Schooling in the New Year

Welcome to 2011!  I can hardly believe we have passed a decade since 2000. Seemed so crazy as we approached the year 2000 and here we are. Anyway...

We took most of December off because Fiona and Eric had a lot of clogging performances to go to. Six total and 4 in one week. Add to that all the Christmas stuff we needed to do and there just wasn't time for lesson plans. We eased back in by having the kids visit www.sheppardsoftware.com and www.multiplication.com along with www.learningplanet.com (they love Lemonade Tycoon!) and www.pbskids.org.  Colleen loves www.starfall.com and nickjr.

Then we spent a week talking about Christmas and New Year's traditions and snowflakes. Now we are back to more typical schooling.

Fiona has started back at www.time4learning.com. You may remember that I did a review about them a while back. It worked so well for her with math, that I decided to subscribe her to it again. It seems to be a great fit for her. She learns well with it and I like being able to see where she is on the subjects.
Eric and Colleen are doing well with our other plans, so we are keeping with that for now. I use www.lessonpathways.com to make up lesson plans for them. It's free and a great resource. They also love to visit www.brainpop.com and www.brainpopjr.com so we went ahead and subscribed to those. They love to explore them on their own and I also use the site to add to my lesson plans.

The multiplication site I mentioned above has been great for helping Fiona (and now Eric) to learn the multiplication facts. It is full of games that work to simply expose them to the facts over and over. Once they do a set amount they get to do some art or something else fun. Some of the games are set up so the fun stuff is the fact part. Eric is just getting started, but Fiona has learned most of her facts playing there. Colleen even goes and does the 1 times facts to get to play on it. LOL

Sheppardsoftware has been great for exposing them to the addition and subtraction facts more. They can do them all, but I'm hoping to help them be a bit more fluent with them.

On Thursday, Jan 6th, Eric had a basket weaving class. He had a great time and made a nice little basket. I'll try to get a picture posted before long. All the kids had a great time playing with their friends during the day also. We look forward to more chances to get together with them.