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I find a curious dichotomy within myself every spring. One part of me is looking forward to summer
vacation and a chance to put the schoolbooks aside for a while. The other part of me is looking at book
catalogs and making lists and getting excited about what we will be doing
next school year. I’m not sure why this
is.
I am a planner by nature, so picking out new school books
and getting ready for next year is exciting, and since I have all summer, there
is no pressure to hurry up and get done already.
At the same time, I am looking forward to getting the books
out of the dining room for a bit and having a chance to reorganize the house a
little (or maybe just pull out my chair in the dining room without running into
books!). I’m also looking forward to
doing some things with the kids that we haven’t had much time for lately –
crafts and science experiments and what not.
So here we are with two weeks left in our school year. As I’ve been considering books for next year,
I’ve been evaluating my goals from the current year and our progress with those
goals. After a rough start at the beginning
of the year, Math is now humming along nicely.
We have improved a great deal in handwriting and spelling – now it is
time to move on to more independent writing.
My preschooler, however, is still working on letter and number
recognition. The letter F, it seems, is
doomed to be nameless. But then just
this week almost every other letter suddenly has its correct name, giving me
hope that F will eventually too.
As a slight aside I have been wondering lately who thought singing the letters of the alphabet to the tune of “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” was a good idea. I’ve never met a child yet who could differentiate L-M-N-O-P from the middle of the song. I babysat a girl years ago who was much mystified over an alphabet puzzle when she couldn’t find the letter “alimenopee”.
At the end of the school year, I like to take some time to write an evaluation of our progress against my
goals for the year. It is encouraging to
see how far we have come, and it helps me to see each child's weaknesses so we can work
on those next year.
I have also been thinking about the general flow of our
school day, and what things I would like to change for next year. There are a few things I had wanted to do in
school this year that I ended up cutting out because we lacked the time to do
them – the aforementioned science experiments being chief among them.
Based on the current year, I have decided not to fill up our
schedule in the first few weeks of school.
I’m usually so full of ideas of things we can do and cover that I
overfill our schedule and then grow stressed and frustrated as we struggle to
get it all done. Next year I want to
start with the basics and slowly add new activities until we reach a schedule
that works well for all of us. We’ll see
how well that works…
Take some time now to evaluate the past year. Are you pleased with your students’ progress? What changes will you make next year?
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