Right. That was a looooong
break from blogging. Since my last post
was on 25 May 2011, I figured that I might as well wait a full year before
posting something new. So here we are –
25 May 2012! The year of silence is official over, and I’m ready to say hello
again.
Quick updates are in
order. Emily, almost five, is midway
through her K1 year in school and we celebrated Nicholas’ first birthday about
two months ago.
The past year saw us
seriously bump up Emily’s music instruction. She’s still in the Music for Young Children (MYC)
programme, but we switched teachers about a year ago, and now we’re doing what
can only be described as “MYC on Steroids”.
Just keeping up with the programme requires Emily to practise on the
piano for somewhere between 30 to 45 minutes a day. But she has really learnt a lot this past
year, including sightreading across two octaves on the staff and two-note
chords for C major, G major and A minor.
In January, we also added
the violin to the mix. After a disappointing start at a certain
well-known music school when Emily was three, we stopped sending her to violin
lessons and her 1/36 was left untouched in our music room at home. However, because she kept asking us for
violin lessons, we eventually enrolled her in NAFA’s violin programme and she
started in their Preparatory class (with a 1/10-size violin) this year. Violin practice probably takes Emily another
half an hour each day, although she has been known to practice for up to an hour
and a half on days when she feels particularly motivated.
With all this going on,
it’s a wonder we had time for other home learning activities. We have had to scale down a bit, as my time
is now split between two children, but thankfully, we have still been able to
get some things done.
Let’s get Mathematics out
of the way first. We made good progress
with Right Start Math (RSM) but I
hesitated when we reached four-digit addition last year because Emily seemed to
be struggling a bit with place value. The worksheets literally asked the child
to solve "2631 + 1250 = ___ " which seemed a bit much to me.
Thus, when other mummy
friends purchased Math U See packages
from the local distributor, I jumped on the bandwagon to give Emily more
practice with basic concepts like addition, subtraction and place value. We completed the Primer level programme
fairly quickly, and are now working on the Alpha books. I suspect that we’ll be in a better place to
resume our RSM Level B work once we’ve completed Alpha.
Topping off the Mathematics
line-up are the abacus classes which
Emily does in school. They are currently
working on multi-number addition and subtraction and Emily seems to enjoy the
workbook-based programme enough to keep going with it for a while.
We haven’t felt the need to
work too hard on reading this
year. After Emily reached a certain
level of proficiency (probably around Book 8a of Peter and Jane), we stopped
formal reading instruction altogether.
These days, we just try to find time to read books together, and I ask
her to read brochures, mailers, recipes, road signs, advertisement billboards
and other random print. We continued
reading books listed in the Five in a
Row curriculum - including The Story of Ping, Papa Piccolo, Night of the
Moonjellies and The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Gray Bridge - but have
not done a new lapbook since the New Baby one she worked on. I definitely want
us to read together a lot more in the year ahead.
Emily is now reading comfortably
at a second-grade level and she is enjoying the readers at that level which I
purchased recently. She has also mastered all the Dolch commonly-used sight
words for the Pre-Primer to Third Grade levels, which has helped her read a
larger variety of books.
Handwriting was a new challenge in the
last few months, with more worksheets coming in from school now that she is in
K1. This will be something we definitely
have to work on in the year ahead. We
also made a start on spelling but
haven’t been working very consistently on this in recent months.
For Chinese, we’ve been depending on Emily’s kindergarten to give her a
proper foundation and we also started Emily on Berries classes, which she
enjoys. I want (and probably need!) to
do more here. Along with the other one
thousand things Emily and I would like to do, that is!
All said and done, it’s
been a busy, busy year. Phew! That was
the catch-up post. Still with me? J
Nice article, which you have shared here. Your article is very interesting and informative about the abacus. If anyone looking for the Abacus Coaching Centres in Dwarka, Visit scholarspoint.net.in
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