Of Compound Words and Suffixes

KC and Rob tend to not give up schooling even when the school year is really over.  And while part of me longs for a bit of respite, most of me sees huge benefits to them.  Without a certain amount of structured time, all my kids become a bit rudderless and more likely to have behavioral problems. For them there is a fine line between enough "down time" to feel relaxed and to foster creativity and having too much which leads to spiralling into negative behaviors.

So we are in "homeschool lite" mode for the summer which means about an hour or so of schooling daily with rotating subjects.  Most recently, KC has felt drawn to working on his language skills.  This past week the concept of compound words and suffixes were introduced.  To help him have a better grasp of them, I used his artistic skills. For suffixes, I drew a picture of a little bi plane.  It was pulling a banner with the suffix 'ing' on it and "fly" was on the body of the plane.  He colored it in and then thought up other words to make with suffixes.

Compound words were harder for him to understand. So I had him draw a picture of himself, Rob and Lissa.  Then on his shirt he wrote "every" a plus sign on Rob and "one" on Lissa.  Then below them the full word without the plus sign.

It was fun, even for a slightly fried teacher! LOL