Tag Archives: 2008

E for Excellent!

 

I was excited and surprised to find a comment from Tonia at The Sunny Patch yesterday awarding me with an “E for Excellent” blog award!  I am so flattered!  I have not been blogging for very long, but I am glad that someone finds my rambling useful 🙂  Thank you Tonia!

In return, I would like to pass on the “E for Excellent” award to a few of my favorite blogs: King Alfred Academy, La Scuola d’Argento, Koinonia AcademySmooth Stones Academy, and Trivium Academy.  These are the blogs I visit everyday (although there are many more as well) and they have been a great source of inspiration and information for me.  Thank you for inspiring me to join the blog frenzy and document our homeschool adventure.

Week Four Report

Wow, every week I am getting later and later with these things… My new goal is going to be to post them on Friday afternoon. Hopefully I will be able to follow through with that. I am halfway through Week 5 now, and I can barely remember what we did last week 🙂

We have not been having the greatest weeks – life keeps getting in the way of school, even though we have still been able to accomplish everything I wanted to. This past week we had to use Friday as a catchup day since Madison was sick most of the week (and she is still sick this week – we made a trip to the emergency room last night and found out she has an ear infection).

So, last week, for bible we did great. We normally do one lesson per day but ended up doing a few extra this week. On Tuesday we finished with Joesph and Madison said “Can we please do one more today? I need to know what happens!!” We also did one extra on Friday because our routine is to do bible first thing every morning, and since we did catchup school on Friday, Madison said “Aren’t we going to do bible first,” and we had to do it.

For reading, things are going OK. She is reading the Bob Books we have been working on with quite a bit of fluency now, but I still don’t think she is”reading.” I think she is memorizing. We are starting some new books this week, so we’ll see how those go. I feel totally lost here, which is not how I expected to feel.

We also read several library books (one of these days I am going to update the preschool reading log), including “The Moon is Made of Milk.” It has a recipe in the back for Moon Cookies, so we made those which was fun.

In ETC, we did the letter K. We did finish the workbook pages, but we did not get around to making the recipe for the week. I think we will end up making it sometime in the next few weeks when we just have extra time. On the plus side, we are planning to make an alphabet quilt and since we went back to my mom’s this weekend, I was finally able to get all the pieces cut out. Hopefully we will get a chance to start on that today and post pictures in our next weekly report.

For math, we just continued in Horizons K. She is really liking it, and doing well. I have heard some mixed opinions about the book as far as retention at the end of the year, but I am hopeful that it will work for Madison. She likes it. I also think that next week, we are going to start doing it everyday rather than twice a week since we are moving out of review mode and into material she is not familiar with.

We started back up doing violin lessons this week, which are going well. We are still just familiarizing ourselves with parts of the violin, etc, but Madison is really enjoying it.

It was my intention to start Japanese this week with Rosetta Stone, but we I went to set it up, I found that my DH’s work log in had expired!!! Now I am not sure what to do. When we had access to Rosetta Stone for free, it was a no brainer, but if anyone has suggestions about a Japanese program for 4 year olds, I would love to hear it. I am going to research this for the next few weeks and then make a decision.

Finally, art. My original plan was to use the book Scribble Art to present a new concept every week (basic stuff like using scissors, making a collage, using oil pastels, etc.) but that has pretty much not happened. At all. However, Madison does have an art center that she plays in for hours everyday, so I think my new plan for the time being is just to continue to add in new materials over there every once in a while and let her play. She loves to do art, and for right now, that is enough for me. We do live across the street from an art museum right now though, so I am planning to take her over there before we head to Japan.

Other: We went to the zoo on Monday, which was nice. We only stayed for a few hours because Madison got extremely tired, which I now recognize as the beginning of her being sick, but we had a really good time. Since the zoo here is free on Monday’s in Jan, we are planning to go back in a couple weeks with some friends. We missed storytime on Friday because Madison was sick 😦

We also went back to Kansas this weekend to visit my grandparents who were visiting from New Mexico and we had a great time there. I realized when I was looking for pictures for my weekly report that I did not take any pictures of Madison with them 😦 Maybe next time…

Week Three Report

After what felt like a long break from homeschooling (and a longer break from this blog 😦 ), we are back! Since Madison went to visit her grandma the week before Christmas, we started back a week earlier. What I had not anticipated, however, was a visit from my sister and sister-in-law this past week (ages 15 and 13). We did school anyway, but only Bible, Math and Language Arts. The girls were actually a great help – they did a science experiment with her one day, and helped with her ETC book and math another day. It was nice having them here for a little while – it was like having live in dog walkers/babysitters/house cleaners – but I am glad they are home now and finally my life is back to what passes for normal these days.

So, here is our light weekly report for last week:

Reading: I have completely given up on 100 EZ lessons and wanted to start something new after the holidays. What I decided to try is two separate things, and neither one is really a new curriculum. First, I made up flash cards to go with the Bob books. I *thought* she could read the first few Bob books, but when I started working with the flash cards, I realized that she was just looking at the pictures and guessing. So we are using the flash cards to play games, like memory, a matching game that includes running, etc. For now, that is working great, but I think at some point she will be bored with it. Then I have her read me the book after we have practiced the words. My goal is for her to recognize these as sight words. The other thing I am using is a combination of Leap Frog products. Right before Christmas, a bunch of Leap Frog stuff was on sale, so I purchased the LeapPad Reading/Writing and their phonics sets. She had a baby leap pad that she liked and has been excited about this one. We do the phonics stuff together, but she plays with the other books I bought on her own as well. We have only done the first phonics book together (out of 12), but it is going well because she thinks it is fun. I did read through Phonics Pathways and the OPGTR, and while we might move to them later, for now I am going to stick with this.

All of this is in addition to ETC. We did the letter “m” this week, and made mud pies.

Math: Madison loves math. Again, I am not sure where this comes from, but I am glad. We are still doing two lessons, two days a week out of the Horizons K book, which is working great.

Bible: I think we are finally finished with Joseph!! I love that this material is so in depth as far as bible history: we have been studying Joseph for 12 weeks. And the best part is, after a quick review last Monday, Madison pretty much remembered the entire story (after 2 weeks of no school). We are also working on learning the books of the bible and have a timeline where we add new events each week.

Science: With my sisters, we did an experiment out of Mudpies to Magnets about shining pennies.

Other: We went to see Mr. Magorium’s Magic Emporium (which I don’t really recommend; it was a little weird), I got my haircut, we went to Bass Pro (that is kind of like a field trip, right?) and, of course, we went to storytime – even the aunts couldn’t persuade her to skip storytime. Also, over our holiday break, we went to the state capitol in Texas, and Nana took her to Exploration Place in Wichita, KS.

One other exciting addition to our homeschool room is a new easel from Grammie for Christma, which we added to our art center.

This week we will be starting Japanese with Rosetta Stone, which I am very excited about.

Today I think we are going to skip everything and go to the zoo – the zoo here is free on Mondays in Jan., and since it is 61 degrees outside today, I don’t think we should pass up the opportunity…