Weekly review: Week ending June 26, 2020

| review, weekly

On reflection, I'd like to get back to a weekly review. A month is too long. A week is just about the right size for me to think about things. I've been able to fit 2-3 hours of discretionary time after A-‘s bedtime, which is great for making progress on all these things I've been putting off. For A-‘s part, I'd like to practise pedagogical documentation by picking just a few moments and reflecting more deeply on them.

Journal: I added draft images (automatically copied from my phone camera via Syncthing) so that I can use them to prompt my diary entries without worrying about cluttering up my thumbnail directory with images I haven't reviewed. I also tweaked the views so that it's easier to look at images while adding entries or browsing around.

Education: I attended an EarlyON kindergarten Q&A session while W- played with A-. It was reassuring hearing about how to prepare A- for more independence and how schools might adapt. It looks like online learning for kindergarten right now is more of a list of activity ideas, but if I look for parent education or teacher education resources, I think that might be awesome.

I sketched an

of thirty-one expectations in the Ontario Kindergarten 2016 curriculum (KP). I then traced it in Inkscape based on a brightness cut-off and reorganized it onto a letter-sized page. For fun, I resized it to an and retyped the text using my font. After printing with evince instead of Inkscape, I got it to print the index card. Whee!

I tend to keep anecdotal notes in my journal, focusing on what happened. To raise these to the level of pedagogical documentation, I can start reflecting on the thinking behind the actions and what she might want to explore next.

A-: A- is now pretty comfortable on a pedal bike on the sidewalk and in parking lots. Biking is becoming one of her favourite activities. She says “Too much sitting around!” and asks to go biking. (KP: 6.1, 7.1, 7.2, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3) She can start, stop, pedal, balance, and turn, all without training wheels. She's good at looking ahead, slowing down, and pulling to the side in order to keep the right distance from other people on the sidewalk. She can even talk while biking figure-eights around us. We still stay close to her to help her bike safely, of course. She wants to know when it will be okay for me to ride my bike while she rides her bike. We won't get there for a while, but someday! Pretty cool, considering she first got on a pedal bike on June 6. Three weeks!

A- made the connection between my work = earning money = sharing some of that money with her = being able to buy more LEGO sets with her allowance. She asked me to work while she played with LEGO and with the tablet. She spent some time checking out Khan Academy Kids. When I finished the task I wanted to do, I said that I was ready to play with her again. She said it was okay if I worked a little more. I think this might be a good way for her to practise being independent. When she feels ready to play on her own, she can suggest that I do some consulting. There's always something to do, and she can see me having fun solving problems. Then we can wrap up when she wants to reconnect. (KP 2.1, 2.3, 8.4, 8.5, 20.4)

A- is keenly aware of her progress towards her savings goal, especially with the graph we made. (KP 19.2) She's been patiently waiting for it for weeks. Sometimes she chooses to spend on other things (Pocky, other LEGO sets), and sometimes she chooses to delay gratification and save for the set.

In Khan Academy Kids, she found it easy to solve the puzzles for 4-year-olds: letters, sounds, colours, shapes, numbers, ordinals, …. Puzzles with moving parts were sometimes a little rattling for her, so that might be good for her to practice. I wonder if it has something to do with the form of the puzzle, too. She liked the bubble-popping one and did well with that, but the balloon-dragging one ended up with her just trying everything. (KP 11.8, 17, 20) I switched my account to a teacher account so that I can see her progress. Khan Academy Kids doesn't have an API for exporting the data, so I'll keep track of it in a table.

I'm curious about linking my journal entries to curriculum expectations. Maybe tags can help. I wonder how I can get better at thinking with the different frames described in that kindergarten curriculum document, too. Lots of fun things to learn about!

Blog posts

Time

Category The other week % Last week % Diff % h/wk Diff h/wk
Unpaid work 1.5 4.4 3.0 7.5 5.0
Business 1.1 2.5 1.4 4.2 2.4
Discretionary – Productive 8.4 8.8 0.4 14.8 0.8
Personal 3.8 4.2 0.4 7.0 0.6
Discretionary – Family 0.3 0.6 0.3 1.0 0.5
Discretionary – Play 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0
Discretionary – Social 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0
Sleep 32.4 30.1 -2.2 50.6 -3.8
A- 52.6 49.4 -3.3 82.9 -5.5
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