Time

Now that Gage is in 2nd grade, he is bringing home more homework. He has had quite an attitude about it in the past (because a friend of his had this attitude), but he's been doing reasonably well so far this year. Every week he will have reading homework on Mondays that are due back the following Monday, Math homework on Tuesdays, which are due back the following Tuesdays and on Fridays they bring home new spelling lists to study for a test the following Thursday and a dictation test the following day, on Friday. We are going to be plenty busy with homework it seems. Today Gage brought home his first reading homework. He has a reading log that he is to fill in each day of at least 15 minutes of reading. Even though reading to Gage is still very important, this 15 minutes has to be on his own, either silent or out loud. He then has a story that he is supposed to read while I time him to see how many words he can read in 1 minute. In the beginning months of 2nd grade, they should be able to read 44 words per minute or more. The sheet he is to read is at the 2nd grade level and he read the entire thing, which was 144 words, in less than a minute. There is also a graph that we are supposed to graph this information on so we can see how they progress through the year. I'm hoping she'll send home harder stuff for him, or a bigger graph, so I can see Gage's progress.

For his spelling tests he will have 12 regular spelling words, and then they have 3 bonus words they can spell for extra points. This week his extra words are lettuce, pocket and engine. The first 12 words he has are pretty simple and he has no problem with them, and he only had problems really with lettuce. Scott taught him a trick for lettuce though, so now he has it stored in his little memory bank. Spelling was always my favorite subject and I enjoy seeing his new list of words each week.

My only problem with all of this is TIME. It's very hard to get all of this stuff done in just the few hours we have from after school until bedtime. We are shooting for a 7pm bedtime for both Gage and Emma and after you add supper time in there, and just plain "free time" to play by himself or with friends, there's not much left!!! I am very thankful that alot of this stuff comes very easy to Gage, because if it didn't, and we had to work twice as hard, I'm not sure I could get it all done in a day? Then, on top of all of this, Gage brings home big chapter books from the library that we are trying our hardest to get read in a weeks' time. He gets to check out 2 books from the library and I want him to be able to check 2 out each week instead of having to renew the same book for the second week. Thankfully this week he only brought home 1 chapter book and the other one was a little picture book. However, we have discovered a way to help get some of this extra reading done by sending the library books with him to school each day to read during his silent reading time. Unfortunately I had to make a second trip to the school this morning because we forgot to put his book in his bag. He has library tomorrow and we have 3 chapters to read in the morning. He was begging me to let him stay up and read the rest of the book on his own, but I told him he would have to go to bed and I would read it to him in the morning. I certainly don't know how people with more than 2 kids, especially if they all have homework, do it?