Wednesday's Homeschooling

Today we got a lot done. First we did a placement test we got from the Saxon Homeschool website. Saxon publishes math textbooks that are ever-popular with homeschoolers. Cimeron is using their Math 87 book in public school now, and I'm hoping to get a book for Aaron soon.

We got about half way through the test. It is helping me identify areas we can work on together.

Next we read from a book about magic, and learned to do two of the magic tricks. That was fun for both of us and involved using some strategy and science.

After that we did a review of New York history including the information we learned about John Brown and the start of the Civil War. Aaron usually remembers things like this very well, which makes me wonder why it has been so hard for him to learn to read and write.

Next we did the dreaded spelling test. He got a few of the words right, which I found very encouraging. Next to his words I drew a vertical line and had him write the correct version of what he missed. We'll use the missed words again another week.

Oh, one other thing I had him do - was to calculate how much money he had left out of $100 after buying a new controller for his Nintendo and a used game. I thought he'd do the subtraction on our pen board but instead he glanced at the numbers and did an estimation in his head. I thought that was cool, how quickly and easily he came up with *almost* the right number.

  ¶ 2:07 AM