Subjects
Here is a list of subjects we taught this school year. Click on the button to take you to the subject and the grey arrow to bring you back.
Mathematics
Fellini is still working with Right Start this year. We are chugging along, and he’s doing great. He likes most of the games except for corners, but he really has gotten so much better at it since the beginning of the school year. I like to remind him where he’s coming from and how much better he’s gotten. Here is PDF of his schoolwork completed thus far.
Language Arts
This year Fellini worked with an occupational therapist to work on his letter reversal through handwriting. It helped some. He needed to work on his writing and she really helped develop his letter writing.
We used Spell Zone and dictation to work on spelling this year. I would read a passage to him, and he would spell it out loud to me while I wrote it on the board. This served two purposes. So he wouldn’t get frustrated erasing if he got it wrong, and so he could work on spelling words with some of the rules we learned in All About Spelling. We will continue working on the program the next year.
For reading, he read Charlotte’s Web out loud to me, mostly by himself! This was such a big step ahead of working with the All About Reading programs. I was so proud of him. His comprehension assignment was to work on his own creative story based on characters from Charlotte’s Web. He choose one of the baby spiders who flew away on a spider parachute and wrote this lovely story. It is still a work in progress. He also had to write a dictionary based on new words we learned in Charlotte’s Web.
Next reading assignment was Wings of Fire, a graphic novel and then we switched to the Wings of Fire full-length novel. We still have work to do until he’s completely competent in reading on his own, but we are in a good place. Here is his reading log for the year.
Lastly, I wanted to include a fun project they completed for the presidential inauguration this year. They both drafted and performed their own inauguration speeches! Here is his valiant effort.
History
We started the first 6 chapters of STOW Vol. 3 this summer. We’re on a break now, but will continue throughout the next school year. The kids have enrolled in a Minecraft STOW class and I’m excited to see what they create! To be continued in August…
Geography
Geography this year started out with the basics. The continents, the oceans, the cardinal directions. Then we switched to a week-by-week study of the continent of Africa. We keep it very simple. Watch a video (Geography Now! videos on Youtube), have a short discussion and write in our Geography notebooks. The kids loved the Geography Now! videos and would often ask for them outside of school.
Foreign Language
Fellini started off the year with an enthusiasm to learn Japanese. He used Duolingo app on his iPad. I think he questions his ability to learn a language and felt like he wasn’t learning much. He has a very slight communication problem, he finds it hard to put his ideas into words, so I think that’s where it comes from. He came to me with the desire to learn sign language halfway through the school year. I agreed, and now in retrospect, I truly believe it was a great idea. Perhaps learning a language with more concrete and tactile concepts will give him the confidence he needs to learn a new language. We use a tutor through TakeLessons who is actually deaf, a native speaker of sign language! He’s enjoyed the classes thus far.
Science
Science-this year we used The Elements: Ingredients of the Universe by Ellen Johnston Mchenry as our science curriculum. We learned all about electrons, protons, and neutrons. We explored the periodic table. They memorized elements 1-50 and the element groups for the memory work this year. We also did lots of fun experiments! Slime of course is always a given, but we found how to detect oxygen, make molecules out of food, and launched a homemade rocket. We also played cards with our periodic table matching games.
Here is a video of him reciting the periodic table. The kids learned it using the Aseop Science periodic table song.
This year Fellini also spent half the year taking classes at the Deering Estate. It was a drop-off program, so I didn’t get a ton of pictures, but they would spend the day at the estate learning about Marine biology or wildlife! The themes would switch month to month. This class also propelled them to learn how to ride bikes without training wheels, because there was a day where the whole class brought in their bikes and rode through the rock pineland. How cool! Some other cool things they did were wade through the swamp discovering animals, dissect a lionfish, kayak and also create a pH indicator out of red cabbage. He loved this class so much, he is going again the next school year.
Music
This year we switched completely and took drum lessons! We had an excellent teacher who can 2x a week to teach them through pop songs.
Art
Fellini tried his hand at Flip a clip this year, following in his sister’s footsteps. Flip a clip is an animation app for iPad.
He also made this cute collage and poem.
