Week in Review week of 2/15/2016

     As typical this time of year I really slack off on blogging.  Part of that is I lose motivation and part of it is that school is just going along and there isn't a lot of new things to blog about.  We just finished week 24 in the World History Guide. 
    I will cover just a few of the highlights.  N. continues along pretty well with most everything.  I have made one change in the past 2 weeks and that is we have stopped Rod and Staff Grammar.  This was a really hard decision for me to make because I feel like it is an excellent grammar program, however I was seeing that he still didn't have his prepositions down and couldn't isolate prepositional phrases which then got in the way of him figuring out the other sentence parts.  Also Rod and Staff instructions are wordy and no matter how we approached it he would start to zone out and get confused.  He and I are very similar in this aspect.  So for now we have switched to Easy Grammar Plus and we are hitting prepositions hard.  I'm not sure what I will do next year.
     In EIW he finished his persuasive essay back in January.  He was struggling with the given prompts so I challenged him to come up with his own and he decided to persuade drivers to not use their phones while driving.  Since he has his driving temps this was a very timely topic and one I gladly let him cover. 

     He then did a process analysis essay and again the prompts weren't things he had much knowledge of so I let him write a process analysis essay about how to do one of his parkour vaults.  As expected this was one of his best papers yet because he knew the subject so well.  I figure in public school they are often given a broad prompt and allowed to pick a more specific topic so that is what I did.  At this point it is more important that he write a good essay.

     In Science he has now been doing the Human Anatomy Paces.  As a Physical Therapist I can say that these are very well done.  I had ordered a few additional slides that go along with these Paces because he may go into Exercise Science in college so I wanted him to see the actual slides.  He loved looking at the slide of the 3 different muscle types.

     His World Histoy notebook is really coming along.  I have let him dictate to me a little more this year, mostly due to the nature of the assignments.  He continues to take short notes during You Are There on notebook paper and then I transfer those notes over to his notebook.  He will verbally add a few details to those notes as I copy them.  He is doing better with his written narrations.  The Critical Thinking using Primary Source Documents continues to be a very challenging assignment for him.  I am still having to come along side him quite a bit for this activity.  I'm not sure if that is typical or if most students can do these without input from their parent. 

 The Living Library continues to be a big hit this year.  I don't think there has been one book that he hasn't liked.  In Literature he is reading The Count of Monte Cristo.  He had a little trouble understanding this book at first, but he seems to follow it pretty well now and I was very pleased with his last written narration that went along with the literature. 

    I feel like he continues to slowly improve on skills he will need for college or whatever the future holds for him.  School doesn't come easy for him and his memory issues can cause some frustrations for both of us, but what I do see him learning is perseverance and giving everything your best effort even if it isn't your favorite subject.