February/March Review

At the end of February, the girls and I took an impromptu trip to west Texas. My youngest sister was about to leave to go on a mission for a year and a half and asked if I could be there to go with her to the temple. It turned out, ALL my siblings were able to go. In fact, it was an entire family reunion (minus Tyler who couldn't get off). It was a 2 day drive, one way, and the girls were champs. I love going on road trips with them, even though it is exhausting. We have lots of fun, and even Clara was really good.

Fun with their cousins

More cousin fun

Making cookies with Grandpa

As a result of our impromptu trip, we aren't as far along with school as I would have hoped, but this is one of the perks of homeschooling. If Lydia was in school, there's no way we would have been able to have this trip, and it was a unique chance for the girls to see so much family.

Now that the weather is getting nicer (and I have a fitbit and am trying to hit my daily goals!), we've been spending a lot of time outside lately. We even got a zoo pass in order to have more active fun outside.

Flamingos are their favorite

We've also been hiking a lot. It has been such beautiful weather, that most days we have tried to spend the day outside either hiking or playing in the backyard.

Standing in front of the grave of 2 of the signers of the Declaration of Independence at Guilford Courthouse Battlefield.

Playing on some rocks during a break from hiking next to the Yadkin River

School is going well and I'm feeling pretty optimistic about our choices right now. Minus some attitude problems, things couldn't be going better. I also did Lydia's legally required standardized test this week. I went into it with no pre-conception with how she would do. Standardized testing isn't super important to me at this age, and we use many non-standard scope and sequence curricula. But she did amazing! She was at grade level or higher in every subject! It was very validating, even if it wasn't important.

Making an AM radio with Daddy

Reading:
Lydia is doing well as she transitions to reading "real" books. I've decided to work harder on the Mensa reading list in hopes to get her that t-shirt in the next year or so. She read Ramona Quimby, Age 8, Frederick, Make Way for Ducklings, and a "free choice" book, which was Charlotte's Web. She's really into Charlotte's Web lately and has been making all sorts of little books based on it. She has also been enjoying reading on my old Kindle lately. If she keeps it up, I'll probably get her a Kindle of her own so she doesn't keep hogging "the family" one, or more accurately, Tyler's.

Eleanor is doing better and getting faster all the time. She has started checking out books like Clifford from the library and is able to read most of them. She even started the first Boxcar Children book on the Kindle. She's on lesson 156 in OPGTR

Adelaide is blowing me away with how well she is doing. She is done with the cvc section in OPGTR and is easily my best-prepared reading student yet. I often skip the word practice part of the lesson and go straight to the story part because she just doesn't need the extra instruction. She is picking it up so quickly. And because of her bubbly personality, teaching her is really a joy. "That's the end of my lesson? OK!" and off she goes. She is on lesson 41 in OPGTR

Math:
This month we discovered Prodigy Math. It is an online video game in the format of Final Fantasy that requires math problems to be solved in order to fight the monsters. My girls are loving it! They are using all their daily screen time playing it, even math-phobic Lydia. Gamification really motivates them, and it is great at working on sections the girls struggle with.

Lydia fininished 203 and is on 204 now (lesson 8). She's doing really well with math. In fact, her latest quiz was a 99%, her best ever quiz score. I was so proud of her.

Eleanor continues to do really well in math as well. So much so that I've decided to go ahead and get her Beast Academy, a 3rd grade math curricula that is reputed as being incredibly difficult but also very fun. It has always been my goal to get her to the Art of Problem Solving's curricula, of which Beast Academy is the youngest level available. It arrived today and even though she had already completed her math for the day, she still wanted to read the first section with me and do a practice page. I think she will be able to do it, but if not, we'll put it off for a little bit and try again later. In the meantime, she will continue on with Miquon and MEP. She is almost done with Miquon's 3rd book (78/103) and is about to start the 4th. She should also finish MEP1 soon (lesson 105/140). MEP is the most "normal" math she has, even though it isn't very traditional either. I often mark out sections and try to only have her do ones that help solidify her math thinking. They also have brain teasers that I try to have her do because it is good for her. We do use it behind where she is in her other math by about a 1/2 year to a year, so she usually flies through it, but it is good practice for her.
ETA 3/3/16: I've been thinking a lot about it, and have decided to skip the rest of MEP level 1 and move on to lesson 25 in MEP level 2. It was mostly going to be busy work for her. She was zooming through the pages (5 or 10 minutes to do an entire lesson). I want her to have a solid foundation, but not be bored and do busy work. After looking at it, lesson 25 is about when they start place value and pre-multiplication skills and I think she could benefit from more practice in that, although those skills are pretty decent already. Still, I think the different perspective and extra practice could help. I'm also going to be a bit more judicious with which parts of each lesson I give her. Doing 3 complete math programs at once is a bit much, so since I have to choose, I'm just going to go with the problem sets that I think will specifically benefit or challenge her from MEP. This will probably equal about half of each lesson rather than the whole thing.

