experimenting...

Our homeschool is an ever evolving beast. :-)

I had a homeschooling epiphany the other day (which I'll expand on later) so we're trying some new stuff this week.

I've said it before and I'll say it again.... I struggle with language arts (LA). It was never my strength growing up.... I was more into math and science. Anyway, because of this I have been all over the board with language arts... I have completely ignored it (not the best solution), bought workbooks and curriculum to do it for me and now I'm finally trying a mix - using curriculum in our own way. We're taking the books and going off road. :-)

So, Clara has really been struggling with LA because she struggles with handwriting. She also isn't particularly the sit at the table and do a workbook type (well, at least not for too long). So, I decided over the weekend that I would try typing up and printing out some of the exercises from their LA books. I decided to try this because I really felt that she did get more of the concepts than it appeared when she had to write things out.

So, here's day one...
I decided to use the grade 2 Rod and Staff grammar book I had bought for Alex last year. To start I just typed out some sentences from the book, cut the words apart and let her arrange them back into sentences.... looking for clues to help (capital letters and punctuation). She really enjoyed that. The next section was about sentences versus phrases.... so I typed up their list of each along with the headings "sentence" and "phrase", cut them out and let her put them in the proper columns. Again... fun and quick. Finally, so she can keep working on her handwriting, I typed out a few of the sentences in StartWrite for her to trace and then copy.

Here's Alex's...
He's working in book 3. We haven't gotten very far into it. We stopped for a while when he got into his daily paragraph editing work sheets. Thankfully though, we had stopped right before a review section.

Here he is sorting sentences into columns of "commanding", "telling" and "asking" sentences...
Now, he's cutting up those same sentences in order to separate them into columns of "subjects" and "predicates"....
He had always tolerated his Rod and Staff grammar (once we stopped writing everything out)... but this was the first time that he really got into it and seemed to enjoy it. Figuring he could always use some extra handwriting practice... I did the same for him as I had done for Clara.

After our LA work, it was time for a spelling game...

Snap It Up! Phonics and Reading Card Game, Word Families

I was the referee and the official middle card turner over person. It was a good learning game for Clara and a good review game for Alex. They enjoyed it enough that they think we should get the Snap It Up gamesin all varieties. :-)

I also wanted to show off this little beauty...

My very own Automatic Playing Card Shuffler!! I'm terrible at shuffling cards and so many of the kids' games involve shuffling cards.... I actually used to avoid playing card games with them... but NO MORE!!! :-)

After the traditional round of Snap It Up, we split the ending cards between the two of them and also split the beginning cards.... they then tried to be the first one done with forming words with all of their endings...
It was a good experiment!! However, since it's a little more labor intensive for me, I'm hoping I can keep at it.