Ohio and Today's Lessons

Well I guess it's a big my bad for not writing for so long but life unfortunately gets in the way sometimes. And today is not really any different, it's already 10pm and I have to get up early for my internship so this is going to be brief...

Aurora and I spend 3 weeks in Ohio visiting friends and family while daddy stayed home =( cause he couldn't get the time off work. I planned ABC and 123 lessons for her while we were up there, and it was enough to last the entire time there. Those were the only lessons I brought due to not wanting to "over pack".

Well after about day 3 of these lessons I realize that no matter how I come at her with the information (games, worksheets, hands on, verbal, etc) she just wasn't getting it, it just wasn't clicking for her. She was getting frustrated and frankly so was I (and I was actually being very patient). So I took to a couple of homeschooling groups I'm on and asked what I should do about it. Now I guess I should also tell you that this is not the first, second, or even third time I have attempted to teach her to recognize the alphabet and her numbers. The wonderful women gave me all real good advice but one stuck out.... just quit and come back to it! It may sound drastic or along the lines of giving up instead of trying harder or sticking to it but it really made the most sense to me. So I made the drastic move and stopped all the lessons all together! I know my child just as every other homeschooling mom or dad knows theirs and I felt that she was still not quite ready for this material yet; even at the age of 4 1/2! But to me this is all the beauty of homeschooling, you can stop something and come back to it at a later time for better comprehension; you can basically take your time on what you need time on.

So long story short since all I brought to Ohio were lessons of ABC's and 123's (and my mothers Internet was running at dial up speed, and the printer was out of ink) I was unable to proceed with homeschooling till I got back to NC. Now I did read to her a lot, play with her and teach her things here and there but nothing major. I did feel bad and sad though that yet again her education basically had to be put on hold.

But now we are back home and have been for a little over a week and we officially (again) started school today. I planned a math, science, and writing lesson today and then daddy read to her before she went to bed.

For math she was working on more or less and while doing that she actually did addition all by herself. When i was holding up a #3 and #2 flashcard, she pointed and said "mommy if you put 3 and 2 together they make 1,2,3,4,5.... they make 5"! OMG, I couldn't believe it, I was soooo proud of her for figuring that out all by herself. We did a couple of worksheets on the subject and played with Lego's trying to figure out which group of Lego's had more or less in it.

For science I reviewed her five senses with her. I read her a short story on them, and drew pictures of an eye, nose, mouth/tongue, ear, and a hand on our large white board and asked her which body part belonged with which sense and she did wonderful, although for some reason instead of saying taste she often says lick or eat, but she'll get it.

For writing/English we started a letter of the week thing and since this is the first week (again) we are doing the letter A (duh). So she traced the capital/uppercase A and the lower case a. She also got writing in by putting her name on her worksheets and writing numbers for math on those worksheets (see, I'm slippin those ABC's and 123's in a little at a time).

And then to round it out I started to teach her the days of the week. All in all I think she got a 92 out of 100 today on being good and learning!!! I can't wait for tomorrow!!!!