The Panic is Over

Okay, I'm much calmer today. Actually had things sort of resolved in my head last night. So I spent my Friday night doing school prep. lol.

Here's the decision I came to: for the 15yo's math for this coming week, I've done up sheets with places for examples (some of it will be just photocopied out of the text) and then on the sheet are all the questions I had decided she needed to do. Lucky girl, the first section I had originally planned out for her to do does NOT have to be done, so she only has 3 sections to do this week instead of 4. I've got those three sections done up plus a short quiz. I'm basically telling her that that is the work she has to do for the week and she's got to figure out how and when she's going to get it done. I still have to go through her science to see what would be a reasonable amount for her to do in a week's time and lay that out. I also need to read in To Kill a Mockingbird and insist she get reading. She's taking so long she's not getting into it. The first part of the book is kind of a "Where's she going with this?" so it is slow but it doesn't have to be as slow as it is now! Haven't yet figured out what to do about her French. Probably some worksheets to work on phonics and spelling.

For her brother, I just had a look at the textbook and we'll cover operations with integers, plus his math facts practice PLUS the work from Ray's (got to pick something there). For language arts, I'm changing things a bit. I'm going to do the phonics review as usual and then we're going to preview a bunch of words from a book on Edison that I got from the library. It was written for 12-13yo's (a while ago, but still for 12-13yo's!) . The way we're going to preview them is to look at them in the eyes of phonics and syllabication, and then have them as spelling words. After that, we'll get to the reading. I'm going to either photocopy or type up the pages we'll be reading together so that we can easily take turns reading. (I got this idea of previewing words and using them for spelling before reading from Marva Collins.) For French, I think I'll just print of some labelling worksheets from Enchanted Learning. (Ooh, and print some off in German for dd.) Actually, ds could do some of those sheets, too. It would be a great activity for him.

Back to the language arts... Once we're done the reading, I'm going to have him write about Thomas Edison or write to a character in the book.

With him, I've got to be careful just how much I push because he will push back--by doing absolutely nothing. I should probably plan in some science and social studies work for him in case the other stuff doesn't take as long as I think it will. Oh, and he can start typing lessons, even if it's just two days.

Ok, back to math sheets prep for the 12yo!