Weekly Report: Week 26

All three girls playing with their Duplos happily

 School as normal happened here this week.  We're chugging along nicely in all subjects.  I don't even think I'm going to do a subject-by-subject breakdown this week, because it was all pretty standard.  I did notice that Lydia is only 1 poem, 2 scriptures, and 1 fact away from being done with her memorization list, which is amazing to me.  I made that list at the beginning of the year as a sort of shooting for the stars kind of thing.  And since then, I've actually added to it!  Lydia (and even Eleanor) is amazing me with her capacity for memorization.  We are definitely going to finish all her memorization items by the end of July, which is our "official" end of our school year as my plan is to go year round.  I've been working on coming up with a memorization plan for next year, and I think it will be a good year.

Eleanor and Adelaide having fun outside on one of our nice days!

 The weather has been either really nice here or really rainy.  On the really nice days, we've been spending several hours a day outside.  This morning we spent 3 hours at a park and going on a "hike."  We'll need to do that more, because after about 15 minutes into it, Ellie and Lydia started asking me to carry them (I already had Adelaide strapped onto my back).  So we need to work up their stamina!  It was really nice to be out in the fresh air all morning, and we'll probably spend all afternoon outside too.  I better go look for the sunblock

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.

Weekly Report: Week 24

This week was Spring Break for Daddy, so we only did one day of school, but I didn't blog about last week, so this post will just combine them both.

This week, Grandma took the girls to Turpentine Creek, a big cat refuge about an hour from where we live.  Grandma was watching the girls while Tyler and I were in Houston so Tyler could take the Step II medical exam.  The girls had a lot of fun seeing all the animals and told me several of the ones they saw.  I don't have any pictures, although I'll have to see if Grandma took some and maybe I'll share them later.

This week included the first day of Spring!  The girls have been very interested in the seasons the last few months and we talk about the seasons every day as part of calendar time.  They knew Spring was coming up and were looking forward to it.  We decided that to celebrate Spring, we'd put a bird feeder up in our backyard.  The girls really enjoyed that, although we haven't seen any birds at it yet.

Math:
We started subtraction in Essential Math.  So far, so good.  Lately Lydia has wanted to color every page we do, so school has been lasting a lot longer, but it is fun and she enjoys it more.  She seems to be understanding the idea that "minus" means "take away," which is definitely an important concept to start with.

Reading:
We will finish up "sh" words tomorrow.  There were two "sh" lessons in OPGTR and a lot of sentences to get through, but she seems to have a pretty solid grasp on it.  We'll be starting "ch" this week.  Oh, and we've been doing almost all our work on the whiteboard the last while, instead of the iPad.  For some reason it is working better right now.   I'm all for whatever works, though.

Memorization:
Lydia is still working on "The Rainbow."  She is also learning even more geography.  The countries that she can identify on the map number in the 30s to 40s now.  She is almost to the point of being able to identify more than me, which is both sad for me and awesome for her.  It is amazing what a geography puzzle app will do.  I also bought her the Barefoot World Atlas App in an effort to help her learn more about the different countries than just their locations.  It is probably a little advanced for her, but she enjoys playing with it and it is a very well-done little app and I look forward to using it in the future.  Now if only I could find a good children's anatomy app...

Handwriting:
We're working through HWT every day we do school now.  So far, Lydia has learned E, L, and F.  We also practice the letters of her name every day in capital letters.  Eleanor has been doing handwriting most days with us, although instead of the HWT workbook or letters, she is doing pre-writing pages from ebooks I own that I print off for her.  Oh, and she plays with Lydia's HWT chalkboard a lot too.

Now that Eleanor wants to be included, school is lasting almost two hours between the two of them.  They have fun, but I'm starting to see what it will be like to juggle my teaching between my girls.  It is going to be an interesting challenge that will keep me on my toes, I have no doubt.

