I used to think that Zach was a visual learner, just because he was good at sight words, taught himself how to read and in general was getting a lot of information through things I had scattered all over the house. But in the past few months I came to realize that he is more of an auditory learner, with a bit of visual to it.
Recently, I came across this post about Characteristics of auditory learnes, that definitely confirmed my suspicion. Hop on over it is a great read!
Zach displays a whole lot of these characteristics like:
Hums or talks to themselves!!
They spell most of the time correctly
They can read pretty well.
Most are musically inclined
Good at grammar
Make up great stories!
They remember things they hear during lectures or conversations with others
Good vocabulary
They can carry on interesting conversations and get their ideas across very clearly
They like to talk lot!!
Their descriptions are usually long and they repeat things over and over!
Not good at reading silently
Hard for them to keep quiet for prolonged periods, they just gotta get up and talk!
It’s hard for auditory learners not to express themselves emotionally
Have poor comprehension when reading silently
This has definitely helped me understand him better and now the challenge is to further tailor the way I present materials to him to his learning style. Not always an easy task!
Here is a chorus that I really like. It is short but very uplifting (Romans 11:30-32).
How Great is Your Love
by Mark Altrogge
No eye has seen, no ear has heard,
No mind has ever conceived
The glorious things that You have prepared
For everyone who has believed
You brought us near and You called us Your own
And made us joint heirs with Your Son.
Chorus:
How high and how wide,
How deep and how long,
How sweet and how strong is Your love.
How lavish Your grace,
How faithful Your ways,
How great is Your love, oh Lord.
Objects of mercy who should have known wrath
We’re filled with unspeakable joy.
Riches of wisdom, unsearchable wealth,
And the wonder of knowing Your voice.
You are our treasure and our great reward,
Our hope and our glorious King.
I have discovered 2 great educational sites: Arcademic Skill Builders, which is a great online Math games site, and, Mark Kistlers great drawing site (it is a paid course but there are free samples and there is a good deal on it at the Homeschool buyer co-op).
Education Place has great resources as well for the teachers and students. Be sure to look around, there is lots of stuff there.
I also found a mine full of free internet resources for the homeschool here.
Fridays seem to come by so quickly. The week just flies by and it feels like we have not done much. But, I guess we must have done something.
We have been following a schedule for the past 3 weeks so as to give structure to the boys and that has helped us keep things on going and on track.
One of the changes this week was to put his violin practice first thing after breakfast and before school. This has definitely minimized the complaining about having to quit his play to practice and has added regularity. Practice have been a bit of a struggle for both of us for the past few weeks but that's for a totally separate post. Today was a good day though, which has a lot to do with having prayed before we started.
Math has been going well. I am very happy to see that Zach has been enjoying Math even though he is not very happy about all the work involved, but he really likes the concepts.
English is going along as well. We finished grade 1 of FLL and have moved on to grade 2.
For reading, Zach has been complaining a bit; he does not really enjoy fiction, so it is a bit of a struggle, but we are making our way through. e only do reading twice a week since he does read a whole lot of other stuff at other times. Narration is going well. I am still to actually add more variety, but that has to do with lack of organization on my part.
Science is on track as well, we learnt about amphibians, reptiles and fishes this week.
History has been passed over for the past 2 weeks. Zach and I have been feeling pretty tired. No playdate this week either, instead, you won't believe it, but I set up my christmas tree. I know, I know it's early, but I totally love christmas trees. Next week, the baking will start.
We have also began to read Prince Caspian as our read aloud. We had read The lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe a few months ago.
Joho has been busy with playdoh, Super Mind shape puzzles, Math games, worksheets of all sorts.
So, that was our week in a nutshell. Sorry not many pictures this week.
As I mentioned before, our style of homeschooling is a bit of Charlotte Masson, classical and unschooling. One aspect of the classical education I have been trying to incorporate in ur homeschool is narration. With our BJU Readers 1 I had Zachary do the accompanying worktext for comprehension. He was doing well with that, but I realized that the questions did not test his actual grasping of the story on his own. So for the Readers 2 I have decided not to use the worktext and just do narration. This has allowed me to know exactly how much of the story he is able to understand and grasp on his own, along with all the other benefits of narration.
As promised I have the pictures of the lapbook I was working on last week. It comprises all the topics we covered in our science class during our 6 weeks long elective. I just wanted to give the kids something to take home that would remind them of what they learned. I created all of the material from scratch using resources from the the internet.
If you would like the file you can e-mail me and I would gladly share it with you. I might put it on my Scribd account, but I am not sure of when yet.
For any of you who normally follow my blog, I am sorry I did not blog this week, but I was very busy working on a lapbook for my students at elective this week, since it was our last elective for this session. I will post the final product on Monday.
This project took me the whole on Tuesday, Thursday and part of Wednesday.
On Monday we went on a fieldtrip that took us the whole day. we went to the Royal Ontario winter fair. We all had a great time.
We did do school this week. Math, English and Science got squeezed in somehow.
Wednesday I did take the kids on a playdate for a few hours. They had fun!
Today was our last day of elective and I forgot my camera. Zach did well in his drama presentation. Could have spoken louder, but hey. . . His song presentation was nice too except he kept jiggleling during most of it. I found the whole thing rather funny.
I am a christian wife and mother to 2 beautiful young boys who just started on the homeschooling journey. My desire is to train my children in the ways of the Lord while giving them a good education, all for the glory of our great and wonderful God. The road is not easy, specially when you try to do things God's way but the reward is well worth the effort.
To God be the Glory!
