School Year 2010-2011: Jaeger’s Lessons
Jaeger gets his own 30 minutes of one-on-one lessons this year. This time is as much to give him attention as to teach him. I would be satisfied with 5-10 minutes of phonics, but I have noticed that Jaeger’s attitude and behavior especially are very responsive to the fill-level on his tank. So my goal in his lesson time is to fill his tank more than to make any academic progress.
So, we do spend about 5-10 minutes working on phonics using TATRAS or an alphabet book (I say the letter name & Jaeger gives me the sound, and I only use ones that have lowercase letters).
We spend about 5 minutes on handwriting, using Penny Gardner’s Beautiful Handwriting for Children. I love StartWrite, but Hans wasn’t making much progress. Instead he was confirming his bad letter-forming habits. So, I splurged on an additional resource (ten whole dollars and it is — yes! — an e-book with rights to print out as much as you need for your own family) that focuses on strokes and builds more deliberately. I am hoping that starting now with Jaeger will help him not form bad habits in the first place.
We spend 5-10 minutes using Piano for Preschoolers. We do a scale, singing the notes, then I play the song and then Jaeger plays it twice. I am at a preschool level myself, but we haven’t progressed past the first song yet. We only did this sporadically last year and the year before that, but I’m hoping to be more consistent with it this year.
Finally, Jaeger gets to choose one picture book that we read together. This is what fills his tank the most. Doing handwriting and piano and math (a separate post later) boosts his confidence and pleases him most because he so desperately wants to do whatever Hans does.
