Sunday, February 14, 2010

Humanities, Maths

It is fairly important to be prepared when being a home school teacher. I had read through the lesson plans for Humanities - in fact I'd read through the whole first 4 weeks, but I had not actually PREPARED. After a very unsatisfactory start to the lesson yesterday I called it a day with Jonty and did not complete the lesson. I just stopped the class and sent him to watch TV. I realised that he lost out because I had not done my homework. Not fair. And he was disappointed too. The lesson was about families, and he was enjoying it. So today, while waiting for Em to do her ballet, I re-read the lesson plans, and made copious notes of what I needed to do and how I needed to prepare. I am confident things will go better next week.

This morning I did 2 maths lessons, even though its Sunday, because I am still trying to catch up. I think that by the end of this week he should be on par with his maths. He's doing well - when he thinks, that is. He does not really like to think. He likes to know the answers, memorise them, and the sprout them.

He counted well in 2's (starting with 0 or with 1, and in fact starting with any number). he counts backwards easily, and can count backwards - a little slower - in 2's. He is very comfortable counting up and down in 10's. He is also very quick to figure out which number is bigger than which, and also to order numbers correctly e.g. given a sequence like 38, 12, 7, 56, etc. he will have them sorted in seconds.

He enjoys written work a lot - must be because that's what he's used to from his Thai school. You can see him visibly relax when we move from mental work to written work! He works very quickly and confidently.

He's really getting the hang of the new vocab too! he was even coming up with different ways to say "2 plus 3" or whatever.

He pretty much breezed through his 2 lessons - took about an hour to do both (with numerous interruptions from the E and the N factors).

And here endeth my day. Good night. Sleep tight.

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