Setting Goals

This week we are learning about setting goals, and how it is that people achieve the things they set out to do. We talked about how without setting goals you don't have a road map of where you are going and could end up just anywhere.

We talked through our goals for Sesat School this year, which are:

• Mastery of Fourth Grade Math
• Speak Basic Spanish
• Reading 200 books this year (then we discussed whether or not this was possible, or even desirable!)
• Play 6-8 songs on the piano with two hands
• Finish writing a story and Submit to Stone Soup

Then we set 15 year goals, 10 year goals and 1 year goals. These were fun! Dreaming about what could be, where we'd want to live, who we'd have in our lives. Do we want to have a lot of friends, or just 2-3 really good friends? Do we want to live in the country or the city? Where do we want to travel?

We've been continuing today with more learning about goal setting, and how you achieve things a little bit at a time, by working every day. We watched this video about this:



Then, to really drive the point home (and because my daughter has expressed an interest in learning how to play the violin) we watched these videos from a Norwegian woman who taught herself to play the violin, and videotaped her progress as she improved. She went from being a complete beginner to being able to play extremely well in two years. It is quite impressive!



We wanted to learn more about how she had done it, how much she had practiced, so we watched her follow up video. Turns out she practiced sometimes an hour a day, sometimes 15 minutes, and sometimes, not any practice at all. She took a total of 8 lessons during the two years, and taught herself to play by watching videos on YouTube. But she kept at it day after day.



 This has been a really great area of study for us! And it's only been two days. Looking forward to the rest of this week as we work more on goal creation, and getting closer to them every day.

Goals

This week we are learning about setting goals, and how it is that people achieve the things they set out to do. We talked about how without setting goals you don't have a road map of where you are going and could end up just anywhere.

We talked through our goals for Sesat School this year, which are:

• Mastery of Fourth Grade Math
• Speak Basic Spanish
• Reading 200 books this year (then we discussed whether or not this was possible, or even desirable!)
• Play 6-8 songs on the piano with two hands
• Finish writing a story and Submit to Stone Soup

Then we set 15 year goals, 10 year goals and 1 year goals. These were fun! Dreaming about what could be, where we'd want to live, who we'd have in our lives. Do we want to have a lot of friends, or just 2-3 really good friends? Do we want to live in the country or the city? Where do we want to travel?

We've been continuing today with more learning about goal setting, and how you achieve things a little bit at a time, by working every day. We watched this video about this:



Then, to really drive the point home (and because my daughter has expressed an interest in learning how to play the violin) we watched these videos from a Norwegian woman who taught herself to play the violin, and videotaped her progress as she improved. She went from being a complete beginner to being able to play extremely well in two years. It is quite impressive!



We wanted to learn more about how she had done it, how much she had practiced, so we watched her follow up video. Turns out she practiced sometimes an hour a day, sometimes 15 minutes, and sometimes, not any practice at all. She took a total of 8 lessons during the two years, and taught herself to play by watching videos on YouTube. But she kept at it day after day.



 This has been a really great area of study for us! And it's only been two days. Looking forward to the rest of this week as we work more on goal creation, and getting closer to them every day.

Non-Stop Reading: The Land of Stories

Well, we're on to the fifth book in The Land of Stories series, and it looks like there is a sixth and final book on its way. Maybe after she reads that I'll see my daughter again? She was introduced to this series by one of her friends in Language Arts and Book Club.

Book Club: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

For book club this month my daughter mistakenly started reading The Black Stallion. But that was not the book this month! So we got started reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and finished it just in time.

I was never a fan of fantasy books when I was young--that was my sister's domain. I didn't like The Hobbit, or any of the Lord of the Rings (though I read them all!). I got into science fiction as a teenager, but not for long. And fantasy never took hold. I remembered starting this book, and got as far as Lucy meeting the faun, and visiting his house, and coming back through the wardrobe and her siblings not believing her when she told of her journey. But I never got any further. I am a new convert!

It was not my daughter's favorite, though she said as she was nearing the end, "This is a REALLY good book." It is.

A love of writing

One of the things I had hoped to instill in our children is a love of reading, and a love of writing. We've been studying writing with our groups of homeschool friends using the Institute of Excellence in Writing, and the results have been amazing. Her vocabulary has grown tremendously and her sentence structure has become wonderfully complex. She has learned to express herself in different voices, different tones, different moods. She elaborates and simplifies. So good!

Another workbook we have been using for vocabulary building is Wordly Wise, which also seems to be working well.

Class outside

It has been raining in San Francisco for the past five months, with barely a break. So when the sun came out, it was almost impossible for Lisa to keep the kids inside and focused on learning the lines in their scripts. So they took class outside.