Emily’s reading is getting better and better. She’s reading most 3-letter words fluidly without sounding them out, as well as some of the more common 4-letter words. She’s working on words like “grass” and “quick” now. Such a jump from a few months ago when it was all “Sam is a rat.” She still isn’t a big fan of it during our reading lessons, but she loves showing off to people at other times, and reading signs or reading things to her sister. She observed, while I was driving the other day, that a sign said “BUMP.” So she’s definitely noticing all the writing in the world around her.

We’ve had *huge* success with math since switching to Life of Fred. I don’t think it’s a very complete program in the elementary years, but she is learning *something*, so we’ll do that for a while before getting back to RightStart.

The main reason that I decided to graduate her to kindergarten was that we’re starting a new Sonlight core, Core A. So far it’s going great, although we’ve only done two days. There still aren’t enough readalouds for Emily’s taste, though, so we’re reading the main readaloud book, “The Boxcar Children,” about twice as fast as we’re supposed to. I’ll add in a sequel once it’s done, so that we still hit the next book roughly on schedule. At least, that’s my current plan. We’re also catching up on some of our magazines that we’ve received and not read yet. We get “My Big Backyard,” which is great, and “God’s World News,” which is interesting, but it’s written at *way* too low a level to hold Emily’s interest, and yet too high a level for her to read it herself, so I read her the parents’ notes to elaborate on the stories. I think if I renew it, I’ll jump her to whatever the next level is.

Not much to update other than about school. We’re still waiting for the new house to be finished. Now it’s looking like it might be February when we move in. It’s at least a few week’s away.

Oh, Emily’s birthday is in a few days, so we’re having her party next weekend. The theme this time is going to be dinosaurs. So I need to make a papier-mache Tyrannosaurus Rex and stuff him with candy and such. Plus I need to make a dinosaur cake. I did get some great deals on treats for the goody bags and dinosaur skeletons to bury for a fossil dig on ustoys.com. With their free shipping, I was a little worried they were going to be a scam, but they weren’t! I got everything fast and just as described. Awesome.

I’m really excited about it, I think it’s going to be great. It takes kids through about a 2nd grade reading level. It’s set up so that it has 12 maps, and each map has 10 lessons and a quiz at the end, and each lesson has about 10-13 different activities. You have do do each activity/lesson/quiz/map before it lets you progress to the next. As you progress through a lesson, your egg gradually develops a crack, and at the end of the lesson it pops open and you get a new little creature. The inducement of this “reward” is really what makes it work for Emily, she loves it.

I’d say it’s good for about ages 3 and up. I tried it a few times with Jenny, doing the very first lessons on the first map, where it introduces letters, and she did very well. She has a little bit of trouble with, “which word starts with the sound mmmm? Milk, or cheese?” So she’s not separating sounds perfectly yet. I also know (from other reading activities) that she doesn’t completely understand rhyming yet, although she’s getting there. So it definitely has a pretty good span of age/abilities that it can work for. Emily just started map 7, but I think it will take her a while to get to map 12. Also, you can reset what lesson your child is on, so if she needs more practice at some point, I can move her back a bit and close up all the eggs again, so that she can have the fun of revealing them again. I’m not sure how much excitement they’ll be good for when she’s seen them before, but it’s worth a try. And the extra practice will probably help. I’m rather impressed that, at 4, she can read the words “happy” and “bossy” and “horse” now, at least with some context.

About a million decisions have been coming due about the house lately. I don’t remember if I’ve mentioned, but we’re buying a house that is being renovated for us in the downtown historic district. It’s an old Victorian, and so we’re trying to find a good balance, as we decorate, between preserving the historic flavor but also making it reasonably modern and comfortable (the original floorplan didn’t, of course, include any bathrooms, so those have to be added in). They’ve progressed really well. The outside is mostly painted, the inside is mostly painted (although I think it’s just the first coat), etc. This week we picked out tile and vanities and bathroom hardware. The kitchen cabinets arrived and Seth put them together (he agreed to install the cabinets himself). Hopefully we’ll be moving sometime in January, which means I really ought to start packing! We tried to unpack as little as we could when we first moved here, knowing we’d be moving again, but with the kids we found more and more we needed to unpack, and… well, you know how it goes. So, another moving day will be soon!

