6th Grade - 1st Reporting Period

First Reporting Period

January 7 - February 14, 1997

Sixth Grade

We took off the twelve days of Christmas this year, hence the January starting date. T___ likes to plan his own school day, so I let him do that on Fridays if he has completed his work Monday through Thursday of that week .

I'm getting T___ to focus more on accuracy. In math, he's been having up to four iterations of corrections. Before he turns in his work I'm having him mentally check it. He's discouraged by X's, so I rewrite the problems for him to correct in his math notebook. Of course, as he matures I won't have to do this.

We still do school from 9:00 to 3:00 and cover math, English from selected pages in the comprehensive curriculum workbook, history (backwards from the book - most recent to next most recent), reading topics from the worktext, life science (backwards from the text - most complex organisms to least), and cars (the motorcycle and carburetor units).

T___ is learning Spanish, sign language, and interpretive reading in Activities Day.

Second Reporting Period

February 14 - April 4, 1997

Sixth Grade

I made T___ a report card (six grades, A's and B's). He sees he needs to look in the book to verify answers (science), answer according to the directions (reading worktext), and check his work (math) to make all A's.

In history/geography he learned to identify the European countries and went from the 1900's to after WWI (Chapter 16). In cars he did the chapters on outboard motors and service careers. In Comprehensive Curriculum 6 he worked various spelling, writing, English, math, comprehension, and math assignments, pages 239 - 329. He worked on vocabulary, identifying rhyme schemes, doing a bibliography, and using a concordance (selected pages from 97 - 114 in his reading worktext). He finished the digestive system and is on the circulatory system in science.

He's out of the sixth-grade math book and is up to page 97 in Math 7 (Bob Jones Press). A professional test showed him ready for algebra. He went through eight pages of a Houghton Mifflin pre-algebra book (simplifying and evaluating expressions following rules for the order of operations) before we decided to finish the seventh-grade book. It is familiarizing him with algebra, too. These books have a more gradual presentation of algebra than the sixth-grade book had and are working out much better. T___ has more success on an assignment, understands it more clearly, and doesn't get discouraged. So far, the book expects him to solve the equations in his head, which was the way he likes to do it, and he is learning how to write math sentences from word sentences before solving problems.

T___ drew nature pictures on our mid-week trip to Abilene. We took off a day our bird Da Vinci died and the week after Easter (March 31). Travis played a simplified "Morning Mood" from Peer Gynt Suite at the March home school recital. Shakespeare plays from Charles and Mary Lamb's book have been his bedtime stories. Since every other week Activities Day takes up a morning and disrupts a day, T___ hasn't planned his own Fridays like he was. They were more laid back, though. He went over Spanish and sign language, "investigated" a Highlights Top Secret mystery, and worked on a Corvette plastic model.