Tuesday, April 1, 2014

Weekly Report: Days 100-104

The last week has seen a change in Lydia's therapy here at home.  She has a new therapist that is alternating times with her old therapist and her program has changed to be a bit more rigorous.  She is struggling a bit with the expectations of her, but she is equal to the task and has been able to keep up with her basic school lessons.  The last day for therapy is in the beginning of May, so she only has a few weeks left and we want to make the most of her time.

I'm also giving a lot of thought to how I will do school after we move.  It is very likely Lydia won't be in any therapy at all after we move.  Tyler will also be a 1st year resident and will be gone almost all the time.  I will have my kids 100% to myself and I would like to up our schedule and formalize a little more of our learning time.  I just need to figure out how to do it.  We'll re-institute memorization time which we are currently ignoring because of Lydia's tough schedule.  The rest of it is up in the air.  I'm sure I'll be talking more about that as time goes on.

Lydia

Reading:
OPGTR is going well.  She is on lesson 169 and moving along nicely.  She also reads an easy reader book from the library almost every day with her therapist and is now reading two verses every night at family scripture study.  Her reading is starting to show a little more fluency and she has started adding emotion to her reading and sounds a lot less like a robot.

Math:
I have some big changes in store for Lydia for math.  As you might have noticed, we are sort of floundering with math right now.  Lydia seems to have hit a wall with my current methods and I don't think what we have been doing is particularly effective for her.  Lately she has been working on Xtramath as a sort of minimal math and placeholder while she's been doing therapy, but I think I have come up with a solution for our math woes with her for after we move.  I'm going to take a very new approach that I'll talk about in another post.

Spelling:
Spelling is going well, although it is fairly low on the totem pole right now for us.  She just finished lesson 17 in AAS1.

Handwriting:
I realized that I never had her finish the HWT book a little while back, so she's been working on the last few pages.


Eleanor

Reading:
While Eleanor isn't going to officially start school until this fall, it seems like we are unofficially going ahead with it.  Most days, Eleanor will practice her letter phonograms with the LOE phonogram app.  She has them down pretty well by now.  I usually quiz her on first sounds of words at random times throughout the day as well ("Can you tell me the first letter of the word 'TABLE'?").  Now I am starting her on blending.  I'm using an app for this, but it is almost as easy on my own.  Basically I just say the three letter sounds of a simple word separately and help her figure out what word it is.  Once she gets that, we'll start OPGTR.

Math:
Almost daily Eleanor asks to do math. I went ahead and started her in Essential Math A and she is flying through it.  She loves doing her own math and I usually have to cut her off.  Right now she is on page 36.