Homeschool is going well, but fast! We’ve been speeding through the last year of preschool. I decided that when we finish, we’ll just go ahead and start “kindergarten,” possibly a little before Christmas, possibly after we move. I thought about trying to make it after our move, but I realized that it doesn’t really require an extra amount of work or anything, so there isn’t really a reason that we need to make both changes at the same time. Mostly it will just mean starting different books instead of the same ones we’ve been reading for months, although we’re actually going to reread a few of the old ones along with it. I’m looking forward to it, though, as I’m a little tired of the books we’ve been reading! Even though it’s a different story each time, the stories within each book still have the same style, and it’s still the same books every week for months on end. Onward to the new stuff!

And the kids are really loving the experiments! We made a paper spiral snake last week and held him over the cracked oven door (as we don’t have a radiator) and watched him spin to demonstrate how hot air rises. Sorry, I don’t have any pictures, but we might do that one again sometime as it was quite fun.

Then yesterday, we made a wind vane. The girls absolutely loved it.

This is what it looked like up close:

The girls loved it so much that they were asking eagerly when our next experiment was. Sonlight Science schedules all of the experiments for Thursdays. I don’t actually go by the days of the week, I just do each day in order, and occasionally we’ll do two days’ worth of science. So I had to tell them that we had several days’ worth of reading to go before we got to the next week’s experiment. And then, low and behold, I looked to the start of the next week, and it turned out that there were several optional activities that I thought the girls would enjoy. So today I made two kinds of homemade dough-ish stuff, one that the girls used to make fossil imprints. They pressed leaves, sticks, clover, small plastic toys, etc. I’ll have to see how well it ends up drying. Pictures to follow, maybe tomorrow.

The other dough we used to make a volcano! The instructions suggested using a bottle, like a soda bottle, but we just used a little plastic teacup from one of the kids’ sets so that we could make a fairly small volcano. I added some food coloring to make it brown, then the kids stuck some of the extra grass and leaves that they’d picked out for fossils and hadn’t used around the base of the volcano to make it look more interesting.

Tomorrow, we shall be mixing red food coloring into vinegar and adding it to baking soda for some fun! I’ll try to take some fun pictures and post them when I get the chance.

As an inducement to Emily to learn to read, we told her that once she could read a specific book (we chose “The Beginner’s Bible,” because it’s the first book done in the level 2 readers, which seems a reasonable goal), she could have a light in her bed and spend a few minutes reading after she goes to bed before she falls asleep. We’ll get her one of those lamps that clips onto the bedrail, and we’ll put it on a timer so that it turns off 15 minutes after she’s supposed to be in bed. If she dawdles, she’ll lose some of her reading time. She’s definitely interested, but she knows it’s something that won’t happen too soon, so she’s not antsy about it in general. However, today she spent a good bit of her quiet time looking through the pictures in the book and asking questions about it. She can read a few words, which seems to please her. Also, yesterday, when she was bored during quiet time, I suggested that she might read to Jenny for a little while. So she happily went downstairs, got her readers, and she and Jenny sat on the couch together for a while while she read. “Pat is a rat. Pat is fat. Pat is a fat rat.” It’s so fun to enjoy her learning to read.

Jenny is really starting to get her letters down! She knows a lot of the letters and their sounds already, which delights me. She may end up an early reader, too. Pretty cool.

I’m not feeling well this week, so I’m hoping to head to bed early. After NCIS.

Emily is still hating math, which is frustrating. I’m not really sure what to do about it. I’ve switched to just trying math games, like memory, and even that she gets frustrated with. There were a few fun activities in “What Your Kindergartner Needs To Know” that I might try, like using paperclips to measure things. Maybe they will interest her. I think one of the problems is that she has decided that her life’s ambition is to be a dance teacher, and “dance teachers don’t need math.” Cannot *wait* until my adult friend Jenny (not my second daughter, but the person she’s named after) comes for a visit in November, as she’s taught dance (and is now a lawyer) and can tell her lots of reasons that dance teachers need math.

