Term One
(This week is the end of Term One. There are three terms, plus a Christmas block to make up the total year. I plan for us to school year round. We’ll work for four weeks with a focus, and then have a week that is unstructured (aside from Swimming and Co-op which both follow the local school year). Three of these blocks will form a term, which will mean twelve weeks of school and three weeks of break per term, three terms a year. There will be a tenth block, which will be basically December, where we will still do some formal work for the first four weeks, but much lighter than usual (this is planning generally for the future, at the moment it probably won’t make much difference) while we prepare for Christmas.
I want to name the terms, as we’re not using the same structure as local schools, so I think numbering them will just lead to confusion. Not sure what we’ll name them… need to ponder on something appropriate…)

Back to this last term. We stuck to the plan in fits and starts. I was kind of expecting that—it’s one of the reasons for
beginning now, so I can develop the habit.
The singing and the art study works well. The craft and cooking basically falls down when I forget to look ahead at what I’m doing. I kept going to begin a craft and then realise that there was something that I should have looked out ahead of time. Actually, the same applies to the composer study too… We didn’t listen to much Mozart, because I forgot to line up tracks ahead of time.
Puggle enjoyed the poems a lot, although we rarely read them more than twice a week. I should make more of an effort to read them each day (at this stage, they’re all quite short). The same with the nursery rhymes.
The stories that we were reading were less successful. Partly that was me not making a push to sit and read them (we read picture books a lot, but not the longer stories). But I think part of the problem was also the slow reading of the tales. I think for now, we might change to reading the whole story each day, a couple of times a week, and see how that goes.
I started printing out letter outlines, just so that he’d be seeing the letter each week, but he loves to trace around them! I’ll keep doing this, but I think I’ll put away the skinny pencils and crayons, and just leave the thick ones. His grip is quite variable of late, but with the thick crayons, it tends to be more correct.
We’ve been gluing his work into a journal (that will be what we take to co-op fair), but I probably need to be more regular about that, perhaps do it on Friday afternoons? (That’s also probably a good time to be sure to add cooking requirements to the shopping list).
Mostly though, I just need to make a point some time on the weekend of printing out what we need, gathering craft supplies, and making sure the music is lined up. That and the full story readings should make a difference to how this next term progresses.
Actually, I guess I should try and be more regular about posting my progress reports… I have a number drafted, but incomplete…