I love the idea of having a goal for the year; it's a great way to keep the focus on quality over quantity. The first year of homeschooling, I feel like we were just figuring things out and working out kinks (sorry Alison for always being the guinea pig). The next two years our focus was math as we built Alison's foundation back up from public school and I'm excited to see the strong results from that work.
This year, our focus will be on reading. Our goal for the year is to see how many books we can read. We're keeping a log of every book read, including books we read as a family and books individuals read. If they write a summary of the book, they get an extra point. We haven't set the prize yet, but at the end of the year, we'll celebrate the grand total of points for the year.
Why reading? While we have reading time most days, it is the one things that quickly gets tossed to the side when we get busy. I need the goal for myself to make reading to the kids a priority for the day and to be diligent that I'm getting good literature in their hands. Alison has gone through spurts of devouring books and has been in a fiction dry spell since the end of Harry Potter. My goal for her is to fall in love with fiction again (she choses biographies first, then informative books). Eli has been doing awesome with reading, but needs some encouragement reading harder chapter books. Colin is at that sweet spot of reading where it's just waiting to spring off. At this point with Eli, I had him make a book of his reading lesson stories; he reread the easier stories and drew a picture to go with it. Colin has started doing that as well. It builds their confidence and makes it fun. My goal for Colin is to get him reading independently.
No comments:
Post a Comment