If your year started out "crappy" Update

[mama25angels]

The first half of our year was horrible and I decided to make some changes after our winter break. I'm here to update and I hope everyone else does too. Things have been going very well, not perfect, but not as bad either. I have been working out consistently AND miracle of all miracles i'm sleeping better. I'm still working on consistency in my eating habits, but i'm slowly getting there. My attitude has been the biggest change as well as following up with consequences for not doing work. The main thing has been slowing down and working at my DC's pace. We're doing good with getting work done everyday, it's not always everything I had planned for the day, but we are moving forward. We are having success with:

 

CC memory work (done at our own pace)

Primary math (using education unboxed alot)

Building Thinking Skills (Ds loves this)

MP Christian Studies 1

read alouds

McGuffey readers (oral reading)

HWOT cursive

McCall/Crabbs (reading comprehension)

 

Not sure we're going to continue this:

R&S spelling(thinking of replacing this with WRTR or Spelling Power), Ds is just not retaining well. We'll probably finish out the year and switch next year.

 

So how are things going for you? Were your changes successful?

[pinksneakers14]

Our first half of the year was bumpy. We're doing much better now. I tried to do math four days a week, but we moved to five when I realized how far behind we were getting. I decided to leave science experiments for the summer when we need things to do, and we just do our science reading and history once or twice a week. We dropped sonlight's LA before Christmas and switched to WWE and FLL, and we started using AAS. All are working out great. We'll have to go into the summer a bit, or just order the second books and start them when we get there. I feel more confident too. There are still things we're working out, but I'm happy with our progress.

[dsmith]

We had an absolutely horrible start to the year. I've been poring through the boards looking for some inspiration. I decided to make a curriculum switch a few months ago, so we are now using A World of Adventure. I like the freedom this curriculum offers me. It lists some recommended resources but I have found plenty of resources on my own that are more tailored to my son's learning style. I do have to modify some of the literature assignments for ds, but overall it is a pretty good fit for us. I also switched math a while ago, and CLE has been a great fit! I still end up going through each lesson and selecting which problems to do, but it takes less than a minute per lesson. Ds does not do well with constant repetition of concepts, so this has been working out well for us. It has really become apparent to me that I need to spend a decent amount of time tailoring curriculum to my son's special needs, and while it is time consuming, it is really paying off. I spent so much time finding curriculum to fit ds, but now I am working on making curriculum work better for him through modification.

[newbieoftwo]

This is my first year homeschooling, so it wasn't a crappy start, it was just a 6 month learning experience. I needed to figure out how my DS learned and what approaches worked best. He processes things almost the exact opposite of me so it took some time to transition my approach.

 

Now the days are really zooming by and I can see my DS starting to get excited about learning! We finally found a math program that reaches him with RightStart Math and my DD can sit in on the lessons and play games with us. My DS loves this!! He loves group activities so I brought in more of the "extras" that DD could do with us. We started HomeArt Studio and Story of the World (well its our starting point) and Fridays are full of science discussions. His retention is way up and (besides reading) school time has become a very enjoyable time for all. DS is even showing improvement in handwriting :w00t: