Months 4 & 5 Review

I forgot to do a review of our progress for September, and by the time I got around to it, I was halfway through the month of October and decided to just wait and do two months worth at once.  First, the extracurricular things.

We have been very busy.  In September we visited a butterfly farm.  It was really cute and the girls enjoyed letting the butterflies sit on their fingers.  There was also a little presentation about butterflies which set the girls on a butterfly information binge that we are still working on.

I caught Lydia reading her sisters a family favorite all on their own.  I love to see times like this.

For dress like a pirate day, we went to Krispy Kreme and got 2 dozen free donuts.  Two instead of 3 because Adelaide didn't want to be a pirate, only a bunny and for some reason that didn't count.

A few weeks ago, Tyler had a week vacation and we had a blast exploring our new area.  There are many things to see and do within an hour or two of our new home.  One of our favorite things was exploring Hanging Rock State Park.  There were many beautiful waterfalls and the girls were champs at hiking.  Eleanor, especially, would have gone miles and miles.

Dad with the girls behind a waterfall

Eleanor and Dad seeing a waterfall on their own without the rest of us because we were too tired after a full day of hiking.

Lydia looking at our first waterfall.

We spent a day at a nearby city park that had a carousel and train.  We got passes and rode them many times.  We also rented a canoe and Dad took the girls out on a really pretty lake for their first rides on a canoe.  

Eleanor on the carousel.

Dad and Adelaide on the train.

We also explored the traditional English gardens at Reynolda Gardens.  It was a fun morning and really pretty place.  The girls enjoyed frolicking in the garden.  They literally frolicked, but it was good to see.  We'll go back sometime, I think.

Our last family activity was to visit Old Salem.  This was probably the biggest bust, simply because the girls are a little small to enjoy the history aspect, although they did enjoy a lot of the more hands-on elements.  They enjoyed a puppet show, running the cider press, and the water pump.

Adelaide liked pumping water.

We had a fun Halloween.  Daddy had to leave to go to work at 7, so he took the girls out for a little early trick-or-treating and then we handed candy out to the kids who came by.

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Now for our school report:

Math:

Lydia had started fighting me on math and I was getting sick of how much time it took and decided that although it worked fairly well, we needed something more streamlined.  I switched Lydia over to Christian Light Education Math.  By all accounts, it was supposed to have all the pros of Saxon but be more streamlined, and this is exactly what I have found it to be.  It is a Mennonite math program and I am LOVING it.  We doubled up on the first several lessons in an effort to catch up since she was starting late and now our lessons are taking about a half hour a day.  She has completed through Lesson 32.  There are many more lessons in CLE than there were in Saxon in a given year, so we will be doing math most days, even when we don't do other school in an effort to get it done before next year.

Eleanor finished Essential Math A a while ago and is now well into B.  She is on page 64 (out of 158).  She is doing an amazing job and I'm already looking towards what she will do once she finishes.  She is also doing a great job with Miquon.  She is almost halfway through Miquon Orange.  I think I will try to introduce more math games rather than just worksheets in an effort to slow her down and help her have a deeper understanding of math.

Reading:

Lydia finished OPGTR!  This was a major milestone.  We've been working on OPGTR since Lydia turned 4 years old and she went from not being able to blend two-letter words to now being able read fluently on about a 4th grade level.  She also finished her first chapter book, The Boxcar Children, and is halfway through Sarah, Plain, and Tall.  I found this reading list by Mensa and have decided to have Lydia work through it.  She has also started Book-It again and I'm struggling to figure out goals for her.  I'll just have to think on it.

Eleanor is on Lesson 46 in OPGTR.  She has moved from CVC words to simple blends.  She is doing a great job with it too.  She enjoys reading Bob books and has finished the first 8.

Language Arts:

Weekly Report: Days 70-75

Crystal Bridges

We're powering on through.  We went on a family trip to the beautiful Crystal Bridges art museum this week.  It is only a half hour away and a block away from where Tyler grew up, so it is a wonderful resource to have.  We took the girls in the past, but never with the intention of focusing on their enjoyment of the museum.  That's what we tried to do this time, and we lasted a whole hour and a half!  We talked about what different sculptures were made out of and talked about several paintings.  Lydia got really good at picking out which sculptures were made out of marble and which were made of bronze.  They also have a fun kids room and the girls had fun playing with some of the puzzles and puppets.

