Highlights From This Week In School

10th Grader

The vocabulary binder is working!!!  In my last school highlights post, I told you about my new idea of starting a vocabulary binder.  Well, I started it with my teen.  My Mom was telling me the other day that she's noticed he has been using bigger words (more vocabulary) in conversation and using them correctly.  Isn't that awesome???  That just tickles me.  I hope to get a vocabulary binder made for my 6th grader soon. 

We also had some good discussion with his material for Mere Christianity.  This is an excellent book and one that I highly recommend.  Interestingly enough, as we were doing our family devotion yesterday, there were a couple of times we talked about things that C.S. Lewis had discussed in Mere Christianity and we were able to point that out.  Our son remembered some of the material too!  That just tickled me so much!

Also, the children went on a field trip on Monday.  When they came back, I had them do narrations.  My son had to do a written narration of what he remembered from the field trip and it had to be one page long.  When he turned his written narration in, his handwriting was much neater that in times past when I'd have him write something for me.  I praised him for having such neat handwriting!

6th Grader

Our 6th grader did a wonderful job on her dictation this week.  As I dictated the passage to her and watched her writing, I delighted in seeing her take her time to form her letters correctly.  She would make the letters, look at them, and then correct any ones that didn't look like they were formed well.    I was also tickled to see her put punctuation marks such as commas, semi-colons, and periods in the right places as I dictated each phrase.  She didn't have to wait for me to go back and read the entire passage at the end to listen for the pauses and so forth in the text.  She knew where to put them as we went through it phrase by phrase.  It just made me feel really good to see that!  I did things a little different this week with her dictation passage.  For the first one or two dictation passages we did, I went over the passage and any difficult words with her.  I then gave her the responsibility to study it on her own without me actually having to tell her to study it.  She still did wonderfully well with her dictations.  But they were easier selections with not many punctuation marks to remember.  I chose a more challenging selection this week.  So we went over it when I gave it to her and discussed any difficult words I thought she might have trouble with.  I then had her do the passage for her copywork.  I also modeled how I wanted her to read it aloud when she practiced it and then had her read it out loud to me.  I told her that I wanted her to read it out loud that particular way and then write it while looking at it (copying it) throughout that day at different times.  I told her that I would tell her when I wanted her to do this.  In addition, the next day I told her she was to read it out loud at different times throughout the day and this time she would try to write it without looking at it (and then check it).  So for those two days at different times throughout the day I would tell her to study her dictation passage and she would do what I asked her to do.  I think this approach really worked well and made a difference with studying a more difficult passage.  On the third day, we did the dictation.  Here's her paper:

My scan didn't come out as clearly as I'd have liked but I think you can see it well enough.  I was really proud of her work!

Another wonderful school moment occurred this week with our 6th grader.  I was having her fill out a chart where she had to put the prefixes, what they meant, and some example words that used each of the prefixes.  As she was working on that she asked that, when she was done, if she could write down some of the words using those prefixes and look them up because she wanted to learn how to spell them and what they meant.  Are you kidding me????  OF COURSE!!!!  Wow - that was one of those school moments that just warm your heart and make you feel so good!!!  So when she finished her work, she went about writing down a list of the words she wanted to learn how to spell and then utilized the dictionary as well as an online dictionary to look up what each word meant.  She then wanted to quiz her dad on the words to see if he knew what they meant!  And get this - we talked about the voting and election process this week.  Well, Friday night when we were at my parent's house for dinner and fellowship, she pulled out a paper that she had questions on and started asking us all questions from the material in her little booklet that I had given her on the voting and election process!  She had taken that little booklet that I had given her and wrote out questions with their answers totally on her own!  Woohoo!!!  That's grasping the love of learning!  I absolutely LOVE it!!!