End-of-term-itis

It definitely feels like it is nearly the end of term!  Whilst I have much more energy at this point of term than I ever did when I was teaching in a secondary school there is so much going on outwith school that it is kind of difficult for both S and I to concentrate on work!

I remember reading about homeschool mums having major confidence blips in their abilities to teach - think I'm having one of those blips!  Maths is fine - for a change!!  The work we've been doing on addition and subtraction is definitely paying off.  He is already a bit faster after just a week of work on it and I can see his confidence improving.  Through a combination of games, puzzles and a worksheet S answered 47 addition/subtraction questions without any difficulty at all.  Just 2 weeks ago there would have been lots of difficulties.  So far we have focussed mainly on addition.  Tomorrow we are going to start to focus on subtraction which he always finds harder so I'm hoping his confidence will improve there too!  Reading has been fine.  There is always more we could do but I'm trying to strike the balance between helping him to develop a love of books and reading and not kill the books by doing so much work on them!  He's loving the series and they are really exciting so I'm treading carefully!  Language work and story writing - that's where my confidence is not so hot!  S would find this area of work his weakest and it seems to be taking me a long long time to work out which level he is at and where to pitch it.   Today we did more work on story writing and I feel like I could be permanently correcting it!  Obviously this would be soul destroying for S but it is quite hard to know where to start to develop anything!!! 

Having nearly finished our term I do feel that our "de-schooling" process is nearly finished and that we are at a point where we are getting into a routine and working out how each other work (no doubt I'll write differently in a couple of days!).  I am delighted that he is already beginning to work on his own and I am not having to sit beside him for him to do any work at all.  I can see that we will need to be a bit more structured in the frequency that we do some topics - not because that's how school does it but because I can see that gaps could arise if we don't start to do that.  He has picked up good habits from school (like weekly spelling) which have clearly gone into his memory and served him well.

One very positive aspect that I am noticing is that S is coping so much better with mistakes than he did 2 months ago!  At the beginning he would go into meltdown if he made a mistake.  Now, he self corrects or accepts me correcting.  He is beginning to see the glass half full instead of half empty which for him is a MASSIVE change!