It Is Better to be Slightly Concerned About Socialization Than Very Concerned About Socialism

Our first week of the 2009-2010 school year is complete!

This week in history we learned all about the first men. We talked about nomads who had to wander around looking for plants, berries, and animals. Ashton and I made a cave and he had fun making cave paintings of horses and oxen - just like the nomads, although I believe tempra paint was not an option at the time... We learned that some nomads found that they could grow plants on purpose by leaving the seeds in dirt and watering them. They no longer had to wander from place to place, and became the first farmers. (This led in well with Hailey's pre-K program which is focusing on food grown on farms right now.) We blasted through talking about the first civilizations in the Fertile Crescent (the land between the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers) which is located in present day Iraq. The rise of the Sumerians, conquering and falling of the Assyrians, and the gaining of the Babylonian empire.

Keep in mind this is Kindergarten, so I am not expecting him to really remember any of this in detail. He is really enjoying listening to all the reading so far though. What has been most interesting to me is the type of questions he is asking. Perhaps this is the intent of the program... it isn't so much learning about specific events in history as it is learning about the human condition. "Is an army bad guys?" Wow. Talk about a difficult question to answer! My answer is that an army is made up of soldiers, and it is those soldiers' job to do what their boss (the leader of the country) says. Sometimes the leaders have bad motives, and sometimes they are just trying to protect their people.

Math has been super easy this week. We just switched from Singapore pre-K to Horizons K. We'll see how Horizons goes, but when he is finished we will probably switch back to Singapore. I only switched because Horizons came free with the History/Phonics package I purchased. So far it seems MUCH easier than Singapore, and Ashton has a pretty mathematical mind. I think next week I will let him finish as many worksheets as he wants (he ALWAYS wants to do more math than we do in a day). It seems that he has sorta forgotten his left and right though. He remembers when I ask him which hand he writes with.

We are switching from a horizontal phonics program to a vertical phonics program, so right now reading is a bit of a step backwards. When we really have "all" the letter sounds and combinations down I think the vertical method will translate much better into actual reading of real books, not just phonics readers.

Oh, we got a violin this week too. It is 1/8 size and so cute and tiny! Ashton's first Orchestra class is next Tuesday.