| Teacher's Diary |
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| April 9, 2002 Well things are finally coming together. We have changed our curriculum to KONOS. The previous one just was too fast. I know I could modify it, but I always felt guilty that I wasnt keeping up and then got overwhelmed and would stop doing plans. So because I am the ultimate SHE (Sidetracked Home Educater, my own definition), I need something without strict timetables, but still with timetables. KONOS seems to fit well, plus I have 2 of the books borrowed from my aunt which makes it good in the budget department. I am excited, we are starting out slow and working up. We are starting with the Cooperation unit, its 30 weeks long. This week is Family/Church and how we each fit. Its actually the last sub unit in the unit, but I wanted to start with it first because it involved reading Little Women, which Don just finished reading to them last night. I am thinking we will probably make it a 31 week unit and redo this one at the end too. As you can tell I changed around the diary. I figured that most people want to read the most recent first so the old ones are here, they are just backwards now. I think I will probably clear out the first entries sometime this summer, but we will see, I still have a lot of room on the site. Well I want to update some other things on the site, so I will leave it at that. : ) |
| April 10, 2002 Is it possible, I worked on this site 2 days in a row. I am on a roll! We had a great day in school. Ali worked on numbers, phonics and writing, with no arguements. She was even willing to listen to our stories for the day, "Little Red Hen" and "The Blind Men and the Elephant" She even got the basic moral of the story. I am so excited, she is really catching the learning bug. AJ did really well too. He worked on same/different and writing. He amazes me at his hand control. He has chosen to use his left hand. His writing is as good as Ali's if not a tad better. I think it is just something he likes to do (drawing/writing). Of course his attention span is quite a bit shorter, so he didnt make it through the stories, but he didnt interupt he just did his own thing. This is something we have been working on with both of them. Housework failed, but I did get the bed made, 2 loads of laundry and a quick vaccuum upstairs and down. It didnt fail because of school, but more because I was hooked here, working on the site. I wish all days could be this good. |
| May 14, 2002 Ok, bad on me, I forgot about updating the site again. Actually, it fell out of my habit making stuff because Geocities took down the site the last week of April because I had used too much bandwidth. I had too many pictures on each page and they were downloaded over the limit of times for a free page. (excuses, excuses, I know) But that is a good thing it means that people are actually reading my site and find it interesting enough to go past the first page. I dont have the money for a pay site, so if the site is down sometimes, I apologize. Check back at the begining of the month (they take it down till the end of the month each time I go over bandwidth). I will try to keep the pics refreshed and take down the old ones so that it keeps the bandwidth usage lower. They are the most fun part of the site though, so I wont try too hard : ). We have gone to a new strategy on the reading. AJ isnt interested (and according to the book too young anyway) so I have started our program over with just Ali. She is doing really well and really picking it up much better doing it by the book and one on one. This is assisted by the fact that AJ has 2 passions that are "on your own" type activities (go see his page) and that he loves to use the computer too. I have slowed down on the "official" school time a bit (other than the reading program). I could give a hundred excuses (we have been outside more, my house is clean, etc) which would all be true, but the truth of the matter is I havent been spending my time once a week planning anything. So we kinda do it by ear on the days that we do school and unfortunately, a lot of days get skipped all together. I have tried to do "teaching moments" when ever they come up though and I think they learn alot from those. One habit at a time, I will have this school thing down before too long. |