Adelaide is still working on Miquon Orange. Since she's still only 3, I only "require" one page a day, if we feel like it. She really enjoys it and is doing a good job. She likes to make up little math problems for me all day or tell me little math problems she's figured out. Lately she has taken to counting to 100 for fun while she looks at our hundred chart. She has completed 30/126 in the Orange book.

Language Arts:
Lydia finished AAS2 and is in the first lesson in AAS3. She chose Adele's "Hello" as her dance party song when she finished. She also started FLL3 and is on lesson 16. It has started her diagramming sentences and even I'm learning some things about adjectives. My grammar instruction was not the best, so I'm looking forward to learning with her. She is doing a fairly good job in WWE2 as well. She is on week 9, day 2.

Eleanor just finished lesson 18 in AAS1 and is on week 8, day 3 in WWE1

Piano
Both of the older girls are enjoying Hoffman Academy and I'm fairly committed to stay with it for the long haul (next several years). We supported their Kickstarter last month and are excited about the expansion they are doing. Taking piano lessons from Mr. Hoffman is like taking piano lessons from Mr. Rogers, and the girls really respond to him. They are almost done with Unit 1 and we should be picking up our pace soon. I want to do at least 2 video lessons a week regularly.

September Report

We had a super busy September. 2 oceans, 2 birthdays, several doctor appointments, 2 weeks of school. The girls and I spent a week in Myrtle Beach with Grandma, Grandpa, 3 aunts, and all their cousins on my side of the family. They enjoyed swimming at the resort, playing on the beach, playing with family, and going on the Skywheel (Ferris wheel).

It was a great time to be there. The weather wasn't too hot, the beach wasn't crowded, and we had most of the pools to ourselves. It was quite leisurely and nice.

Adelaide and Eleanor playing with cousin Sam

On the Ferris Wheel with Aunt Hannah and cousin Sam

Lydia swimming in the "pirate ship" pool

Lydia reading to her sisters and cousin Belen

Adelaide being silly at the beach

Straight from Myrtle Beach, we flew to San Francisco to attend the wedding of Tyler's sister. Tyler was able to join us for the weekend, although the girls and I stayed a few extra days to visit with a friend who lives in Oakland and also tour around a bit. The girls looked adorable in their matching dresses and we were really happy to be there for Tyler's last sister to get married (the third one this year!). I didn't get any pictures though, and the official ones aren't out there for me to take yet.

Later that week the girls and I went on a hike in Muir Woods National Monument and saw the redwoods. It was a really great day. Besides an unfortunate incident where we were a mile away from a bathroom when the need was there (we made it!), the girls worked really hard and completed the Junior Ranger requirements to get their first ever Junior Ranger badges. The program was perfect for them and they paid a lot more attention to details about our unique surroundings than they would have otherwise. We will definitely be doing more in the future.

Starting out on our hike

Working on our scavenger hunt for the Junior Ranger program

Lydia looking up at the tall redwood

They got their Junior Ranger badges, made out of redwood!

By the end of our almost two weeks away (with only 2 of those days with Daddy, so Mommy was on her own), we were ready to be back. Luckily, the girls are champs when it comes to travelling and aren't too tricky to take on my own. Regardless, we are always glad to be home.

2 of the 3 asleep on the plane home.

Other fun things we did in September included taking advantage of our various museum memberships. The day we went to the children's museum, they had this funny tent set up outside full of things to help kids learn early learning skills or something, I'm not sure. However, they did let them dress up in a "profession" and take a picture against a green screen. Eleanor was the only one who wanted to do this, and I thought it turned out really cute.

