It's been awhile. As we've been taking a long break, I thought I would remind myself of where the boys are academically, and how far they have to go!
JM is in 4th grade this year. It seems like we are not learning too many new concepts, but expanding upon concepts we have learned in the past. He is still excelling in science, so I'm not going to go too much into that. Suffice it to say he could hold his own with many high school students. He just needs some of the dissection, and some of the mathematical formulas for figuring some of the physics out. KWIM? Oh, and chemistry and chemical formulas are a little beyond him at the moment. But physical science? He's got that down.
We've had trouble keeping him in books. He's become a voracious reader, but only of things he finds interesting. It's been okay as I feel like he will read plenty. He loves the classics like Moby Dick, and 20,000 Leagues under the Sea. He also has read all 7 of the Harry Potter books. He's started in on the Magic of Xanth series by Piers Anthony, and he's reading those Star Wars fiction books. This is, of course, when he's not reading science books or history books.
History, we've been doing our state history this year. I bought the Alpha Omega state history for him, but it's really geared toward High schoolers. He's doing okay with it, but we can tell he's gotten somewhat frustrated. So, next semester we're doing unit studies on American History. I figure books like Red Badge of Courage, Johnny Tremain, etc. will be good. We visited Washington DC last spring, so he has some of the context already. We'll just go a little further into it.
In Math, we're going back and relearning the "tables" for everything. He rebelled against us learning and memorizing them. So, we finally hit a point where he realizes he does need to know them and wants to memorize them. He's doing long division, stuff with fractions, and solving equations. We've had discussions that things in parentheses go first, that letters can mean "any number," and how these are like big puzzles.
With handwriting and such, he's still working on it. We aren't pushing it as per the OT suggestions. He does it, we just don't grade it anymore.
Then, our nemesis. Language Arts, the composition and grammar variety. Oh boy has this been fun this year! We are giving him "extra" work to do on learning grammar and how to write good sentences. We're trying to help him with ideas for writing. We're doing as much as we can. Some is sinking in. However, we doubt he'll ever be a best selling author. He wrote a recent essay, and we let him choose any topic. He chose to write the report on a World War 2 airplane. I was fairly impressed by it.
In extra curricular activities, he's writing a book that is a guide to Disney World. He'll be "publishing" it this spring in his Young Authors class. He's also creating a Mexican restaurant menu for his Spanish class (yes he has now had 3 years of elementary Spanish and is doing very well with it). He loves his art class, which I'm glad for. Other than that, we're still going strong in Karate. He's now a Gold belt, working on the gold stripe. His focus and determination in karate has greatly improved over the last year. For that I'm thankful.
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