Halloween Education

We continue to work to home school the boy, despite the fact that he is at school from 8:30 to 3:00 every day.

Today is one of the few days when it sounds like he did something actually educational at school. He said he played a reading game, and since he could read, he said he was the "teacher" for the game and read off the cards.

Of course, I'd prefer him to be a student and actually learning something.

We've been doing various Halloween related things at home. I found some Halloween mazes, a secret Halloween code, and a fill-in-the-missing-letter sheet at Enchanted Learning. That's a good site, and 20$ gets you full access for a year.

He's reading some complex stuff these days. He's seen the "ight" ending a number of times, last week we worked on the hard/soft "c" and "g" sounds. According to one workbook, both turn soft in front of an e, i or y. Of course there are so many exceptions, it's pretty hard. When it came to the different sounds of "s" (like s, z, or sh), the book punted and didn't even give an explanation for that one. So, why is sugar pronounced with a sh sound? No clue.

As for number work, I am a big fan of dot-to-dots. He's come a long way with those. It gets him to understand what happens after you get to a 9. 9, 19, 29, etc. He's doing a good job of getting up to 100 now.

We also got a skeleton which grows when you put it in water, so we've been doing some surreptitious science by measuring its growth and writing it down each day.


Well, that was rambling! Oh well. Time to go to dinner.