Weekly Wrap-up: Week 3

This week we enjoyed school at our lake house. I posted about it in School by the Lake. We especially enjoyed our special classmates, the two mallards.
I spent a good bit of time really evaluating where Little Buddy is with his school work. I could tell that we were getting completed with our coursework extremely quickly and wanted to be sure that Little Buddy wasn't just rushing through to be done. We had thoughtful conversations about it at bedtime, bath time, and during our school time. Not too much, but just enough probing questions for Little Buddy to share what he was thinking. I was impressed with the conversation and his evaluation of where we were and where we were heading. I do not believe I had given him enough credit before this week on his ownership of his schoolwork or on how advanced he is in many of the subject areas. To be frank, he already knew everything I was trying to teach him!
I spent the nights researching and remapping some of the lesson plans to include more challenging work for him. It made all the difference. I drafted out lesson plans through the end of February 2010 for our major studies of math and language arts. Now, I need to add in for science, history, Latin, and special studies. I am also going back and revisiting the books that I had previously chosen for our weekly readings, along with the artists and musicians we were going to be studying. I think now I am getting much deeper into my planning so that all of his school work is more comprehensive and pulled together. At least it is in my mind.
We should be completed with all 2nd Grade level language arts by Thanksgiving and 3rd Grade level math by the end of February 2010. I've planned celebrations for each milestone and order dates for ordering the next level of work.
I shared my planning with Little Buddy and showed him the lesson plan book which includes EVERYTHING! He smiled at me and said, "this looks like we'll learn a lot, thank you."
Now, that makes a Mama proud.

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