First week of 2010

The first week went very smoothly indeed. Tammy works hard in her Ace books - math and English. She will finish the last of Grade 3 work in math soon and then start with Grade 4! This week she had to count money again and that was fine, but when I scored her measuring of pictures and drawn lines, the answers did not match those in the score book - only to find that the drawn lines in the book were not accurate at all! A line of 12.3 mm is given as 12 1/2 cm. I find this pretty shocking - should write to ACE. The lines they draw in the book, should be very accurate don't you think?

English is still Grade 2 level, but we are getting there. She is much more keen to do creative writing e.g. to write sentences with given words. On Thursday I stayed the afternoon while she did her homework and she really battled with making sentences with "isn't", "wasn't" etc. It is not that she doesn't know what the words mean, but to have to think up sentences is still hard for her.

On the grammar side, I find that the ACE books do not give enough drill work - she needs much, much more before she really grasps a concept. When she has to chose between three words e.g. to / too/ two and underline the correct one, she is usually able to do it, but when it comes to chosing the correct form of a verb, e.g the children is / are at school the alternatives seem to confuse her. I now try to get her to give the correct form of the verb, by simply writing the verb e.g "eat, ate, eaten" at the top of a couple of sentences with blanks where she has to write in the appropriate form of "eat". I also underline the timewords or auxiliary verbs to help her choose the correct form. So far it seems to work.

For reading we are busy with two books. I want her to read a Secret Seven book by Enid Blyton all by herself - I just give her monkey puzzle type questions on the story, which she has to score herself. The idea of the questions is just to make sure that she understands the story. I wrote meanings of new words in pencil above the few words that I thought she might struggle with, but they are few and far between. So far she seems thrilled with the book and that is my aim: to let her experience that reading by yourself can be great fun! For speech we practise asking and answering these questions orally.

The other book is another "High School Musical" story: this one is about school elections - a fun way to revise the whole voting process and the vocabulary that goes with it. (If we hadn't done Elections as a theme last year, I doubt whether she would understand anything of the story.) We read this book together: We read aloud together and she follows with her finger and we discuss the story as we go along. My aim is to keep on improving fluency of reading (eyemovements) as well as her vocabulary.

May the rest of the year be as much fun as the first week!