Summer School

As you may know, I'm very involved in my kids' educations. Namely Alex, since he's my only child in school, but I started teaching him things the day he was born. I honestly don't feel like my son gets much of an education at his elementary school; it's more of a place for him to make friends and run around. He's such a smart boy and ahead of the game, he gets so bored there...which leads to trouble. Seriously, his homework consists of stuff that I had him doing at least a year ago, and some of it before he started kindergarten. It's pretty ridiculous, and very frusterating.



I paid a small forture for these workbooks...haha, yeah right. I got them at the Dollar Tree! And I LOVE them. I was SO happy to see these there. They're by Evan-Moor. The workbook on the left is for Math - it has 14 different sections in it, and the book on the right consists of literacy stuff has 13 sections, which I finished today. You can click HERE to check out their other stuff - they sell it online for a hefty price, but mine were just $1 each!!

I got these cool little folders from a friend of mine for free, so I decided to put each section of the workbooks into page protectors and into the folders, and they turned out AWESOME. Each section is a different concept, like you can see below - Synonyms, they sound the same, and more than one meaning (like bark of a tree, bark of a dog), etc.



I took the time to put these together for Alex (and my other kids to use when their time comes) because I think that Alex will respond better to the freedom of chosing which activity he wants to work on each day. The literacy one is for grades 2-3, so that's kinda a bummer (I also want/need higher grade levels), but the lady said that they were expecting another shipment of workbooks soon. I'll let you know what else I find there! YAY!

Seriously, they're so cool. It took me a couple of hours to complete the literacy workbook - tearing out the pages, putting them in page protectors, organizing them and then putting them in the folders - but I think it's so worth my time. And it's not so bad to take care of while watching a good movie or something!

I also got "Story Starters" by Teaching Tree at the Dollar Tree. They're SO awesome. I got four of them - one is titled "What do you think about..." (a pig driving a car, or singing moons, a different storyline is on the top of each page) and then the child writes a story about their thoughts. The others are titled "What if...", "I wish..." and "How would...". Such a great way to encourage a kid to use his imagination and use his writing skills. I LOVE them.

The Dollar Tree is also an a great place to get posters! In the hallway between the kids' bedrooms, we have posters of South America, North America, and the United States, as well as the Articles of Faith (which we're working on, I ordered it on ldscatalog.com). I have cute posters of the ABC's, shapes and colors hanging in my office for Emma's preschool.

I've also bought a couple of other workbooks (at Walmart or Walgreens), like Word Searches. Alex LOVES word searches. I've also bookmarked a bunch of websites that Alex (and some age appropriate for Emma too!) can work on this summer. There's lots of great FREE websites out there.

Now I just need to better organize Alex's curriculum for the summer. Both he and I work better with calendars & lists. He's a boy after own heart :) Wish me luck!