A Big Box and a New Term

A week before we finished up summer school, this arrived!

The big box from Sonlight! Flower was sure enjoying seeing what all we had. It was a major effort to hold Jewel off for a week, lol.

We officially started Kindergarten on 10 September. This year we are using Sonlight K (Core C) with 1st grade readers, Singapore Math, Handwriting Without Tears, Explode the Code, and continuing Rosetta Stone German. All is going very well. Jewel loves, loves, loves to read. Although I am a little concerned about using 1st grade readers, I know she would have been bored to tears with the Kindergarten readers. She is trying really hard, and on the things that are above her ability (e.g. writing similes) we are discussing and moving on. There will be plenty of time for that later. As we are getting accustomed to the new schedule, I haven't re-added German, but that will come later in the week.

My goals for Fall 2007 school term are:
*build confidence in reading and writing letters
*improve concentration and retention when I am reading aloud to her
*learn the weekly memory verses
*learn at least 5 facts about Turkey and be able to relate them to our holiday
*achieve next badge level in swimming
*provide a good starting foundation for history and science study

I am less concerned with how many book-facts she can spout off, and more concerned with how she is relating the things we are learning to real life. I'm really praying this year is a fun foundational year for her.

Here she is on day one, hard at work:

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*