today dillon and i went through his main lesson book and reviewed some of his work from this year. i wanted to document some of our favorite pages. we started the year following donna simmons' grade 2 curriculum from christopherus and began with a math block. her squirrel imagery was really sweet and it seemed to really help dillon. i love it when dillon is trying to figure out a division problem and i hear him muttering to himself, "okay, there's 20 squirrels in the treehouse and 10 at the door..." :-)
he really enjoyed the story of hiawatha when we began our block on saints and heroes. on day 3 with this story, he modeled hiawatha, his canoe, paddle, and a little forest of evergreens out of beeswax.
i always loved seeing dillon's versions of the drawings. even when he was at first intimidated by some of the animal forms, i thought he did a really great job and with each drawing i saw his confidence grow.
saint martin was one of our favorites as he was already familiar to us after years of lantern walks in november for martinmas. these saints stories really spoke to dillon and he eagerly looked forward to each one!
we spent lots of time this year working on the times tables, stomping, clapping, throwing the bean bag... we also worked on a few of these "multiplication clocks" from a little garden flower's journey through math book. i think it was helpful for dillon to work with the tables in all these different ways. we also made a big chart which is hanging next to our workspace.
we read the king of ireland's son and made it into a block. i think it was slightly difficult for dillon to follow this story entirely, but he did still enjoy it. it certainly is like a celtic knot! such a journey, twisting and turning; kept us on our toes. :-)
i found the idea for "math suns" on the little nature nest blog. great idea for working whole to parts.
in february we did a block on animal fables.
by spring, i was definitely losing steam and we fell out of the block system and i turned back to my oak meadow second grade syllabus, which i didn't think i was going to use this year. so, our final "block", "spring", was a bit of a mish mash.
we read from oak meadow's "animal stories" which we all enjoyed. they were a bit reminiscent of the thornton burgess stories, which we loved. when we finished these stories, we read the just so stories by rudyard kipling and are now onto the voyages of dr. dolittle, which the kids seem to like. on tuesday i found a copy of my side of the mountain which is on deck as our next bedtime read-aloud to kick off the summer.
my friend at our trip around the sun reminded me of a book i'd heard of last year and filed in my brain for use this year. the book is called multiplication in a flash and uses stories and pictures to help kids remember the times tables. it definitely helped A LOT! i now feel like dillon has a pretty good grasp on those multiplication facts. he's also really taken off with his reading abilities, which is so cool! we started off this year reading frog and toad, mouse soup, mouse tales, little bear, etc. then we moved on to the henry and mudge books, which are so cute and both boys really liked hearing about their adventures. after a few of those, dillon chose to tackle a magic treehouse book. he did really well with it. we would take turns reading, one page or one paragraph at a time. today we read billy and blaze from the library and i also found a copy of childhood of famous americans~ john muir: young naturalist. these last two titles were recommended in donna simmons' waldorf curriculum overview for homeschoolers. phew! i'm sure i'll have lots more reflection to share over the summer along with thoughts and plans for next year. on a different note...
i've been having so much fun with the no-knead artisan bread. tonight i tried my hand at the naan to accompany our curried lentil veggie soup. it was super yummy!
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