LANGUAGE ARTS
Trevor completed the orange book from Hooked on Phonics 1st Grade level and really enjoyed the books (they are much more interesting that the easier books.) He showed consistent progress with sight words since beginning this program about 5 weeks ago. He now rarely forgets to start from left to right. He is noticing blending sounds that sometimes can sound similar to others-- such as "DR" sounding more like a J or a "TR" sometimes sounding like a "CH". He notices and corrects his own pronunciation accordingly.
Trevor is reading without fuss or fear and is doing it on his on while we are in the car and around town without prompting from me or anyone else. He expressed his goal this year is to read a book we read together by himself! It is almost fun for him. This is marvelous and a real victory for the Swan Academy!
Trevor still very much struggles to turn the table and write the same word he can read, though, his fluency in this isn't without progress. His penmanship is improving and he is remembering rules for capitalizing, periods, and is just beginning to understand how to use quotation marks.
We are in chapter 4 of Dr. Doolittke
Trevor is enrolled in a stories and games class and is learning about authors, illustrators, setting and characters in this class.
Trevor is on page 26 of Explode the Code Book 2.
In Reading Eggs, Trevor has earned 1015 points and is on lesson 56.
MATH
Trevor uses Right Start Math and is on lesson 37. This is a wonderful curriculum. He has much confidence in math and enjoys it.
He is beginning to understand base-10, place value, has become a master of the abacus and easily partition numbers, adds, counts, skip counts, understands parallelograms, rectangles, squares, right angles, and perpendicular lines. We began counting thousands this month and visualizing it with the abacus tiles from the book.
Trevor has started doing daily math races for practice in math facts and is motivated by beating his previous score. He completes these +1 and +2 sheets with 100% accuracy every time fixing his mistakes as he goes.
We are using Dreambox for practice. He has completed
66 lessons
2 Stories Completed
9 Tokens in Piggy Bank
31 Total Tokens Earned
13 Adventure Friends
2 Carnival Rewards
This means he has completed all but half of the problem solving problems in Kindergarten level, and, in the first grade level:
96% of counting
27% of comparisons and ordering
35% problem solving
In the second grade level:
problem solving 14%
At first I couldn't figure out why he wasn't finishing Kindergarten, but I see now that it was because I wasn't allowing him to play some games that actually count as work.
This seems to be his strong suit.
SCIENCE
Brain Pop Jr. is my best measurement on his understanding. I require him to answer the quiz without missing more than 1, or to re-watch the video. This one of his favorite ways to learn and these past two months he studied rocks, flowers, parts of a plant, the scientific method, seasons, slow changes, fast changes and measurements.
Trevor does weekly hand-on projects through his "Mad Science" class at co-op and Science Club.
We read:
• Usborne books on flowers, weather, and Wild Places
• The Berenstein Bears Science book
• Magic Schoolbus books which teach on hurricanes, snow, and bees
Science projects are his first choice for school work.
SOCIAL STUDIES
We use Brain Pop Jr. in addition to books for this.
Trevor studied:
reading maps
rural, suburban, and urban,
needs and wants,
president
Martin Luther King, Jr.
HEALTH:
We studied:
vaccinations
bones
colds and flu
friends
losing a tooth
Trevor practices gymnastics 1x per week at Gem State Gymnastics and has been learning new balance beam skills and still-ring skills. He has improved dramatically in listening to his teacher and on the trampoline.
