There’s a storm brewing outside in Singapore. I love sitting down to write when it’s raining. Rain cleanses. Rain nourishes. To me, writing does the same thing. It cleanses my thoughts, getting some of them out of my brain and feeds my soul. Sounds corny perhaps but I always feel better about life in general after I hit the “publish” button.

I’ve needed to update about our homeschooling for a while so that’s what I will do. Here are previous homeschool posts if you want to catch up.

I can. I will.

SHS Day 2

Play and Learn

It’s been one month of 6th grade and things are going pretty well. There have really only been two days when I honestly didn’t “feel like it today”. One of those was just laziness and we pushed through and the other was a true teacher sick day. I have to say, though, that it was nice to lay around that day and watch 4 movies. Anna still did some of her independent school work. She’s kind of task oriented that way and I’m grateful. She really likes to check things off of a list. Makes me proud. :)

PACE is going well. She is making good progress here. Sometimes it’s challenging and really hurts her brain (and mine) but alot of the time it’s a fun sort of challenge. We are both learning some things about her through this program. Areas where she tends to lose focus and ways to help her overcome that. She has already memorized all of the U.S. President’s using picture stories. This is a visual processing task so that comes pretty easy for her but it is still very impressive to me that she can rattle them off. Visual pictures to help connect objects together is a great learning tool. Many of the PACE drills use a metronome. Sometimes she uses it to keep a beat while doing the drill but sometimes its function is more of a auditory distraction. The auditory processing is what we are mainly trying to enhance for her through this program and we are seeing improvement. We laugh alot, especially when some of the drills require her to perform a specific task while I engage her in an easy conversation. Every time I bring up Dr. Pepper she messes up and every time we end up laughing. Dr. Pepper is a huge distraction I suppose.

As I said before, we’re not doing much in the realm of Science and History and Language. She does some easy grammar worksheets here and there. She is also reading and doing her memorization and copywork with Poetry. Blogging through some of these subjects is growing her computer skills and her writing ability. We brought in a DVD program for some easy American History, Drive Thru History – Foundations of Character, and we do that a couple times each week. She has written several summaries on her blog about Helen Keller and a brief research project on the Travelers Palm for Science. You can check out her blog here. Welcome to La La Land.

She barely tolerates Math. We still both love the program we use, Teaching Textbooks, though. If Math must be done, this is a good tool, for her anyway. She loves the being at the computer and she loves working independently which she can do with this for the most part. My favorite part of her Math is being downstairs and hearing her hum through her lessons. I think humming gets her through Math without making her crazy. If she were in a school setting, she would not be able to hum in Math and then it would be even less tolerable. :)

We’ve taken a few field trips and enjoyed our flexible schedule on a few days. We normally start our day around 9am and finish up around 1 or 2pm and this includes lunch and a swim on most days. She sometimes saves her Bible lessons for when Dad comes home and we usually share some things with him and Jakeb that she’s done in PACE. It’s always fun to show off a little.

We brought in Rosetta Stone Spanish this week. She will only have Spanish twice a week but so far she seems to like it much more than she liked Mandarin in the 4th grade. She said that Spanish is much easier because she must have ”more Mexican in me than I thought”. Funny girl. I suppose that living in Texas very near the border of Mexico for the first 10 years of her life made her part Mexican. Who knew???

We bought a new Think Fun game yesterday at a toy store in Tanglin Mall. The pieces of the game are chocolate shapes. How could we resist???

Here are a few pics from “school time” over the last month. There are some perks!

Lunchtime at Din Tai Fung. :)


School day at Starbucks!