Two things I need to work on are getting started earlier in the morning, and getting in more physical activity time. My *intent* is to go upstairs to get my shower at 8:30, then start chores at 9 and school at 10. With the idea that, if the kids wake me up earlier, I get more free time/computer time in the morning, and if I get to sleep later, I get less time. In practicality, when they let me sleep late, I still end up taking about as long in the morning before starting my shower, and sometimes it’s not until 9, and then when I come downstairs I don’t get right to work on chores but do other stuff instead, and then pretty soon the dishes still aren’t washed and it’s 10am, and should I do the dishes or school? Etc. Yes, I am incredibly lazy. Also, I send the kids outside plenty and watch them from inside, but I don’t go outside with them as often as I should.

So, I’m going to really try to work on those two things these next few weeks. Getting going earlier in the morning, and getting the kids to be more physically active by doing it with them. I don’t end up taking them to a “real” park all that often because I want Charlotte to nap in the morning. But I think what I will start doing is taking them after lunch. There’s about a two hour window between when I wake Charlotte up from her morning nap and when I put her down for her afternoon nap, so even if lunch is in that time period, there should still be plenty of time for the park. And I’ll try to play a bit with them, as much as I can with Charlotte underfoot/attached via baby carrier. On the plus side, pullups are a lot more work (and benefit) when you have to lift an extra 20 pounds!

And as for getting going in the morning, I think I’m going to install a program that will automatically hibernate my computer at 8:30am. Eep! But I *want* a clean house and to get more things done, so I think I’m going to have to try it. Wish me luck!

So far each day we practice recognizing a number without counting. Yesterday was numbers 1-3, today was 1-4. She seems fairly solid on this. She was also very comfortable with the other parts of the lessons involving sorting, continuing a pattern, etc. The two things that she might need work on are using her fingers to indicate a number, and ordinal numbers. She understands how to use her fingers to indicate a number, but she doesn’t seem to understand how to use her thumb to hold fingers down, and that’s going to handicap her as we go along. However, she conceptually understands all of that fine, so I don’t think it’s really much of a problem. She can always use tally sticks instead. The ordinal numbers thing isn’t uncommon to take a while, especially as “second” and “third” don’t sound a whole lot like “two” and “three.” She may find “fourth” and “fifth” easier.

I’m looking forward to playing with the abacus, which we don’t use for a few lessons. I’ve never understood them before, but looking through some lessons in Rightstart, it’s like… Oh! So that’s what it’s for. Yeah.

I’ve been majorly slacking off with the other stuff that I wanted to do with Sonlight. I have All About Reading pre-level 1, A Reason For Handwriting K, and Language Arts K. With All About Reading, I haven’t been pushing the letters much, working more on the games to develop phonemic awareness. But today was G, and I wanted to make sure we did some activities that involved looking at G, because the rounded shapes are the ones that Emily struggles to write correctly. So we did some coloring activities with G, I showed her the G in a pan of cornmeal, and practiced writing the capital G on a whiteboard with the A Reason For Handwriting treehouse on it. Tomorrow I’ll probably have her try to make a G with foamboard letters, make it herself in the cornmeal, and then try a sheet of handwriting Gs. Plus math.

I think that trying to do Bible (which involves reading Bible stories, practicing our Bible verse, and talking about a Biblical character trait), the reading of the core books, reading, science, math, language arts, and handwriting is way too much for a day. There are people on the forums I read who talk about how they’re finished a higher level of school in 1.5 hours and they wonder if that’s long enough, and I don’t get it. We usually do school for 1.5 hours, sometimes 2.5 if we do some in the morning and some in the afternoon, and we don’t get everything done. So I’m contemplating either alternating days (Bible, core, and science one day, handwriting, language arts, and math the other day, or something like that), or splitting some subjects into two days. Maybe doing language arts one day, and handwriting and math the other day (plus Bible/core/science every day). Not sure. I’m inclined to do math and science every day, because those are the ones that I want to get ahead/keep up on, and I wouldn’t mind core and language arts taking longer, but… it seems like every time I make a plan for how I’m going to do things, I never end up sticking to it. So, we’ll see.

