Recommended resource for outlining

I can happily say the trip to the dentist today was not as bad as I had imagined, I started getting really nervous in the hours leading up to the appointment, and I mean really nervous, I lost count of how many trips to the bathroom I had actually took! lol.  I was booked in to have iv sedation to help me relax, which it did, and I felt like it only took about 5 minutes to take the tooth out, but when I came out I was surprised that over an hour had passed! The pain set in as soon as the numbness wore off, so have to make sure I'm well topped up on the ibuprofen & paracetamol tonight!

One resource I wanted to share this evening is Beginning Outlining by Remedia Publications. The link I've given is to a pdf version of the book on Currclick, I searched and searched online for a copy here in the UK, but couldn't find anything, except from Amazon, which cost £18.75 + £9.44 delivery. So as you can imagine I was over the moon to find an online version. Insha Allah in September when we get started properly with our learning, I'll be following some of the guidelines from The Well Trained Mind, and for my son's grade level he would be expected to know how to outline, which is basically summarising the main points of a text in order. I'm not sure if he's actually learnt this in his previous school, don't think he has, but it was suggested by the authors of the Well Trained Mind to start with this book. So we've started with a few pages at a time, quite basic to begin, but he's really enjoying it, and it's actually making more sense to me now :)

So over the holidays we're just going to be preparing for September, make sure our classroom looks top notch! or as near to top notch as we possibly can xD.  I just splashed out on two colourful drawer units with work boxes from Staples, £50 each but I just couldn't resist! These ones are very similar but ours have 8 drawers and the colours are slightly different..

......There's quite a few books that I need to order, which I normally buy from Amazon, and a lot of the time from 'new and used sellers' which surprisingly 'new' are sometimes cheaper than the 'used' bizarre! Along with that, I need to carry on with the task of de-cluttering this room, I hope one day soon it will all be organised and I can share some photos on here, it's not too bad at the moment, just not exactly the way I want it to be, but it's a work in progress I guess, always improvements to be made :)

Yet another 'update' title......

Doesn't time fly?! Can't believe it's been about a month since my last post! I'm really not all that good with keeping my blog updated, I admit I should try & make more effort, but as the old saying goes 'better late than never!' ey 

As it's coming to the end of the academic year, we haven't really been doing a lot, mainly brushing up on some grammar, I'm still having to remind mine to put a capital at the beginning of a sentence & full stop at the end! just hoping that all my constant reminding will somehow make it stick someday! 

We've been using Conquer Maths, to go over previous work they would have learnt while in school, which some was pretty much forgotten. Dd12 struggles in many areas of Maths, so we're kind of doing one topic in  a lower year, then doing the same in the next year up and so on. I'd much rather her be going over the lower work and basics to make sure they are fully understood & mastered than keep working on her years work just because 'that's what she should be doing'. Alhamdulillah that's one of the many beauties of homeschooling, you can go at your child's pace, they don't need to feel inadequate because they don't get it, and it does help them to build their confidence masha'Allah.

With Ds5, we've mainly been working on his sounds & using the beginning lessons of Reading Reflex. I was quite surprised when he came out of school that he didn't know more of his sounds, and I was expecting him to be able to blend some words. He has struggled with it a bit, but we've persevered, and I started using the flashcards from Ruth Miskin's phonics programme with him, just introducing 5 at a time in the order suggested. Today we had a small breakthrough, after not doing the reading reflex lessons for quite a few days, he found it a lot easier to say & blend the sounds, and then the same when we were reading one of the Bob books.  

My aim for the coming weeks is to put together a varied collection of fun learning resources for Ds5, for language learning & Maths. I do like how in America they put together Math & literacy centres, I've printed off a couple of activities we can do together & also he can then do them independently insha Allah when I'm helping the others. One site I came across recently is TeachersPayTeachers , they have alot of free resources to print off as well as paid, and the ones I've come across are certainly worth the money in my opinion.

I've been using pinterest alot lately, and it's amazing what you can find on there, sometimes a bit too much information overload, but I tend to just pin alot of things I like the look of and return to them later. One idea I came across that I really liked was the one below (only decent shot, the others were blurry! :/) you basically draw a car park on a big sheet of paper, if you have it, card stock is best, but mine is just paper. We added an Asda building and queued all the cars up, I wrote cvc words which Ds5 has been learning onto each space, and then simply told him to park in the space which said 'sat' or 'cat' etc.. I added one or two sight words also that have come up in his reading book. Also once he found the correct space, I would ask him to sound out the word before he parked the car there. He seemed to enjoy the game, and I'm thinking to make another one with numbers iA.

I did intend to add a few more photos of what we've been getting up to lately, but my battery just died on my camera, and it's 12.45 am here, so time to get myself off to bed.  I have an appointment at the dental hospital tomorrow for a tooth extraction which I'm not entirely looking forward to, so roll on tomorrow evening when it's all over & done with! insha Allah. x