Break is finally over...

Almost a month and a half later, we are wrapping up our holiday break.

We went to Florida (Gulf side) for Uncle and Auntie's wedding. While we were there, we went to the beach, we collected shells and talked about what lived in them, we went to Dinosaur World, and learned about dinosaurs, including the scale involved... A grand, and educational, time was had by all!

Now that we are working on being back, I decided to start the new year with a sort of review. I took the subjects we were working on and came up with questions for each.  Reading was mildly difficult, as expected. The words to read were: home, out, shut, cheek, target, penny.  The results were not surprising. He needed a good deal of help to get home, shut was easy, out, cheek and target needed reminders of the "what does -ou- say?" or "what does -ee- say?" or "what does -ar- say?" variety, and that was then easy for him. Penny took some doing. He kept going with pen-yuh. That 'y' sound was just going to be the end of him. He did finally get it, though. We will go over the last unit of reading again, just to play it safe. Not actively teaching it, but watching the lessons, just as a refresher.

Social Studies had the question of "Who helps us cross the street?" This didn't go well, as Monkey defaulted to "red man, white hand." This is completely correct, as these are the signals on the crossing light, but I was hoping for crossing guard.  Kind of funny, truth be told. He went through the signals, the crosswalk and holding hands before he figured out what I was going for.

Science saw the sun bigger than the moon, and health saw us brushing our teeth and wearing jackets in the winter and sandal-shoes in the summer.  He was also able to explain why our clothing choices were different by season. Language as a whole went well, as he picked out a comma and a question mark, told me their names and functions with no hesitation.  I was impressed.  Math was a little slower. I'll want to do a few review lessons from the front of the blue book just to get back into the swing. He had three equations to solve - 7+2, 10+4, and 70+8. He used LEGO for the first two, and the abacus for the third, but he needed a little prompting to remember how to make those work.  So we'll get back to that and get moving on along.

All in all, I'm very pleased, and I think his year is going exceptionally well.  Next stop... planning for the rest of the week!