It occurred to me today that… I actually love vacuuming. Okay, I’ve always been fond of it, because it’s fairly easy, not messy, and you get to watch a dirty floor turn clean and beautiful. But I love it all the more so because I got a new vacuum.

Our old vacuum bit the dust back when we were moving out of our house in New England for a TDY in the Midwest. I hadn’t used it much there because the floors were all hardwood, except for the dining room. Yes, the dining room. So I went to vacuum as we were moving out, and only the hose (the part that you put the attachments on) would give any suction whatsoever. However, I’d lost all the attachments at some point in the last 10 years. Using the hose to vacuum a room? Not fun. But I didn’t do anything about it at the time, as we were provided a vacuum during our TDY and then had hardwood floors everywhere when we went back to New England, and it wasn’t until we got here and I went to vacuum the rug we have in the girls’ bedroom that I was reminded that it didn’t work. So we looked at Consumer Reports, and Amazon, and… it turns out that what CR thinks are the best vacuums are not what regular people think are the best vacuums, and vice versa. I think part of it is that CR tests new vacuums in one limited test, so they don’t deal with vacuums aging, or breaking, etc. But I also care about some of the things they were testing for, and I didn’t agree with their methodology for testing things like maneuverability. So I ended up trusting Amazon reviewers and got the Dyson DC-25 Animal. And I love it. It is so easy to use. It has a ball that it rotates on, so you can maneuver it extremely well and it takes a lot less effort to push and turn it. It has fantastic suction. It has a hose with a pipe and a handle attached, so that you can easily and effortlessly clean under and around things and things over your head. Or clean out messy booster seats. You have to empty the canister every time, but I actually love that, because you don’t have to buy bags or change bags. So fun, so easy. Yes, I’m a dork. But I love vacuuming now. In fact, I’m tempted to go clean the playroom right now just so that I have an excuse to vacuum it. But I think I’ll play Wii Lego Harry Potter instead (review on that to follow!).

I can’t find the signup form, so I’ll have to grab a new one at church today, but I think I might go for it. Jenny doesn’t want to do it, of course (she cries every time I drop her off at church nursery), but as she did okay at our old church in Massachusetts, I think it just takes her a bit longer to get used to a place. So I think I might sign both girls up for now. You pay by the session, so if it really doesn’t work for Jenny, I can always pull her out later. She plays better independently than Emily does, even though she’s younger, so it wouldn’t be the end of the world to have her home. And I think that Emily will really enjoy it, as it’s almost a bit like preschool. Charlotte I’ll keep home, because she usually naps in the morning anyway. Not only do I not think she would nap there, but also there’s no point in paying the extra money to have somebody else watch her nap.

Hopefully it won’t interfere with homeschool too much. The family group that I joined also has a preschool coop once a week. But even if she does both, two mornings a week shouldn’t be the end of the world. I’m already hoping to make P4/5 last as long as possible. And I can try to do a few things in the afternoon. In fact, while sometimes I struggle to get our afternoon school session done just because I so want to spend afternoon naptime/quiet time getting things done around the house, having the girls gone in the morning might make me more productive then and more able to fit school in the afternoon. Wow, that was a sentence worth of Cooper or Hawthorne. I hope you can parse it, because I don’t feel like rewriting.

Seth took down a tree yesterday. I was quite impressed. He figured it out by watching videos of tree removal on YouTube. He didn’t even crash my clothesline that was almost underneath, or so much as brush the house with a branch. Very awesome. We’ve got a bit more sun now, and once he gets the stump out he’ll have a place to park his car not on the road.

