A look back at the school year…

I think I say this every year…but wow. I cannot believe another school year is coming to an end for us!! Since we school year round, we finish up the 2011-2012 year in May and then in June we just start right into our next school year.  I can’t believe my kids will have completed 4th, 3rd and 1st grades!!

The past few years I have taken a a few moments to write up a blog post reflecting on our school year and I want to encourage each of you to do the same! Even if you don’t blog, look back over your child’s work, look at pictures from field trips, look at all the memories and hard work you have accomplished!

I know for me, personally, it helps to look back and see that YES, we DID accomplish a lot!! It helps me not to feel like we haven’t made it very far and it helps me to focus on the positive!

A few highlights:

• Teaching Textbooks continues to be going well for us! And, Caleb has just begun using the 3rd grade level for math and will continue that into next year! Some say that TT is about a year behind, and he started the 3rd grade level with no problems! So far, so good!
• Halfway through our year we gave up Rod and Staff English and picked up Easy Grammar and Daily Grams. The girls are about halfway through levels 3 and 4 right now. This is going SO MUCH better for us…and we will continue this on into next year. The Daily Grams especially are GREAT. I was able to get both levels for used, so I didn’t have to pay much for it at all!
• With our little co-op of 3 families we completed a year full of Astronomy fun and we LOVED our science this year!! Caleb, especially. I am looking for ways to continue to help him learn in this area of interest. And next year we will be continuing with a different Apologia text.
• Also with our little co-op we finished year 1 (out of 2) with American History and again, we had a GREAT time with history!! I think I learned even more than my children did!! We will continue with American History year 2 next year and I will share more about what we are doing with that in the next post.
• Our little co-op also continued on with a little bit of Spanish and La Clase Divertida level 2. We got most of the way through this level but ended up giving up on it after the new year pretty much. While this program is fun, our kids weren’t retaining much and the workbooks are not very good, in my opinion. We have almost picked out a Spanish program for next year and I’ll be sure to let you know how that goes…we are ready to bump it up a bit for our kids in this area.
• The girls continue to do well with Spelling Wisdom and we will continue this into next year also.
• Caleb has done well with his Explode the Code books and is finishing up book 3 this month. We will move on to book 4 and continue his reading instruction.
• Writing programs: a bit of a challenge. My girls do copywork, spelling, and sometimes I will have them write a paragraph about a biography or subject we are learning about in history. But, I feel very inadequate to teach writing for some reason. I just need someone to hold my hand. We started IEW and have done fairly well with it. But, I also purchased The Writer’s Jungle (when the HSBC had a deal on the pdf version.) to read myself and get some more ideas. I am hoping to really make some good strides in this area next year.
• I will include a quick word about piano lessons. We continue to be blessed with a wonderful teacher and all 3 children did wonderfully at their recital!! Caleb started taking after the new year and I’m so proud of them for their hard work and consistent practice!! They will all continue lessons starting at the end of July.