Eleanor's favorite: "Pinocchio" by Jim Dime (neither marble or bronze... wood!)

"The Life of a Hunter, A Tight Fix" by Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait

Reading:
This week in OPGTR Lydia has been learning about silent and not silent "gh".  They are more complicated than I realize before teaching them and Lydia is struggling with them a little, but I am completely confident that she will pick them up soon.  She also read several books with her therapist.

Grammar:
This week we started Language Lessons Through Literature (LLTL) and it has been a hit so far.  We've done 3 lessons and both Lydia and Eleanor seem to look forward to it. We are still reading Beatrix Potter stories and although we've read all of them before, the girls are really connecting with the stories this time around.

Math:
Lydia is still primarily doing math with her therapist.  They are focusing on patterns and sequences right now and Lydia is getting good at them.

Spelling:
We finally got through Lesson 14.  I don't know why it took us so long, but it did.  We're well into Lesson 15 now and she's doing well.  Also, the SoundLiteracy app is finally updated so it doesn't crash all the time!  Its a little thing but I'm glad to have it working.

Weekly Report: Days 32-38

This has been a busy few weeks, and I have a feeling that the next several months are going to be that way.  Tyler has started interviewing with internal medicine residencies and whenever possible, we are traveling with him.  Luckily, the girls are good travelers.  This last weekend we went to Dayton, OH.  It would have been lots of fun except that on the drive there I felt myself getting sicker and sicker.  I powered through it enough to be able to go see the things we wanted to see, but 5 days later I'm still feeling poorly.  So, we haven't done school at all this week.

 

In Dayton, OH, we went to the National Air Force Museum.  It was really neat and the girls loved seeing all the airplanes and helicopters.  If you ever get a chance, I suggest that you take the time. We only spent a few hours, but could have spent so much longer if the girls would have let us read the plaques.  My favorite was that we saw the actual airplane that dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki.  For some reason that made it very real for me.

Eleanor the Astronaut

Reading:
Lydia is on Lesson 106 in OPGTR and is starting on all the ways to read the "oo."  She continues to improve in speed and pick up other stuff from all the non OPGTR practice reading she's been doing.  It is an exciting time for me to see her making this kind of good progress after working so hard with her.
Eleanor has been begging me for reading lessons and we are doing the McGuffey app on the iPad for the moment (I got it for free).  The app is really neat as it basically just takes the old McGuffey speller that all the pioneers learned to read with and turns it into iPad lessons.  I doubt we'll use it all the way through, but as a place holder, Eleanor's enjoying it well enough and it requires no prep for me. I think with a lot of work she could probably start OPGTR right now, but I don't want to put in that work yet, so I'm mostly holding off and working on solidifying her letter sounds and starting on some phonetic awareness activities informally ("what letter starts the word cat?").

Lydia in front of part of Apollo 15

Math:
Math continues as normal.  I see her making some number sense connections, which is great.  We continue to do a page of Math Mammoth and a page of Miquon daily right now.

Adelaide eating the dirt at the park.

Memorization:
The big news on this front is that Lydia finished the first 1/4 of her timeline, "Ancient Times."  Today she learned "John the Baptist" and that was the last one for the first group.  She has learned 42 items on the timeline and I think she just might make it through the entire thing this year.  She also finished the 5th Article of Faith, "Autumn" by Emily Dickinson, and has started the 6th Article of Faith.  It is amazing how quickly she picks up poems and I'm already wondering if I picked enough for her to do this year.

Spelling:
I haven't been great about spelling lately because Eleanor and Adelaide got into our magnet letter tiles for AAS one day and now 8 of them are missing, likely never to be seen again.  It really bummed me out.  Since then, I've been using spelling as sort of an extra handwriting practice for Lydia, but that meant we were only getting through maybe 4 words a day and her frustration level with spelling was much higher.  So last week I bit the bullet and bought the Sound Literacy app for our iPad, which is basically just a virtual version of the letter tiles.  It is the most expensive app I ever bought, but I knew that once I had it, I would be 10 times more likely to do spelling and that Lydia would probably do spelling more happily as she likes anything iPad related.  So far so good.  It hasn't been optimized for OS7 yet, so it crashes a lot which bothers me, but I'm going to hold off and hope that it will get better soon.  As a result, Lydia finished Lesson 10 in All About Spelling last week.