In other news, we got a play structure for our backyard! Yay! And it was free! More yay! I saw it on Freecycle Friday evening and responded immediately (although it had been up for two hours). Late that night, I got a reply and he said I could have it! Seth went over and picked it up. And yay!
This is a stock photo, of course. As ours is from Freecycle and 5 years old, it doesn’t look that lovely. But all the parts are present, Seth will make sure it’s safe, and I’m going to stain it and buy a new canopy, so it should look pretty nice soon! I’ll take pictures as soon as I can.

We’re still trying to get the house in order. This is where it stands at the moment. Kitchen: No floor. Or, rather, plain, untreated, stained wood floor that needs vinyl. Or something. Walls had several layers of wallpaper and paint stripped off them, so they’re all patchy and ugly. Dishwasher is plumbed and usable, but has no counter above it, so when you open it you need to support the door with your foot, or a stool placed there conveniently for that purpose, or the dishwasher will fall forward. I just managed to unpack my spices today. Of course, the bottle of rosemary apparently did not have the cap tightly sealed, so when I went to lift it out… rosemary everywhere. On the plus side, I have an awesome new vacuum cleaner that made short work of cleaning up the spill of rosemary in the kitchen, and one of the attachments let me suck up the extra rosemary from the packed box so that I didn’t have to take everything else out as well. Ironically enough, I probably still have enough rosemary left in the bottle to last me until my fiftieth wedding anniversary. It is not a spice I use often. The overhead light in the kitchen is not hooked up yet, but there is a switch-light mounted over the sink that serves well enough.

Moving on. Dining room: Not bad, not bad. One large hole in the floor plugged with a board. Another hole in the wall for ductwork blocked with a box so that nobody tries to fit a toy (or perhaps a baby sister) down it. Otherwise, definitely messy (some boxes in the corner, some clutter issues), but otherwise okay.

Living room: Also not too bad. A large pile of boxes in one corner, and plastic-wrapped strange things (I think some are pictures in frames, no idea what others are) against the fireplace. However, we finally got the TV hooked up. It took a visit to my parents for which I brought along my new Wii, and showing Steve the Lego Harry Potter game. Now we’re addicts, and he had to hook up the TV almost as soon as we got back here so that we can play Lego Harry Potter together. It’s been great fun. Of course, we played a little this evening, and just when we got to the big battle of one part of the game, the Wii froze (while making an annoying high-pitched sound) and we lost the game. And the game doesn’t let you save at any point, only at waypoints. So we’ll have to go all the way back when we start over.

Kids’ playroom is also not bad. It has a row of boxes along the wall, but I’ve tried to make use of them, so there’s space to play and all. I just cleaned it tonight and vacuumed (yay new vacuum cleaner!) so hopefully I will have better luck getting the girls to clean it in future.

Downstairs bathroom: gutted. As in, there is some PVC sticking out of the drywall walls, and a wooden subfloor. Yeah.

Stairs: No baby gate at the bottom. I have a pressure gate that I put up, but I keep forgetting, wondering where Charlotte is, and frantically running up the stairs to find her in the bathroom eating the toothbrushes again. So far I have been *very* lucky. I really need to get Seth to set up a mounted gate at the bottom of the stairs, as I’d be less likely to forget to close it. We do have a mounted gate at the top of the stairs.

Bathroom: Wooden subfloor. Toilet flushes, but it has a problem where the water never shuts off, so you have to keep the valve turned off except when you are actively filling the tank. This is hard for me to remember for some reason, but very bad to forget. I did the other day, and it caused a major flood that meant water leaking through the closet in the girls’ playroom (which is directly downstairs from the bathroom). There is no sink or vanity or mirror. There is a working bathtub, and we sit on the edge of it and wash our hands/brush our teeth in the tub. The tub does not have a tile surround yet, it’s just plastic taped to the wall. There is no bathroom closet or anything. A plastic bin holds our bathroom supplies, and the frequently-used items rest on top of the bin for easy access (which explains how Charlotte is able to get hold of toothbrushes all the time).