Daddy also took the girls a Lowe's Build-and-grow workshop. Basically they have little wooden kits for the kids to do for free. They love these and this was the second one they did, but the first one in a while.

Their finished firetrucks.

We finished reading the Book of Mormon as a family, for what I think was the third time. Last time we started the tradition of going out for ice cream to celebrate, so of course we had to go out again!

So yeah, a busy and fun but not super scholastic month. Speaking of academics, here's what we accomplished when we were home.

Reading:
Lydia read a few chapter books and some books to go along with our history. Book-it starts up again in, so we'll be working on that for the next few months.

Eleanor continues to do well with OPGTR. She's in lesson 101 and is getting more and more comfortable with it all while slowly picking up speed.  A lesson nowadays takes us 10-15 minutes for the whole thing. Here pretty soon, I might start her on some early readers like Little Bear.


Math:
Lydia just started the last light-unit (workbook) for the first grade level of CLE. We already have level two sitting here and she is very excited to start. I am too. The flashcards are getting to be a bit cumbersome to do on a daily basis and the 2nd grade math totally re-arranges them and it looks like there will be fewer to review every day. She should finish by the end of this month or the beginning of next month.

Eleanor has finished 93/120 pages of Miquon Red and is doing a great job. She should also finish it by the end of this month or beginning of next month. It still continues to be her favorite math, but that may be because she gets to pick a page every day. She likes the control over what she's going to do. In MEP math, she's on lesson 54. I'm amazed at some of the problems she's able to do, and what they are asking in a first grade math program. A few days ago, for example, she had to find all the answers 0 to 8 given problems like this: x+2>8-1. And she could do it! I'm finding that I am really loving MEP, which is funny because I totally planned on going a different direction before Eleanor came along. But it really is a great program that she is thriving with.

Adelaide officially started Miquon Orange a few days ago. She learned the c-rods in record time although I have to be careful with her because she doesn't seem to have the attention span of her older sisters at that age. Right now I make math completely optional, just asking her if she wants to come do math with me. She seems to like it so far, although she turns me down as often as not.

Language Arts:
Lydia is on step 15 in AAS 2 and continues to do fairly well.  In writing, she is on Week 35, Day 1, so she will likely finish the first level of WWE in the next 2 weeks or so. We'll start up on level 2 when that happens. In grammar, she is on 154 of 200. We do just the grammar exercises in the book and skip the copywork and poetry, so it goes pretty quickly. She continues to love grammar.

Eleanor is still working through her HWT Kindergarten book and learn her lowercase letters. She loves to do two pages and then color the illustrations on the pages. She is on Step 11 in AAS 1, but I think she will soon start slowing down. So far the words have been almost completely cvc words with almost no dictation or even that many extra words. And I let her do the majority of it on the iPad since writing is still tricky for her. As we move towards her writing more and more difficult content, I imagine she will slow down considerably.

History:
We are on chapter 12 of Story of the World. This month we read about ancient India, China, and Africa (non-Egypt). Obviously we didn't go into detail, but the girls really enjoy it so far and I absolutely consider this an introduction to all of these things. They love drawing or doing a coloring sheet while I read, and then I have them tell me what they learned. I also started keeping a notebook for Lydia of her narrations for each day we do history and then she draws a (usually) relevant picture to go with it.

Piano:
We started piano for Lydia and Eleanor. I plan on keeping them at the same place for a while, although I'm open to speeding one up if needed. We are using Hoffman Academy which has free videos of lessons we watch on the iPad while sitting at the piano and I also bought the materials to go with it. The girls are LOVING it. They think Mr. Hoffman is funny and he is going slowly enough for them to not get overwhelmed. Although I play the piano, I don't feel comfortable enough to teach them beyond the first year or two, and even that I wanted to be solid with plenty of theory, which I am horrible at. Doing it this way looks like the perfect combination because I watch the lesson with the girls (individually), and make sure they are following and learning what they should, but the content of the lesson is up to Mr. Hoffman. So I'm more a piano tutor than anything. I'm also trying really hard to not get annoyed at hearing Hot Cross Buns played over, and over, and over again. I'm choosing to believe that it is joy to my ears to hear them play. His lessons should take about a year or two to get through, at which point I will probably have to find the girls a teacher. We'll cross that bridge when we get there, though.