Homeschooling Update

This school year is going well so far.

Maeve has started reading and tells the boys to pick out one book at bedtime for her to read. She lacks confidence with spelling, but when prompted, almost always spells the word correctly. Singapore was not a friendly math for Maeve so we switched to Life of Fred. She is much happier and is now asking to do math. We've done a few grammar lessons out of First Language Lessons for a Well Trained Mind and I think that book will work out well. Our focus in science is animals and we are working through the Usborne book of animals. I don't remember the exact title. We are finished with an intro to American History and are jumping to world history. I am loosely basing our history lessons on Sonlight's Core B curriculum for the rest of the year. Maeve isn't a huge fan of her Explode the Code workbooks, but they have helped with her lower case handwriting and they also force her to read and understand what she reads. I think she finds the workbooks redundant and boring. We're still working through the Progressive Phonics books and Maeve is able to breeze through them.

Finn is still great at math. He's almost finished with Singapore 1A and the math is getting hard for him. He works at his own pace and we rarely read the lesson out of the book before starting the problems. He has finished two Explode the Code workbooks and can recognize many words. Finn still has the option of whether or not he wants to participate in school for the day. Sometimes he'll go grab his math or another activity and sometimes he'll go play the Wii. He's only four so I don't feel the need to push academics.

Oren is Oren. I've started trying to include him more by doing a letter a week. He likes to glue and cut so I start our day with a craft geared towards him. Oren has no interest in letters, but he loves books right now. His favorites are The Little Lamb, Where Does Maisy Live?, The Belly Button Book, Come Along Daisy, The Grumpy Goat, and his newest special book is Velociraptor.

I've incorporated calender time into our school day. We pull up the day's weather and on a marker board the kids write the current temperature and the high for the day. They also write the time (and show it on an analog learning clock), day, month, and date. We say the Pledge of Allegiance too, although that usually gets a lot of moans.

All in all, I am pleased with how things are going.