School year evaluation

exploring a local river with friends

So how did the past school year go?

Reading
Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons worked well, but didn't teach reasons for why some e's are long and some are short, along with other rules. I've read that criticism elsewhere and plan on using The Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading in first grade to compensate.

Writing
We zipped through the Zaner-Bloser workbook in less than two months. We'll continue using ZB, but will take it slower and will do additional practice activities, like we did this year.

Math
I really liked the Math-U-See curriculum, but it wasn't working for LMS. Unfortunately I didn't realize this till February. We did a quick switch to RightStart Math and then did some catching up so we could still finish on time. That wasn't necessary, but I wanted to try to make up for confusing her earlier in the year :)

Music
LMS started violin lessons in the fall. We occasionally listen to classical  and Irish music. We finally bought a piano in the fall and she plays her violin lessons on the piano. We'll start formal piano lessons in another year or so.

PE/Sports
We did fall and spring soccer, ski lessons, three kids fun runs, and four weeks of swimming lessons. We also have weekly park days with friends (I'm not always the best at getting out and going to parks, so having a scheduled time works well for us).

Art
Nothing formal- just fun with paints and crayons and glue and the sewing class at the co-op in the fall.

Science
Physics class at the co-op in the fall, farm animal class at the co-op in the fall, nothing too extensive this year.

We took a pretty relaxed approach to school this year and learned a lot from it. In the coming year we'll be changing how we do some things as well as adding more structure to the subjects that we didn't pay much attention to this year. My main goal for LMS in her kindergarten year was for her to learn to read and to make good progress in her math skills, which she did. I didn't want kindergarten to be high stress, and I think we did a pretty good job of keeping things low key.