More testing today for Aidan — this got more interesting since I gained some ideas for things to do with Aidan.
First, rhyming words — we haven’t worked much with these but with his musical ear it might be another avenue to work with. There is this Rhymes and Rimes site which I used a bit with Sean years back.
Secondly, discerning first and last sounds in words.
Third, the special education resource person suggested chanting blends to get him from sounding out letter by letter to actually blending to make words. It is worth a try, since nothing else seems to be working.
It was a nice slow-paced day today. The trip to the school was the only thing on the schedule. The firewood guy came and dumped two cords on our driveway and the little ones spent nearly an hour outside stacking wood.
We have been doing minimal academics. For this last part of the year I have Kieron doing math in two sections. He spends 10 minutes solving larger multiplication and division problems, in order to gain fluency with the operations, and then 10-15 minutes on “conceptual math” where I work with him. Today we worked on integers including negatives. Paddy actually started doing some of it with us, because the book was trying to get across the notion of “opposites” by means of everyday examples, and he thought it was fun.
I gave Sean a Grade 8 test practice book (Spectrum) and he is going to do a bit every day to fit in the space where Vocabulary was before he finished the book. I am going to have Kieron work on the Grade 7 one, since I don’t want to spend the money to buy a 6th grade one and the Grade 7 one looks pretty easy.
Kieron decided to make peanut butter chocolate chip cookies. I made some edible peanut butter playdough for Paddy.
Sean, Kieron and Patrick played basketball-shooting games upstairs, and Sean and Kieron had a bunch of timed scooter races, burning off extra energy.
I am trying to get them tapered down on the screen time, and from that perspective things went pretty well today. I am also trying to taper down on my random internet time — as opposed to “business” type things on the computer — to about 30 minutes or less per day. The day seems to go better if I am not mentally off in the clouds.