The girls’ room is basically done. It’s pretty simple, just Emily and Jenny’s bunkbed and Charlotte’s crib, a small bookshelf for bedtime books, dressers for their clothes, and a standing fan. Plus whatever toys manage to walk themselves (because, ask the girls, they had nothing to do with it) upstairs and into the room. Also sometimes wet pullups. Ick. There’s no switched light, though. None of the outlets work, so a extension cord runs from the bathroom to power the lamp, nightlight, and fan.

Master bedroom: Basically complete, although also has no power and has to use an extension cord to the bathroom. Is sort of a dump spot for household items, plus is hard to clean because Charlotte is napping in there half the day, so is a huge mess. But otherwise is pretty much finished, except for needing outlets and a light.

Backyard: Huge pile of limbs and branches from a tree that has been cut down is diminishing. It was taking up a huge percentage of the yard, but most of it is now chopped up into firewood and in neat stacks on a pallet near the fence. Yay! The yard is a mess of kid toys, but that doesn’t so much bother me. We do still need to hang all our laundry on a line, because the dryer hasn’t been connected yet.

So. If there can be any excuse for the lack of blog updates, I hope that this detailed description of the state of our house will count. I haven’t mentioned the many and sundry toys, clothes, and odds-and-ends strewn about the house, so just assume that they’re liberally scattered throughout the rooms in the previous description.

In other news, Charlotte is, I think, getting close to walking. She’ll sit in a crouch, and then slowly raise herself to standing independently, and hold the position for a few seconds. So it probably won’t be too long! I’m taking bets on whether it happens before or after her birthday, which is the 25th. Either way, I think it’ll be close! She’ll be my latest-to-walk baby. She is so entertaining, though, and such a joy. She’s very cheerful, gets into everything, and just has such a strong and fun personality for such a young child. I adore her.

We’re just about to finish our second week of school. We’re doing Sonlight P4/5, which is the second year of preschool, and having a lot of fun with it so far. I bought Handle on the Arts’ Science and Bible add-ons, which give you some hands-on activities that go with the science and Bible portions of P4/5. The girls have really loved the crafts so far, which is great. We had fun making Noah’s Ark the other day with construction paper for the background and waves, an ark made from a template, and then gluing on cotton balls for clouds and matching sets of animal crackers for the animals. Unfortunately, Emily left hers on the floor, and Charlotte found it and ate off most of the animal crackers and a few cotton balls before I caught her. So I didn’t get a picture of how cute it was.

We took some pictures of us outside reading one of our favorite Sonlight books so far, the Berenstain Bears Big Book of Science and Nature. It’s really a fantastic book. Not only does it give a great overview of so much science, but it does so in verse that is catchy and rhyming and funny and memorable all at the same time.

I also just bought a new math package for Emily. Singapore Earlybird Kindergarten Math wasn’t really captivating her. She seems to detest workbooks in all shapes and forms, which it certainly was. Most math, of course, is in workbooks or similar, though. I kept hearing about Rightstart Math, and finally decided to try it. My initial reluctance was that I had heard that it’s very teacher-intensive. You can’t assign them some problems and then have them work independently, it’s all basically done with the teacher. This can be difficult when you have multiple kids. I finally decided, though, that right now I’d have to work with her anyway, and that Rightstart seems to give such a great foundation that it’s worth it. If I need her to work more independently later, I’ll transition her to another math program then. By then, she may be better able to handle something that is more textbook- or video-based. I love Rightstart’s teaching theories, and I really think they help kids get a handle on math and truly understand what they’re doing. I bought the deluxe kit which has all sorts of math manipulatives, so I look forward to trying it out with her. I have everything ready for the first lesson, but we went on a field trip today to a water event at the park and played hookey from school. Yay for homeschooling.

I should mention that she learned, about three days ago, how to pull herself to a stand. It’s now her favorite thing in the whole wide world, and I think she’d spend all day standing up, holding onto things, if it weren’t that her legs aren’t quite up to the challenge.

