Homeschool Discoveries

Happy New Year!  I feel like we I am still recovering from Christmas, New Years, our holiday travel, and other post-holiday responsibilities.  We returned home late in the day on New Year’s eve from a  six-day trip.  I had started feeling sick that morning…and then I was sick for almost a week (I really regret procrastinating on my flu shot this year!).  Meanwhile, I still needed to take care of my family and try and get some work done on my quarterly editing deadline.

Miss M was sick for about 24 hours last weekend, but thankfully everyone else escaped this round of sickness.  In an effort to return to normal,  I started Miss M on some light independent school work last week, before returning to a mostly normal schedule of school work this week.  My throat was still pretty scratchy, so reading aloud was at a minimum.  Meanwhile, I still feel a bit behind the eight ball. I just finally finished my quarterly editing project this afternoon, my house is still full of Christmas decorations, and it took me a week after we arrived home from our trip to get everything unpacked! 😉

While it wasn’t perhaps the most “fun and exciting” week of schooling, we did accomplish a fair amount:

1. & 2.  Logic of English Foundations with Mr E and Mr K.  Okay, so this is a bit fun and exciting.  🙂 I purchased the pre-press/beta version of the Logic of English early childhood program, Foundations.  My original thought was to use this with just Mr. K.  He is really eager to learn his letters!  But as I read through the program I realized it could really be a good fit for Mr. E as well – a better fit than what I’ve been able to do in Logic of English Essentials with him.  Mr K really enjoyed doing lessons 1-5 of Foundations — we learned about voiced and unvoiced sounds, and he got to “squish” compound words together as well as identifying words that would segment. (i.e.  j – u – m – p …do what I just said!).

In trying to figure out exactly where to place Mr. E, I worked on some concepts from lessons 46-48 with him.  Some items in those lessons are review, while some are new. He seems to like it — I wish I would have bit the bullet and bought this product when they first announced the beta last summer!  Even though we could have flown through the early lessons super fast, we would probably actually be at a further point in his phonics/spelling that we are now. Oh well, live and learn!

Miss M did lesson 21 in LOE Essentials.  We’re over half-way through that book now!

3.  We’ve never tried to keep track of our number of days in school before this year.  It’s not required as a part of our state homeschool regulations.   But I thought it would be super fun to celebrate the 100th day of school this year, so we’ve been keeping track.  This is Miss M’s “100 Days” chart.  Only 17 more school days and we’ll have our 100th Day party!

4. With the new year our family has made a renewed commitment to read the Bible daily.  It’s a habit that slipped in the last couple months of 2012.  Miss M is reading 2 chapters per day starting in Genesis (she tells me she really wants to read through beginning to end — I told her she might want to rethink that plan once she hits a few of the harder-to-read books in a row!).   I am having the boys listen to audio Bible using the YouVersion App on the iPad.  They also wanted to start the year in Genesis and have been listening to 2 to 4 chapters each day.

5. Mr. E is still my math-loving boy.  The so-called “wall” in lesson 68 of RightStart B was no trouble for him.  We finished lesson 68 this week and worked through lessons 69-71 as well (including this long addition page pictured!).

Miss M worked on lessons 83-87 and started #88 in Right Start D.  We’re finally to the point where all the lessons all seem “new” and not like a few new topics mixed in with review.  However I am still not exactly happy with RS D, or at least how it is going for Miss M.  She still finds the presentation of the material in many of the lessons to be less than clear…and she really hates having to do a series of problems followed by a question like, “what pattern do you see in these answers?”  She finds it frustrating that she usually sees some other pattern other than what the lesson is getting at.

I think she would do much better with a math program that was more straight-forward somehow.    I’ve been browsing other math programs the last couple days.  Math Mammoth is an easy program to try out since it is a download…so I am seriously considering at minimum taking a break from RS and doing Math Mammoth for a few weeks.  Maybe it will be a permanent switch, who knows!?!

6. Back in December, Mr E. chose to start reading Cat in the Hat, and he finished it this week! It’s a long book for a new reader!  His next book pick is One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish…another book that will take many 10 minute sittings for him to finish.  🙂  Both of these books have contained some new phonograms we haven’t covered in Logic of English, but having gotten through most of the LOE basic phonograms with Miss M, I am finding I can usually give a rule-based explanation on the fly of words that are new to Mr E.

Have a wonderful rest-of-your-weekend! I’m linking up with Collage Friday and the Weekly Wrap-Up!