At the beginning of every school year, I read about everyone's goals for that year. I always feel guilty because I never have any specific goals for my kids. I just want them to learn various things in each subject. You can't get any vaguer than that.
This year I have goals. I didn't take oodles of time searching for these goals. I didn't have to dig real deep to find them, they found me actually. This past week I was thinking about this coming school year and it occurred to me that I really and truly have goals for our year. These are things that we are going to focus on for each child. We are going to do it nice and slow so no one becomes frustrated. (I might have to make up a poster with this as a slogan: Nice and slow, Nice and slow.)
So, I present to you this year's goals for our learning.
MIa: We are going to focus on writing this year. That is it. That is our only goal this year. This writing , though, will have different faces. We will learn how to outline, write out narrations and start to learn how to write a report.
Rocky: Our goal this year is on writing as well. For Rocky, though, I want to start him in copying out his narrations as well as copywork. We are also going to attempt cursive this year. This scares me as Rocky's printing isn't that good so I shudder at what his handwriting is going to look like.
MIssy: In following with tradition, Missy only has one goal as well. Our goal for her is to teach her the letter sounds and become phonemically aware. That is it. I am not even going to attempt to think about reading with her. We just have to get these letter sounds down. I have tunnel vision where this is concerned. I have tried to teach her her sounds on my own, piecing things together and this is not working well, so I am going to buy a curriculum. In keeping with reading curriculum, this program costs an arm, a leg and a belly button but I just cannot do this on my own. I need someone to hold my hand on this, preferably someone who knows what they are doing.
So that is it. Three goals, one for each child. I am a girl who likes things nice and simple. You have a better shot at succeeding at your goals when they are simple. At least that is my hope.