Monday, January 22, 2007

Plodding right along

Actually plodding sounds like it has been hard work, and it really hasn't. Jewel is really enjoying the Get Ready for the Code workbook. The first day she insisted that we do an entire lesson on one of the letters. She got tired and frustrated before we were done, and it became a chore. Since then I've limited her to 4 pages at a time. She is doing so much better. And enjoying it. Today she couldn't remember how to draw a "b" that we had worked on last week, but she remembered that she could look back at the lesson and did it all on her own! That is a big step, because usually if she can't remember she just gives up. We are revisiting the seasons and the months. She thought she had forgotten it, but she seems to be recalling more than I had hoped. Over the weekend she was busy teaching Flower to say "I'm two" and then helping her count to ten. Flower mainly just repeats what Jewel says, but it is definitely learning. Then out of the blue this weekend Jewel counted all the way to 40. She had not been able to get past 15. Yippee!

This was the Christmas of games. So we have been playing lots of games. Dora card matching, dominoes, Go Fish, Candyland and "My First Scrabble" which has been great to practice sounding out words. At least 2 nights a week have been family game night with Daddy. It is good for the girls and it reinforces what we are doing during the day. YAY!

This week I'm going to add in reading a higher level read aloud to them while they are playing. We'll see if they retain any of it.

That's it for an update. More to come....

Monday, January 08, 2007

A New Year!

Well I am back. I must say that keeping up with a homeschool blog has proven more than I could manage. But I hope to be better this year of at least posting once a week.

We started back today after almost 3 weeks off. I was a little apprehensive of getting back into the routine, but there were no problems. We did our Bible Study, introduced the new memory verse, read a couple of stories and then introduced Getting Ready for the Code. Jewel loved GRC! She jumped right in and did all of the first lesson on the letter "f" with very little prompting. She did decide that she wanted to colour the entire picture and not just the sections with the letter in it. I struggle with that sometimes. The perfectionist in me says "we have to do it as it is instructed" but the other side of me says that "she's 4, school should be fun, let her do it her way." In the end, I let her do it her way, but we did discuss that part of school is learning how to follow directions and she needed to listen to how she was supposed to do it (and ask if she wanted to do it differently instead of just jumping in). But she seems to be getting it. She remembered the verse and the reference we were learning before Christmas. That is amazing. She is good with the verses, but references are difficult. I don't push it. Again, she is only 4.

My one complaint today was with Sonlight. They skipped a good 20 pages in the children's Bible in the scheduled readings. That may work well with some kids. But my "we have to read each page kid" would have nothing of it. So instead of 2 pages of Bible we did 7 pages (and will continue to add pages until we catch up to the schedule). She was happier that we weren't skipping stories, but I know she didn't get as much out of it as well. I may have to just rework the Bible schedule. *sigh*