The other day, she got her bath first, then it was the big girls’ turn. While they were in the tub, she crawled over to the tub, held onto the side and stood up, and then she started lifting one leg and then the other like she was trying to climb in. It was so cute! And would be very dangerous, of course, if it weren’t that she’s only about tall enough for her head to poke up above the height of the side of the tub, so she’s no way that she could fall in, even leaning forward. And I’m in there keeping an eye on her, anyway. She does have the tendency to get into the trash can, so I often have to lift it up and put it on the sink when she’s in the bathroom.

I haven’t really updated lately because we’ve been packing, packing, packing. Oh, and did I mention packing? Our living room is the current place for most of the boxes. Items that fall under our weight allowance for professional books (Seth’s engineering books and military gear, my homeschool books and supplies) are in our bedroom. The house is filling up fast!

I’m kind of at the point where I struggle to figure out what to pack next. We’re using most of what’s left. And there’s just so much “miscellaneous.” I find myself wanting to just toss things in boxes. But then I’m not sure what to toss in, what we don’t need for the next few weeks. And a lot of it is Seth’s, so it’s even harder for me to discern.

However, break is over, so I’d better go figure out *something* that I can pack. Wish me luck!

Not only is she crawling, but she loves to pull herself up to her knees while holding herself upright. She’s not pulling to a full stand yet, but just pulling herself to her knees gets her high enough to get into lots of stuff. Eek! I remember not-so-fondly the weekend that my parents asked me to dogsit, and Emily, who had been a crawler, suddenly started pulling herself to a stand. She’d get into the dog’s water bowl, I’d be dealing with that, she’d pull all the magnets off the fridge, I’d be dealing with that, she’d start pulling everything off the coffee tables and end tables and all the DVDs off the shelf and… eek! What a weekend. I needed a baby cage.

Crawling, however, is cute. Really, really cute. Especially when you enter a room, baby sees you and gives a “Squee!” and starts crawling as fast as possible (which is not very) up to you, crawls up onto your shoes and tugs at your pantlegs. So adorable.

I’m reading “The Well-Trained Mind.” It’s got some great ideas. I don’t know that I really want to do the classical method all the way, although I think it has merit, but I think I might appropriate a few ideas. Like, for some of the books a child reads, it suggests that you have the child narrate back the story to you after you finish reading (telling you what they remember). You write it down, then (if they’re old enough) have them read it back. You also have them draw a picture that goes with the book. Somebody on Sonlight also has their child write (and sometimes decorate) a page that has the title and author on it. If you put those together, after each book, they’d make a little summary of three pages, one with the title/author, one with a drawing, and one with a summary of what the story was about. What a great way to solidify memory of a book and be able to look back at it later. Also, I like the idea of the narrative, as it sounds like a good way for the parent to get an idea of what the child understood from the book.

“The Well-Trained Mind” was a gift from my uncle. We ran across a book we thought he’d like, “Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men” (part of Sonlight’s high school curriculum, looked neat), and sent it to him a few months ago. A few days ago, when we arrived at my parents’ for a visit, they had “The Well-Trained Mind” as a gift he’d sent for us. That was really neat of him. And I’m reading it a lot faster than I’d read the “Emancipating…” book, perhaps because it’s on the topic that I’m currently obsessing about (homeschool).

I’m chomping at the bit to start the second year of preschool, P4/5. Also, I’ve decided to purchase All About Reading. Currently, pre-level 1 is the only level out, but level 1 is due out in June or July. I’m going to wait until level 1 comes out and order both together. I’m also going to order the first year of All About Spelling at the same time. So what is all this stuff?

All About Reading is a fun program that teaches kids how to read! It uses Ziggy the Zebra, a character and also a puppet that you can wear, to make learning to read fun. Pre-level 1 focuses on the big five pre-reading skills: letter knowledge, phonological awareness, print awareness, listening comprehension, and motivation to read. It has three sections, going through all the capital letters, then all the lowercase letters, than all the initial sounds.

