Summer Planning Part I

Our first week of summer vacation! I'm doing a lot of brain storming for the upcoming school year.
I know what it is that we are doing, I just want to do some things a little different.

For A8 the 3rd grade is really a transition year. She will leave behind the things she's been doing for the first three years of school and move into things she is going to start doing in the last three years of elementary school.

For the first 3 years the focus was on learning to read, learning to write and of course math.
In third grade we will start to go in another direction. Now that she can read and write, she will use those things to broaden her learning horizons so to speak. She will be learning how to assimilate information, more specifically, information she gets from reading a book herself.

We are still going to do FIAR and lapbooks, but we'll be adding chapter books as well.

The chapter books she will be reading are part of our American history course. I don't want to do lapbooks for these books, I want something different. I'm looking into this resource book: Better Than Book Reports: More Than 40 Creative Responses to Literature. Hopefully this book will help us find different ways to present the information she will be learning from the My America books.

Like I said, it's going to be a transition year for her. As for X5, things are not going to change too much for him. We'll be doing math, phonics and lots of reading a loud with FIAR. The lapbooks will look different than hers just because he can't read or write yet. I need to come up with simpler things than she had for his lapbooks. A lot of the lessons will be oral, just like I did with her during her K year.

I've been told many times by homeschoolers with boys that they are usually behind girls when it comes to reading, but will catch up by 4th or 5th grade. I will trust the wisdom of these mothers and not panic... yet! ha ha!!