Week in Review

This week I discovered that Ben forgot (or never knew) the difference between a vowel and a consonant. We were breaking up words using the VCCV pattern (e.g., carpet is broken up into syllables car/pet) and then marking the syllables as closed, open, or magic-e. When doing this kind of exercise we use unfamiliar words (such as wombat) so Ben is forced to use rules to mark up (and then read) the words. Ben was having a really hard time and I suggested, "Just look for the two consonants together." He pointed to a vowel and a consonant. I reminded him to look for 2 consonants together. He said, "But Moooom... how do I know which they are?"

I was floored. Dumbfounded. I assumed he knew how to tell vowels from consonants. So we had to do a little backtracking and then the exercise went a lot faster.

Surprisingly Latin is his favorite subject. He loves Minimus and looks ahead in the book whenever he can. He likes the story, the characters, the history. History is his other favorite subject but, unfortunately, we did not get to our project this week. The week got away from us and the two things we did not get to were the sundial and creative writing. Not too bad since it was a short and crazy week.

Math is not going as well... he gets the concept... but the math facts he managed to master last year are gone. Gone. He cannot add 6+2 without counting up. He cannot figure out what 8-2 is.

2 comments:

Tina in CT said...

I'm sure after a little reviewing, it'll all come back and he'll be moving on.

I had 4 years of Latin in HS. Are you teaching him Latin grammar and reading stories in English? How does it work? Curious.

Anonymous said...

Give him acorns!
That is so strange to hear. Just a weekend ago, when Yuly was painting cast-iron table and chairs, we were discussing how Ben, when he was here at age of 2 or so, was playing for hours (or may be minutes)collecting acorns and counting them going through the lattice of the table. He had no problems getting two more than a previous time or two less, etc. I was pretty impressed,because I thought that it is hard concept to grasp for 2 years old.
Olga