It has been a full year since DS has been home
schooling. At 4 years old we uprooted from the city of Riyadh where we have
been living and became familiar with for the past 8 years to start a new life
in a new city in Saudi Arabia, on the east coast where all the beautiful sandy
beaches are and calm seas. DS4 first impressions of our new home after a 16
hour flight from the UK, tired and barely awake, ran into every room on the
ground floor then ran upstairs into the bedrooms and yelled joyfully, "Mummy
I LOVE my new house!!!" His words relaxed me and his happiness gave me
happiness and giving me a positive outlook to our new beginnings.
During unpacking, and setting up our classroom, the
children were very excited to see their books that they had missed whilst been
in the UK over the summer. They would eagerly want to write in their workbooks
I had brought for them, although I wasn't ready to home school as I was still
unpacking and getting familiar with the neighbourhood and the neighbours, the
kids funnily enough were happy to sit at the table and work through a few pages
at a time. My inner thoughts was "wow what good kids I have I hope they're
always to enthusiastic when it comes to home school." DS did amaze me at
that time as it was he first time to be disciplined enough to do four to six
pages of a workbook, not that I made he do it, he loved the activities so much
he made me do it with him. Oh, I should mention the workbooks that was a winner
with him... Gold Stars Big Workbook I have been using
most of their collection this year and they have worked well with him.
Aside from workbooks we did a lot of hands on
activities to teach new concepts in language arts, maths and science.
Language Arts
This is the year he learnt to read. We continued
from the year before, using our Jolly Phonics program starting again from group
1 working our way to group 7 until we finished 7 months later, there were many
times he wasn't fond of doing it, so on those days we would Montessori style
activities by matching sounds to objects or picture cards, then moving on to
pink series matching word cards to its picture cards. He preferred these
activities a lot more than Jolly phonics. His writing is neat and controlled
for his age and he tries his best to copy letters and words. The letters that
he struggles with he will write its capital, for example A and B. He started to
read level 1 Biff and Chip books by Oxford Owl by the time he was 4 years and 7
months. He struggled to remember repeated words in the book and always blended
every word he read except for sight words which he read with ease and
proficiency. We stuck with the same book for one week, by the end of the week
he read a little bit better and got a little bit more confident, but he didn't
enjoy to read, only when he was asked to. At 4 he would rather play and move
about than sit down and read a book, although he would enjoy looking at the
pictures and making sense of the story or intently go through activity books
like mazes, or finding wally.
