Weekly Report: Week 25

I love seeing Lydia progress.  She's doing even better than I had hoped she would with reading, and her math is coming along well too.  It is crazy how much satisfaction I get from my daughter reading the word "crash" to me, but it makes me excited and happy.  I've been working on planning her Kindergarten year that will start in the Fall, making us official homeschoolers!  As part of my planning, I'm re-reading The Well-Trained Mind, which is the book the first made me believe I could homeschool and the homeschooling philosophy I connect with the most.  It is always good for a little inspiration.  I have most of next year planned out, although I'll be doing a separate post on those plans.

Practicing handwriting in rice.

Math:
We finished pages 71-75 in Essential Math and a few pages of Miquon.  She's really catching on with subtractions.  I was a little worried that she might have difficulty transitioning from addition to subtraction, especially with the c-rods, but it was amazing. She understood how to do subtraction with the cuisenaire rods without me even having to show her.  More than anything, that shows me that she is starting to internalize these concepts.  C-rods are seriously a magic math manipulative!

Reading:
Lydia has mastered the "ch" sound digraph and is mostly through lesson 58 in OPGTR.  We're still doing all our reading on the whiteboard and she has started having me draw her things whenever she finishes sentences as a motivator.  Her favorites right now are question marks, the word "much", and "train."  I don't really know why that is motivating, but it makes her happy, so whatever.  She cracks me up.

Oh, and Lydia tried to spell her first word by sounding it out this week!  She was playing with sidewalk chalk on the driveway, and she wrote a barely legible, "cor" for car (I know because I heard her sounding it out).  I plan on starting spelling once her handwriting gets better, but I might start looking into oral spelling programs.  We'll see.

Handwriting:
Handwriting is now our most time-consuming subject, mostly because we always do the "wooden"
shapes, chalkboard, and book.  Also Eleanor usually does her pages and tags along with the "wooden" shapes and chalkboard.  Both girls love it, though, so that's just how it goes sometimes.

Memorization:
We're still working on "The Rainbow", although Lydia almost has it down and we'll probably move to the next thing soon. We are finally getting to the point where her memorization is getting too cumbersome to repeat every day, so I started using a notebook I made a while back based on this model at Simply Charlotte Mason.

So that was our week!  Pretty decent, I'd say.