February 1, AO year 1, week 11 and moms' exam prep

On Friday night, we finally got around to watching the BBC Animated Tales of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.  It was very cute! Fina enjoyed it immensely. And it was great to hear the passages we know. She would look at me and smile a knowing smile when she recognized speeches. (There were two seasons of it in the '90s, to a total of 12 stories.)

Today, Fina is feeling sick. She has a stuffed up and runny nose. She slept well enough and doesn't have a fever, so I'm pleased. It has been going around and she has done well to fight it off thing long.

We had a short school day today.

We read the story of St Molios from Our Island Saints. A very different story than all the others. It was hard for her to narrate, but that is ok.

We also finished session 29 from our math book. All we have left to do is 6 pages of session 30.  I will save a few of the questions from that session as part of our exams next week.

Lots of Lego, free reading and cuddling today for sure.

*******************
EXAMS

AO terms consist of 12 weeks. We will do week 12 this week. Once we are done that, AO suggests an exam week. Basically, you have the student renarrate some things from the term. There is no studying, no cramming, no review, no prep (on the part of the student), just a week of sharing and remembering things learned.

To quote "Karen" from the AO website:

The goal of a CM-style exam is to allow the child to tell what he knows -- not point out what he doesn't.

I wasn't sure at first if I'd do exams yet this year. I see that many CMers don't. But I've decided I would like to give it a shot.  I spoke to Fina about it and she thought it would be fun to take a week off from doing any new work. (Of course, she has no school context to tell her that exams are scary or hard or whatever!)

I'm planning on recording (audio, or video) Fina's narrations and transcribing them. I'm thinking about using Evernote to record everything and put it all together (audio, pics of her math, what she draws if anything, etc). We will see how that works. I suspect a lot of it will end up on the blog as well.

Here are some resources for Charlotte Mason exams:

https://www.amblesideonline.org/Exam01a.shtml - this is the AO suggested exam. I will be reworking it a bit.

http://joyouslessons.blogspot.ca/search/label/Exams  I will be adding in some of Celeste's year 1 exam questions. I am using some of her AO replacement books.

https://www.amblesideonline.org/ExamThoughts.shtml Some thoughts on exams, by AO.

https://simplycharlottemason.com/blog/end-of-term-exams-in-the-charlotte-mason-method/ A nice explanation of CM exams.

http://afterthoughtsblog.net/2010/11/examinations-whats-point.html Brandy has a great explanation as to why we do exams

I'm pretty excited! I'm still putting together Fina's term 1 exam.  I have all week to finish it up. (See? No prep for the child, but a bit of prep for mom to do!)