I can’t believe I am writing this.
I enjoyed crafting my children’s first quarter exams. There’s a good mix of written works and performance tasks that I am so excited to present to them. I have been hyping up how exciting and inspiring exam week would be and I think it’s working its magic.
I grew up loving school and studying but I dreaded exam week because there was always the pressure to get high scores as a consistent honor student. As a parent-teacher now, I have a renewed perspective on how exam week should be treated. Because Jeff and I worked on instilling in our children the love of reading through books and storytelling, it has not been an issue for us to adapt narration as a strategy to check/test if our children understood the books that they read. So asking my children to answer which chapter of Dr. Dolitte or Charlotte’s Web is their favorite comes out so naturally.
Math, of course, is our Achilles heel but we’re still alive and breathing. We’re using the Math curriculum of Good and Beautiful and the kids said it’s helping them understand concepts more. It does not mean though that I am in a perky mood daily. I have had several bad days. The twins are working on memorizing the multiplication table while JJ is getting better at mental Math (addition and subtraction). Number Blocks on Netflix and Youtube helps.
Social Studies is challenging because we’re dealing with Geography/Travel, World History, Philippine History, and American History. So far, we’ve experimented on combining stories/living books for World History and American History, stories and videos for Philippine History, and poetry/art for Geography/Travel.
Filipino is fun! We’ve covered “Kamatis ni Peles” and “Ang Mabait na Kalabaw.” We have multilingual children but I was worried about how they would welcome the Filipino language in their “repertoire” but it has been such a joy! Antoinette is a developing linguist so reading in Filipino comes naturally for her. I am most surprised with the boys because they can now read Filipino words without sounding like robots!!!
One positive effect of homeschooling my kids is an understanding that I can adapt the strategies I employ in homeschool to my college students. It is so eye-opening. I did not expect my college students to be happy and participative in my class on “The Contemporary World.”
I will write a more detailed narrative about this here. For now, I am parking this here because I now need to attend to graduate school essays and presentations.
Have a wonderful weekend everyone!
