R and Little G each chose a new book from the prize redemption selection (which mommy needs to replenish very soon at the rate they're going) and they spend the latter part of Language Arts reading their new books quietly to themselves, then to each other, and finally to me. Little G chose Splish, Splat, Splat, a super cute book about a cat, and R chose Do Cats Always Land On Their Feet? (the answer is no, in case you were wondering).
R also had an assessment this afternoon with her teacher contact through the virtual school. She read three stories to assess her fluency, or the rate at which she reads orally. She reads at 140 words per minute, which according to NAEP is a grade 4 average. R is just starting grade 2. She also did an assessment for math, for which she had 8 minutes to answer 20-some questions of varying degrees of difficulty. She wasn't expected to finish all of the problems, but she did. The national average is 10-24 points, and the goal is 15 points. R got 47 points out of a possible 50.In light of her results, we are discussing moving her up to the grade 3 curriculum so she is challenged. R, of course, is very excited about this because she loves to learn and the idea of new material she has never encountered had her jumping around like a kid waiting for Santa.
Little G has his assessment on Monday, and I expect similar results. He's actually been helping R with spelling and grammar since last year when he was in preschool. He is another one with a voracious appetite for knowledge; he worked from page 60-something in his Math workbook to page 109 in a matter of hours today. I think the curriculum, if we followed it, has him somewhere around page 30. He knows everything in the book, and mastered most of it (colors, shapes, number identification) before he even started preschool, so it's just busy work. I really look forward to getting him into some advanced curriculum so I can feel like I am teaching him something. Meanwhile, he continues to do addition, subtraction and multiplication flash cards and play chess with Daddy, and he works on a grade 2 workbook with various math and language arts material in it for fun. And he reads and reads and reads, which satisfies some of his thirst for knowledge.
I love being a part of this. And I had another great talk with my grandma about it, wherein I admitted that I had wanted to tell her about homeschooling sooner but worried about what she would think. She just kept saying she was proud of me and my kids, and that totally made my day :)
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