First Six Weeks Report
                            January 22 - March 1, 1996
                                        Fifth Grade
 
 
     T___ started in his fifth-grade material (Bob Jones math and English and A Beka Old World history).  He is doing fine academically, and I'm not going to list what he's covered, as usual, as a sign that my teaching priorties have changed (plus I have a record in my lesson plan book).  I am concentrating on character training using the academic subjects as the means.  One of our sayings is "A rebellious boy is not a happy boy."
 
     We had a snow day and two field trips, one with SWDHSA to the Dallas Museum of Art, where a docent taught us about the Greek artifacts and statues, and another one to Pizza Hut.
 
Grades:  Math A, Spelling A, English A, Writing A, History A, Citizenship B
 


                            Second Sixth Weeks Report
                                March 6 - April 12, 1996
                                         Fifth Grade
 
       T___ is zooming through the Bob Jones math book.  He knows practically everything in it, so it's essentially practice. In English he is learning vocabulary (prepositional phrase, adjective, etc.) but doesn't really understand it yet.  
 
        We've studied the Egyptians and Israelites and are learning about the Chinese now.  Next week we plan on seeing a circus that developed from the Ch'in and Han dynasties.
 
         I'm easing up on requirements and teaching more of what T___ likes.  He got a spring break and an Easter break, is going through Christian Light Publications Small Engines, has one core subject a day, and no more formal spelling. On gymnastics days, he has only an experiment (generally from his Radio Shack 200-in-1 kit).  Fridays are informal reading days.  The extra freedom has done him good in terms of his happiness and willingness to try.  He spots causes that make it hard to want to work (e.g., "The Need For Speed" computer game).  
 
       Next six weeks A___ will take over electrical experiments, and T___ will start in the Bob Jones life science course, modified so it's at his younger level.  To see why leaves turn colors in the fall, we'll be extracting pigments from spinach leaves with alcohol and then petroleum ether.
 
       When we need the car for Activities Day (alternate Mondays) or gymnastics (Tuesdays), we take A___ to work at 4:15 a.m.  We normally get up at 8:00 so T___ can play from 9 to 10.
 
Grades:  Math A, Spelling A, English A, Writing A, History A, Science A, Cars A, Citizenship B+
 
 
    


                                Third Six Weeks Report
                                April 15 - May 31, 1996
                                         Fifth Grade
 
     T___ is learning how to buckle down, enjoy himself, and experience a job well done.  A far cry from before.
 
     I'm giving him many more math problems to work to get his speed and endurance up.  At this point, it is time to just practice multiplication, division, fractions, and decimals.  Enough is enough, though.  So, I'm skipping to a seventh-grade book when he finishes this one.  He's half-way through.
 
     I got a sixth-grade Bob Jones reader and worktext T___ uses readily enough.  I have an eighth-grade A Beka reader, but no worktext, he reads out of, too.  He still prefers Clue books or car magazines, but he's learning to read less-exciting material.
 
     We'll have to watch Mondays and days after holidays. School after breaks in the routine seems to be especially bad behavior-wise.  I'll try to ease T___ into it.
 
     For summer, I plan on T___ each week doing a couple of pages of math (odds or evens) from My Seventh-Grade Super Workbook, a couple of pages of the exercises in the back of his English book, and a page in his journal.



                               Fourth Six-Weeks Report
                             August 12 - October 4, 1996
                                         Fifth Grade
 
 
       T___ had weekly assignments this summer from the back exercise pages of his English 5 grammar book and selected pages in My Seventh-Grade Super Workbook.  At the end of July he said he wanted to start doing school in the summer too so he could take off days in the fall, winter, or spring.  He worked 8 summer days, 2 of which he has already cashed in (once to go to Six Flags with a friend and once because he just wanted to).  We observed Grandmother's Day and Labor Day.
 
         We will let T___ take the whole month of December off from school if he applies himself without complaining to get a brown belt in karate.  So far he has done that.
 
         We have done units on Italy, England, and are starting on India.  At the book fair in Plano in August, T___ found a sixth-grade math workbook (Landmark's Freedom Baptist Curriculum, LFBC) he thought he would like.  He finished the geometry unit in his fifth-grade book and is into the new book now.  He's very intuitive in working problems, doing many of them in his head, which didn't work for him when he needed to use the distributive law.  We'll have to swing back around on that lesson.
 
        One exercise in his Reading Worktext 6 (p. 189) had him look up Bible verses and suggest solutions to problems in stories in Reading 6.  I'm thinking reading in Proverbs will help him to identify solutions to his own problems.  



                                    Fifth Reporting Period
                            October 7 - November 27, 1996
                                       End of Fifth Grade
 
History: After covering geographical and historical information about  the Roman Empire, India, modern England, Australia, France, Africa, Oceania, U.S.S.R., Antarctica, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, Portugal, Spain, and European languages, we finished the fifth-grade Old World history book.  We did history every day to get through this much material.
 
Math:  He learned to divide with fractions and with decimals and to use percentages.  After completing the lessons on percentages, we'll start set theory.  He has been whizzing through the math exercises with little need for me to teach him.  Many times I'd have him work only the multiples of five.  He needed more guidance on the percent problems.  My goal for him is to be able to reason his way through unfamiliar material.
 
Cars:  We did Small Engines Unit 12, "Size and Performance Measurement," up to torque and horsepower curves (page 132) and the diesel engine part of Unit 7, "Diesel and Rotary Valve Engines." He's writing a report on Felix Wankel.  The last two weeks we've gone to the downtown Dallas library after picking A___ up from work on T___'s gymnastics day.  (We did piano instead of cars last reporting period.)
 
Science:  We finished studying the planets from Physical Geography, by Arnold Guyot, read about vitamins and nutrition, and started the unit on the human body in the Bob Jones (B.J.) Life Science textbook (7th grade).
 
Reading:  He is reading A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court and The Bobbsey Twins for his pleasure.  He has read two Wally McDougle books, plus the usual car magazines and books and a chapter a day in the Bible.  He read selections from his B.J. (sixth grade) and A Beka (eighth grade) readers.  His comprehension was low on the Gettysburg Address, so we went over reading tactics to dig out meaning.  I plan on him reading from McGuffy's Sixth Eclectic Reader (1880) so he can practice digging out meaning.
 
English:  He started sixth-grade English in the Comprehensive Curriculum workbook.  We've reviewed parts of speech, punctuation, and spelling rules up to page 129.  I'm using the worktext to the B.J. reader, too.
 
Comments:  T___ persevered in karate to get the reward of no school in December and then the brown-belt class was disbanded.  He was still pursuing a brown belt though, practicing on his own and in his weekly private lessons, so he got his days off anyway.
 
          Piano is going to be for "de-rust" over December.  He reads, works on the word-processor, and does projects on his own.  He might work in the Seventh-Grade Super Workbook.
 
Grades:  I concentrate on T___ doing good work, and if he doesn't, he does it again.  I don't count off when he misses something; I make him correct it.  If he forgets something, I bring it to his remembrance and keep asking him the fact till it's in his memory.   I don't keep grades because he knows if he's done well without them.  He needs more understanding on percentages.
 
     When colleges are interested in what T___ is doing, grades may be necessary, but for now he doesn't operate under that kind of system.  With no report cards I've entered another level of homeschool liberty.


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