What A Whirlwind

I’m back. Well we’ve been back. Back to school that is. I haven’t blogged yet this year because it’s been much of a whirlwind of preparing, hand writing, teaching, and organizing a curriculum for 3 separate grade levels. It is tedious, not to mention the time customizing it to their individual learning styles and interests. I have a FRESHMAN!! What does that even mean?? Could it possibly be only 3 more years of high school and I have to let one little bird fly the nest to pursue his goals and aspirations? Yes, this is TRUTH. I am very excited about the DEVELOPING  and blossoming mind of my oldest and all that he has transpired to be. He is very independent, a self driven learner, very curious, inspirational, and full of ideas. He’s such an analytical character and really has had the drive to be an engineer since he was old enough to know.

I can tell stories of him at 3 years old pulling remotes apart and figuring out how to put the batteries back in the proper way to get it to work again. Other parents were buying their children toys and all my son wanted was old electronics and still to this day does! We really have exciting goals planned for these 4 years. Mostly driven by him, but I do help steer. We plan on having a well-developed portfolio of engineering projects, community involvement, and much more before he hits the college classroom. I hope to have him taking college courses as soon as possible.  He is also very interested in 3-D printing. He has been participating in working with the Library and creating videos for 3-D printing projects. So far they have created a dwarf from Lord of The Rings, The “ring” from Lord of the Rings, and many more. You can view his great videos HERE.

My other two, 2nd and 5th graders, are doing very well so far this year. We are currently studying a more traditional curriculum for the beginning of the year and then branch out to some Electives for the 2nd half of the year. We are studying English, math, science, social studies, and writing.

We are very big on these interactive notebooks this year. I am trying a little bit tighter of a regiment for the first half to help them prepare for what’s coming ahead. All three are doing fractions right now, but on their grade level. The picture above is 4th grade fractions for my 2nd grader and my 5th grader is adding, subtracting, multiplying and finding the lowest terms, while my Freshman is using a college level Algebra workbooks.

They did some great reading over the summer. My oldest read the whole Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter series, and my two youngest read Harry Potter and Percy Jackson. Each of them have English tools for them to use for reading. My 5th grader is focusing on character analysis and the theme and tone of the story, chapter by chapter. My freshman is working in a college level writing/reading book and my youngest is working on building sentence structures. Sometimes boys can be very hard. Most of mine would rather build than write and it gets difficult to get them involved with writing activities. So I’ve developed Harry Potter book investigator sheets that lead them into questions about the story and questions to write about. We are also working very hard on building a good foundation on phonics and word analysis. We’ve built antonym and synonym word webs to build vocabulary. They actually enjoy these.  Here they are listed below.

If you would like to use these yourself, I can share the document with you. Just send me a message or comment below.