I figured since I'm up at 5:30 in the morning for no real reason, and within the next couple days the rest of Thing 1's stuff for first grade will arrive, that I would take a little bit to reflect back on Thing 1's kindergarten year.
Really, there's not too terribly much to reflect on academically, since we unschooled this year for the most part. Since Thing 1 could already read, and finished Math-U-See Primer very quickly, I didn't feel the need to really PUSH, if you know what I mean. Kindergarten should be FUN, afterall.
In Reading, Thing 1 has continued to grow, just through reading anything he can get his hands on. Including the dictionary. His fluency is really good, I'm not entirely sure about his comprehension (although he can recite a lot of things back to me a couple days later, so his retention at least is excellent) and he LOVES it. Trying to figure something out for first grade has been a bit of a nightmare on my part, to be honest, because most of what I can find for first graders involves phonics instruction still, and Thing 1 doesn't need that. Since I've had some of the books for first grade for other subjects in the house since the beginning of January (I'll take a picture of all of it together once the rest arrives), I've had to keep them out of reach so he doesn't get ahead of me again ;)
In Math, our other "main" subject this year, he has been slowly making his way through Math-U-See Alpha. Not because he doesn't understand it, but because we've been a bit lazy about it. We took a long break for the holidays, and he went back and filled in the missing pages (we skip pages if he gets the concept) and is caught back up to where we had been before. Now it's just a matter of continuing along. This is the only subject I have not purchased the next part for because I have not been getting along with Math-U-See's website. They are going through some changes in their cart system or something and so I'm just going to (try to) be patient and wait for it all to be squared away. We're not in danger of needing it before it's ready at this point, so I can wait. For now.
In other subjects, we haven't really focused on much of anything, besides some memorization of US state locations. He knows a good number of them, and really, it was something I decided we would do just so we'd have something to do when he wanted to "learn something". Other than that, his reading of random things has taught him a LOT of random facts that he just spits out at even more random times.
And don't think that everything is all sunshine and roses around here. He may be doing very well academically, but I will be the first to admit that we deal with some major behavioral and social issues. Thing 1 is a LOT like me, so focusing on a particular task (I've gotten up and wandered a few times during this post, for example, as well as opened other tabs in my browser to just read random stuff) is difficult, as well as handling most social situations. While Link isn't exactly a social creature himself, many times I have noticed that Thing 1 will take his lead on when it is and is not appropriate to talk to people. This means that when we're trying to get a question answered at someplace like The Home Depot the poor sales associate has to deal with a 6 year old interrupting every minute or so (with additional details that he remembers from Link and I discussing it), but at least he's trying to help ;) I'm not going to go into details about behavior, just know that it's not all rainbows and puppies around here ;)
And there you have it, my basic assessment of how Thing 1 has done for his kindergarten year. Hopefully once we get started on first grade (after Voom is here) I'll actually be able to do weekly updates since we're going to be buckling down a bit more and a full year assessment just won't work as well.
No comments:
Post a Comment