2013 - Happy New Year :)

It's always tough getting back on schedule after a break, but we made it through our math and language pages today without any tears and only a few heartfelt sighs... we'll call that progress. LOL

I'm sort of calling this the start of a new year - technically the school year goes from September to June, but we had so much going on the last few months that we didn't really do a lot of schooling... and December was a total write-off. I'd been thinking about switching to following the calendar year anyway, so I'm taking that opportunity now. Started a new planner and everything. ;)

We've made a new deal for 2013 - each day they need to do the number of activities that corresponds to their age. One can be an educational TV show, one can be a computer learning game, and for C one can be a learning app on her iPod. So C is expected to do five "formal" activities, and A is expected to do three (plus a show and a game).

C is a smart kid, she just doesn't like to be told to work. I'm a big meanie, though - I say suck it up buttercup, the real world is going to tell you to work, and I'm only demanding a tenth of the time you'd need to sit still at school. She's quick to pick up on things and easily bored/distracted, so we don't do a lot of repetition. We haven't needed to use any of our manipulatives because she is good at figuring things out in her head - always has been, ever since she first took an interest in math. She's just bright - and independent - and has a painful need to be right and do things perfectly. Any time she sees something new on a page she freaks out... once we get past that, she rarely struggles to do it correctly, it's just that initial challenge. She would really like to be left to work on her own terms, unfortunately that tends to take the form of playing non-stop for a week then spending a morning burning through ten pages of math... and never really doing anything else.

A is much more... interesting... definitely right-brained, visual, kinetic... phonics isn't difficult for her at all and she has a fabulous memory, but without someone watching her and making corrections, she tends to make everything exactly backward. Doing math today, her answers were right, but written backward. A while ago she had her sister spell out words for her to write something, and again it was completely backward, like looking at a sentence in a mirror. And she thinks differently. We were doing basic math today, adding and subtracting ones. "One plus one is..." "Two take away one is..." Approaching it this way, she struggled to comprehend what the words meant. "One more than one is..." "One less than two is..." - 100% correct. Weird. I'm glad now that I read a lot of varied books. One was "Raising Your Right Brained Child in a Left Brained World" - it answered a lot of questions.