Homeschool Progress Check 3

I shudder a little bit about sharing this month with you...It's been really hit and miss with all of the running around we've been doing. Honestly, March is a super blur to me. Like, did we really have March, or we just kind of passed over it and went from February to April, right?

I had a lot of good intentions for March and school. I found a couple of fun games at Goodwill and grabbed a couple of new books for Bennett at Target, but we barely touched them this month.

I finally got on it last week again and things were fine. It's been a lot of bookwork, I've just kind of been making them finish their worksheets, I help them and scroll Facebook and then we've been done for the day, but they seem to be learning still.

Things that have worked:

1. School Zone Workbooks. I got a "Big 1st Grade" book from Target and a math book from Amazon, and they are laid out nicely, they have everything I'd like to touch on in them, and they are totally Bennett's speed.
2. Games. Still. I think games are always going to be a winner for my kids. I got a dinosaur puzzle, a pizza game that's all about fractions, and a set of play money to work on that some more. Also, games like: Memory, Count Your Chickens, Uno, Trouble, etc, are all great games to use.
3. Being Flexible. If I get rigid with my expectations or timing, I tend to lose my temper, so it helps to just be flexible. If we don't begin the day when I want to, no big deal - as long as they are learning things and making progress, that's what counts!

Things that haven't worked:

1. Doing school 5 days a week. I just can't seem to do it. Either we have a day or three that we are running around doing errands, or I just get bored. So, I've settled on doing 4 days a week. It seems to be plenty so far.
2. Sticking to our chores... This is more my fault than anything else...I've just been so bad about keeping up with it lately.
3. TV. I started trying to not let the kids watch as much TV lately because their attitudes have been beastly when they do watch it. I've been only allowing faith-based movies and just one (or two shorter ones) instead of streaming Netflix.

Successes and Progress so far:

1. Bennett's adding and subtracting is really coming along! He seems to be getting quicker at remembering the basics - it's exciting to see.
2. Keeping Christ the center of things. The kids have been more saturated in faith based media lately and naturally, their talk is revolving around Christ and the Bible, and what God is doing more than anything else. It's been very uplifting!
3. Parker's name is coming right along! The other day he wrote it "Pakrkr." It's just the sweetest, he's missing a couple of letters, but he's really starting to grasp putting letters into words! He did a color by word worksheet the other day too and he did marvelous!

So, even though we didn't get a lot accomplished this month, the learning did continue! It's so fun to recap the month like this. When I first started this post, I was scratching my brain trying to figure out what it was going to contain, but it really looks like the month went well overall, besides being slow on the work.

Check back next month for another recap!