This week’s accomplishments

After the recommendation from the Occupational Therapist (OT) we are officially making a switch to Handwriting without Tears.  Lil G had a week without handwriting as I patiently waited for our appointment with our therapist so that I can learn more on how to help him. Consequently, this forced me to get a lot more creative with our lessons.  For math, we played money games and Mental math Bingo and it was such a hit! He loved math.  Did you hear that? He loved it!  I also realized that he had a great conceptual knowledge on adding double digits.  A little bit from our conversation during Mental Math Bingo:

Mom: Quick, Lil G what is 18 + 18?
Lil G: (short 2 second pause) 36
Mom: whoa that was fast! How’d you get that?
Lil G: Mom, that’s easy! I added 8+8 and that’s 16.  Then I knew that there were two tens I still needed to add to that so that’s how I came up with 36. 
Mom: (grasping seat tightly as to not fall off in sheer joy and amazement) Wow!

I’ve worked with many third graders who would need to write that whole problem down to solve it.  They would need to regroup on paper in order to come up with the thirty-six.  I am so impressed!  It really let me know that truly it was the handwriting that was setting him back.  Now that we are well on our way with tips and tricks up our sleeve (thanks to the OT), we are well on our way to getting Lil G on the path of success with writing!  A huge accomplishment this week!

Lil Dude is totally grasping on the sight words practice.  We have a goal of mastering 5 site words a week.  We are still working on reading fluency and we are definitely getting there.  Also, my Lil Dude will start on HWT this week.  I am ditching the other handwriting curriculum immediately!

We will be signing up to participate in our local homeschooling science fair in March.

Both boys will participate this year and I am coaching both boys to think of great science projects that they would love to work on. 

Here's a pic at Lil G's project from last year.

A BIG week for us!