Becca the Blog is going to get noisy.

I promised an update on the school thing, this is not that update. I'd say it's still in progress.

As part of the ongoing-ness, though, I'm going to start posting some sessions that we're doing with Becca after school.

Basically we didn't know just how capable Becca was, and we've been surprised with some of the things she's been doing since the beginning of summer, and I wanted to see just what she could do. Then that sort of evolved into an experiment to see how close we could get to a first grader's curriculum with Becca.

I took the state core standards for first grade and started marking all the ones I thought Becca could learn but probably wouldn't learn unless someone spent some time with her. I was surprised, actually, with how few I wrote off as out of her reach. Turns out the hardest thing in first grade is math, the rest is very approachable for Becca with some straightforward adaptations.

So then I took those standards and organized them into categories that I thought we could work on at home. Things like "order & organize", "sun & moon", "creative piece of writing", "jobs & roles", etc. I was curious just what we were up against in scope. In the end there were about 36 categories of work, and with 35-ish weeks in the school year this was starting to sound not impossible.

Since then we've been working with Becca on some of these categories. Every time after we work with her we take detailed notes of what happened, trying to keep out our own interpretations and noting our biases as we find them. Mostly we want to have evidence of just how capable Becca really is. Because it turns out she can remember a lot of things, and she likes interacting and communicating with her eyes. She likes "school time", as we call it.

But that means this blog is going to get a lot noisier than it has been, for the foreseeable future. Feel free to unsubscribe, we won't get our feelings hurt :-). If you hang around, I'm going to put "school time" in all the titles of these logs so they'll be easier to skip over.