Emily is actually pretty solid on all her letters and sounds, but I don’t think it will hurt to go through them again. I’ll probably speed things up a bit, pairing capital letter/lowercase letter/sound together in one week (or a few days, depending on how long she needs). She’ll enjoy the letter crafts. But the main reason I want to do pre-level 1 is that I think that she’s still a little weak on phonological awareness. She knows what a rhyme is, but she can get confused between rhyming words and alliteration. She’s not too clear on what syllables are. And she can’t always pick out the separate sounds in words. So while we’ll keep the letter/sound parts of the units for structure and fun and review, I think the phonological stuff is what we’ll really want to focus on. Also, I’m not sure whether she has sufficient motivation to read. She loves books and loves being read to, and she stays up late at night “reading” (looking at the pictures and remembering the story), but she doesn’t really desire to read to herself. So I’ll have to see what it does to promote that aspect.

For the most part, though, I think she’s probably almost ready for level 1. So I’ll get both at once so that I can look over it and have an idea where it starts, and then I’ll have it ready as soon as she is.

I want Emily to be really excited about the program, so I’ve already told her about how we’re going to adopt a baby zebra this summer, and how he’ll be coming to live with us, but how he doesn’t know how to read yet, and her job will be to teach him to read. She seems amused at the idea, so we’ll see how it goes!

All About Spelling sounds like a fantastic program from what I’ve heard of it. You can use it pretty early on, concurrent with level 1 of All About Reading, as kids are learning to piece words together. It starts with learning all the sounds each letter can make, which is also really helpful for reading. So, I really can’t wait to make my order and get all that fun stuff!

I’m also chomping at the bit to start P4/5. It’s a bit more structured than our current year was (P3/4 just basically lists the books in trimesters, based on their length/difficulty level, but P4/5 has an actual daily schedule), which I’m looking forward to. It has some longer, more involved chapter books. I got a set of pony beads for Emily in case she needs an activity while she listens to the books that are longer with few pictures. I also can’t wait to start doing some more science with her. P4/5′s science is mostly reading, which I think she’ll like, maybe with a few science observations mixed in. And my current plan is to stay a bit heavy on the science, finish it earlier than the rest of the core, and move right along to Science A (the next level). I’d like to go through the science a bit faster than the core, leaving me with some time to supplement with other books, and also eventually getting a year or a few years ahead (the science isn’t super advanced). Especially as some of the core levels require a greater maturity and so I’ll need to hold back on core so that we don’t get too far ahead, I’m not going to worry about trying to align science with core. Also, I’d really like her to either start doing the advanced science cores that are preparation for the AP exams or to be taking community college science classes in high school. I also think that science doesn’t really require the maturity that certain other subjects do (reading, handwriting, math, etc.). And I’m really looking forward to getting into some of the experimental stuff that comes with Science A! Maybe there’s some stuff in the instructor’s guide with P4/5. We do read one of my favorite science books in that, “How Do You Lift a Lion?” and I might try to devise a few experiments myself that demonstrate levers, pulleys, etc.

So, we’ve finished P3/4, and we’re not starting P4/5 until after the move… where does that leave us? With the children’s room at the library! We have been checking out books by the dozens (literally… I have over 100 books checked out at the moment). I keep my 20 holds maximum filled at all times, and pick up my holds frequently so that I can put more on. We’ve been reading through the recommended reading list in the back of “What Your Preschooler Needs To Know” and Caldecott Medal winners, plus other books that catch our eye or strike our fancy. Lots of books about American History, as Sonlight doesn’t cover it until about age 8 and I’d like Emily to get a little preview beforehand, lots of art, and just good classic stories. She’d read all day if I were willing, so we go through 8-10 books during school each day, plus often another book or two somewhere else in the day, and of course 2 books at bedtime. I’m creating voracious reading monsters! You can really tell from Emily’s vocabulary that she reads a lot. She’ll pop out with long or unusual words that make me smile.

Sorry, another whole post about homeschool! I’ll try to think of something more exciting and/or funny for next time!