About Me

I'm a mom, a teacher, a student, a wife, and a scout leader. I am actually an education major currently working on my practicum in a 2nd grade classroom. I also home school my two children. I'm also a cub scout leader, a girl scout leader, and at church I'm the children's music leader. ;) I tend to stay a little busy. My state requires homeschoolers to keep a portfolio. I am going to use this blog as my portfolio.

What am I?

Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Update on virtual school

The kids have been loving it!! Ronni participates in a lot of the classes. Collin gets 3 live virtual class each week. He has reading and math and then science and social studies alternate each week. He also just got his IEP and now gets two speech sessions with the school and one through private so, yes, he gets 3 speech sessions/week. On top of all that he has math, language arts and phonics lessons daily. Then he has art, history, science, and music which alternate; he has 2 lessons of each one/week. Ronni loves to participate... especially on the projects. He just had his monthly assessment with his teacher to make sure he was where he was supposed to be. We skipped the first 8 units of math b/c Collin already knew them. That equaled 16 weeks worth of work. So, she tested him on that to make sure he understood everything he skipped. He did!! She was shocked and bubbly when she realized that. At the rate he's going he should be moving up to first grade math in January. He is also reading and building words now. It's awesome. He got to start his first reader book today. Hooray!!

Ronni and I have been working on number recognition lately. She can count to 12 but she doesn't know what the numbers look like so that has been fun! :) It's not as fun for her as it was for Collin so our sessions are much shorter for her. She's only 3 so I don't want to teach the fun of learning out of her. We make it fun and when she's tired we do something else.

Here are some pictures of a few of our projects.
These are from history....
When studying the Netherlands we built a dike. The water is on the right side of the dike.

Then we built a canal to go with the dike.

This is Collin's diorama of The Great Reef off the coast of Australia from when we studied Australia. ;)
The following are science:
We've been studying plants and how they get nutrition so, of course, we had to do this classic science experiment. We ended up with a blue and red daisy. :)

This was when we were working on senses. This day we were focusing on the sense of taste. I blindfolded the kids and they had to tell me if things were salty, sweet or sour. It was fun!! Especially when I gave them the lime. LOL! :) It took a lot of trust on their part.

Collin pouring white vinegar into a jar.
Ronni placing a chicken bone into the jar.


Two weeks later - Collin demonstrating what happens when calcium is sucked out of the bone. (Obviously, this was when we were learning about the body and on the topic of bones.)

No comments: