Weekly update for the week of 9/17/2012

This is actually the weekly update for last week and this week.  Since we now are off schedule with doing day 5 on Monday and then doing only day 1-3 in a week it has me messed up some.  I didn't think it would bother me, but I must say I will be happy to see Thanksgiving week come so I can "straighten" things out.  N. doesn't seem to mind it though. 

As I had posted on the HOD board N. had been struggling some with a negative attitude and the days were taking forever.  I finally realized it was because I was hovering too much.  I backed off and let him be totally Independent with the I boxes and it has made a world of difference.  I still check his work after almost every box and he answers any follow up questions then.  He realizes he will have to redo something if he doesn't read the directions fully so he is being more careful with that.  It so happened the day we decided this he had an experiment that was tough for him to do with his weak hands.  He tried it once on his own, which resulted in some very wet feet when he just couldn't hold the jug steady.  He asked me to hold the jug and that worked out fine.  The rest of the week he did all the experiments on his own and did a good job of figuring out his theory.

He is enjoying the Inventor study and does a pretty good job with the written narrations, although for some reason doing an oral narration from the Michael Faraday book is really tough for him.  I think he gets bogged down in the science details the he doesn't quite understand.  I have found a few videos for him to watch in his spare time that have helped him at least visualize some of the concepts.

He continues to enjoy doing the state study and likes to pass along some silly law that the states used to have.

He made an oriental vase for his history project.  I am not sure he did it right because the directions seemed very similar for day 3 and day 4 so he was a little confused and I must admit so was I, but he did what he thought it was telling him to do.

We finished the storytime book Songbird, which he loved and we are now reading "The Secret Wish of Nannerl Mozart".  He has really connected with this book and does a great job orally narrating and answering the deeper thinking questions.  In fact I have seen real growth in this area by using the storytime questions and Carrie's questions. 

He continues to say he loves George Washington's World, but he does tend to struggle with the oral narrations from this book for some reason.  It is mostly on the days when he knows it is supposed to go 4-6 minutes.  Something about the time limit stresses him out.  He is barely able to narrate for 2 minutes.  This past week I did make him re-read the selection and he did a much better job.  I know Charlotte Mason says not to have them re-read, but sometimes I just have to with him or he just can't do it.  I am not sure if that is his short term memory issues or just a lack of attention.

For written narrations I had an aha moment with him when he was ready to do a written narration and he said he didn't know what he was going to write because all the passage did was describe what the man looked like and how he felt.  I told him that was what he was to narrate.  He got a puzzled look on his face and said "that's not what I put in narrations."  I realized he only focuses on the action when he is reading and when he is narrating.  If there isn't much action he doesn't know what to put.  He is like this in everyday life also.  He does not notice any details of dress or what someone looks like.  I talked to him about it and gave him some examples and it is slowly getting better.

I think this is going to be a real growing year for both of us.