Progress
Week 1, Block 6
He's been really focussed on 'looking at the pictures'. He denies "reading" as a descriptor, but he is certainly re-telling books to himself. He also reads through the My Very First Mother Goose at length, but wants me there for the half dozen or so nursery rhymes he can't remember (a very small percentage). He's also taken to singing to himself at night, he just wants me to prompt.
The stamping thing is still a big occupation, he's traced most of the printed letters I gave him, then stamped the outside of the page... then cut out the letter to give to me:-)
We went to 'KinderClassics' this week for the first time. Not sure whether we'll stick with it as it's probably a little more formal than I'm looking for at this age, but we'll give it a few weeks to see. The homeschooling Latin teacher in Perth (there is one, he has more than a dozen classes each week!) runs a 3-5 year old group. Mostly it's singing (we have begun to learn "Mica, Mica"—"Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star"), but there's some colouring in, gluing and cutting out. And I think that's what has made him suddenly cut out the letters:-) They made puppets this week:-) They also looked at a globe and a map to see where we live and where Rome is. He was a bit overawed by it all—except for the bit where he got to count backwards:-) (I think the teacher was trying to get to explaining about the lack of '0', but he realised halfway through that these kids don't have a strong enough concept of what the number names mean for '0' to make any sense:-) )
And we sang. He often comes out with "Mica mica, parva stella" and repeats it to the whole song:-) Should progress now that I've learnt the rest! And he's really enjoying "Two Little Boys". Re-sings in his own version ("Two little boys had two little toys, one had a wooden horse and one had a wooden spoon"), and always corrects me when I use the name 'Jack' in the first half:-) Learning a new song always works much better if I grasp it (or know it already), unsurprisingly. I really need to work on me learning new songs more quickly so that he has a chance to.
All in all, a pretty good week.
He's been really focussed on 'looking at the pictures'. He denies "reading" as a descriptor, but he is certainly re-telling books to himself. He also reads through the My Very First Mother Goose at length, but wants me there for the half dozen or so nursery rhymes he can't remember (a very small percentage). He's also taken to singing to himself at night, he just wants me to prompt.
The stamping thing is still a big occupation, he's traced most of the printed letters I gave him, then stamped the outside of the page... then cut out the letter to give to me:-)
We went to 'KinderClassics' this week for the first time. Not sure whether we'll stick with it as it's probably a little more formal than I'm looking for at this age, but we'll give it a few weeks to see. The homeschooling Latin teacher in Perth (there is one, he has more than a dozen classes each week!) runs a 3-5 year old group. Mostly it's singing (we have begun to learn "Mica, Mica"—"Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star"), but there's some colouring in, gluing and cutting out. And I think that's what has made him suddenly cut out the letters:-) They made puppets this week:-) They also looked at a globe and a map to see where we live and where Rome is. He was a bit overawed by it all—except for the bit where he got to count backwards:-) (I think the teacher was trying to get to explaining about the lack of '0', but he realised halfway through that these kids don't have a strong enough concept of what the number names mean for '0' to make any sense:-) )
And we sang. He often comes out with "Mica mica, parva stella" and repeats it to the whole song:-) Should progress now that I've learnt the rest! And he's really enjoying "Two Little Boys". Re-sings in his own version ("Two little boys had two little toys, one had a wooden horse and one had a wooden spoon"), and always corrects me when I use the name 'Jack' in the first half:-) Learning a new song always works much better if I grasp it (or know it already), unsurprisingly. I really need to work on me learning new songs more quickly so that he has a chance to.
All in all, a pretty good week.
2 Comments:
Just out of curiosity, why Latin, as opposed to any other LOTE?
*grin*
A whole other post!
There are many reasons. It's something I've always wanted to do, which is I guess what started me thinking about it.
I see Latin as a great beginner for other Romance languages, from a vocab perspective. It's a great beginning place for grammer, because it's a declined language—and the pronunciation is much easier than Russian!
Latin for me is as much about the mental discipline as the fact it's a LOTE (and that depends on your moderator... some of them won't accept it I believe). We'll be introducing French shortly (should have done so before now, but I fell down on getting myself in the swing early:-( ), but my plan is to continue Latin as far as possible.
Poppins has a great quote, (which appears to have disappeared off her site) "I choose it because a mind that has been asked to follow a rigourous learning plan is never out-of-date. My goal as an educator is to equip my students with the tools they need in order to learn whatever it is they want to do in life, whether it's how to work a washing machine or draft architectural drawings. I believe that with a classical education my children will have the mental equivalent of a gymnast's body-strong, flexible, well-honed, practiced."
At this stage my plan is to follow the Latin-Centered Curriculum, which works from a less is more background (unlike a _lot_ of others, which involve jamming in as much as possible!), and I'm hoping that Latin will help us in that simplification.
The other thing is that this opportunity landed on our doorstep:-) We're going with the flow:-)
I do plan to blog more about my longer term plans/goals—but I'm wary of putting too much of it down too soon... I do have outlines and sketches, but I'm pretty much going with the flow for this year and the next. You've probably noticed that there's quite a discrepency between our plans and our reality:-)
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