more then 12 classes and a bit more advanced. Lola truly finished the entire seasons lessons in 10 days.
For the rest of the summer all three girls will be listening to a language lesson per day and completing a worksheet. Then at night, when we are reading, the girls read one French storybook together. They may not understand all of it but they are understanding more and more words each time they read them. I bought new story books at the Children's Museum of Maine when we were there on vacation last week.

I have also decided that each day, each girl with make a journal entry. At first we were doing it to work on compiling our thoughts on a page. I give them simple topics and they have to elaborate. Such as "My Favorite Part of Yesterday was..." and they can just finish the sentence or write and entire page. As we have been writing more and more, we have started to work with spelling, punctuation, grammar, sentence structure... I didn't want to start with correcting those for a specific reason. I wanted the girls to feel free to write whatever they were thinking. Now, in Week 3, we are correcting Week 1's journal entries. Because it is summer and I still feel a little guilty for making them "do school" in the summer, I am not making them rewrite the entire journal entry. I am letting them proofread with a RED PEN and find their own mistakes as well as make their own corrections. I have found, they are more willing to add onto their entries, as well as more then capable of finding their own mistakes. (Its all in the magic pen, I swear)

Lastly, we are keeping up with our math workbooks, have dropped our Science unit, went on a wonderful vacation, and are spending alot of our time just playing outside.
I firmly believe we loose what we don't use.. so we do simple math everyday. This helps keep the girls up on their math facts. Not all math has to be in a math book either... Uncle Steven had a birthday and Coco's math for the day was this... If you are 9 years old, I am 6 times older than you, minus 2... how old am I? We spent the next two hours figuring our how old all 37 members of our family at the reunion were. We used our 9's table mostly (hey shes 9 lol) but we worked out a few tricky problems and even some division.

I should post soon with vacation pics and the girls highlights of their trip.