Weekly Report: Week 23

We have some pretty major changes coming up in our routine.  Lydia recently qualified for a program that will provide fairly intense therapy for her at home.  Between this new therapy, the ones she's already doing, and what the program will require me to do with her, she will be doing about 52 hours of therapy a week.  I'm not sure how this will affect her academic studies, although I'd like to keep them going if possible.  We were told that her program will start sometime in April, so we still have a few weeks before things go crazy.

As for this week, we did a solid three days of work.  She is coming along well in all her subjects.  Her new geography app is really teaching her a lot of countries.  Last I counted, she can identify at least 20 different countries on the map by name and is learning more every day.  It is really fun walking down the grocery store aisle and having your 4 year old point to Italy on the spaghetti sauce jar and tell you that Italy is in Europe.

Math:
We finished up addition in Essential Math!  We'll start subtraction this up coming week.

Reading:
We finished lesson 54 in OPGTR and started on "sh" words.  She seems to be catching on pretty quickly, so we'll probably move on some time this week.

Memorization:
Lydia finished Amos 3:7 and has started on "The Rainbow."

Handwriting:
We're moving along nicely, but lately Eleanor has felt the need to "do hanwhiting" and "math" too, so I think I might start printing off some simple worksheets for her to do so she feels like she's not left behind.

Weekly Report: Week 22

We took this week off because I was busy working on consignment sale stuff, but we had a busy week last week (that I forgot to report on).  We're still working on "ng" endings in reading and we've started back up with addition in math.

This week has been fun, though.  We've spent a quite a bit of time "unschooling" and I think the girls have learned a lot.

A while back (like 2 years ago), I bought a birdhouse kit in a dollar store.  I thought the girls might enjoy "decorating" it and putting it in the tree.  And boy, was I right.  I let them color all over it before I assembled it a few days ago and they've talked about it daily.  I sure hope a little bird makes it his home, because my girls would be so happy.

I also mentioned recently that I've been working with Lydia to teach her countries.  I had the idea to get her an app to help with this and it is working incredibly well!  The app I found is call Map Puzzles for Kids.  It is basically just several puzzles of different regions of the world.  In the few days we've had the app, Lydia has learned about 15 new countries (and their locations).  Her favorite is probably Italy, which she told me "looks like a foot.  It is walking."  Some of the countries she has learned are Japan, South Africa, Argentina, Greenland, Ireland, and United Kingdom.

We got another new app by Logic of English.  It is basically a phonograms app and I've decided to use it with Eleanor.  It teaches all the sounds of each letter instead of just one, like most children's phonics apps.  When playing it with Ellie, I discovered that she knows her letters much better than I thought she did.  She passed the first two levels of the game on her first try!  It is a very well-thought out program and I'm excited to use it more in the future.

I'm going to end with a silly conversation I had with Ellie today.  Eleanor and I were looking at old Ranger Rick magazines and talking about the animals in the pictures.  There was a picture of a bat, and I asked her what it was called.  She said it was an owl, so I corrected her.  Then she very matter-of-factly told me, "Not a bat.  It looks like an owl to me."  She wouldn't believe me even after we talked about it for quite a while and she got fairly indignant with me about it.  We started the whole conversation over again a few pages later with a rhino that she declared to be a dinosaur.  I guess she already thinks she knows better than her mama at the age of two years old.  She's a funny kid.

How I use The Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading

~Updated 7-19-14~
I'm updating this because I have one daughter almost completely done with OPGTR and my other daughter is starting it, so I have more experience now.  They have wildly different learning styles and I've streamlined my process a little.

I've been thinking about this post for a while.  I am loving OPGTR.  It is very thorough, no nonsense, and takes little baby steps.  Because it is a "guide" and not necessarily a "curriculum" for reading, I see parents on homeschooling forums get very frustrated with OPGTR because they think it must be done exactly from the book.  I wouldn't use it if this were true.  I feel like it gives the parents a scope and sequence and practice words and sentences and some ideas, but from there it is up to the parent to teach it.  In this post, I'm going to talk about how I've learned to teach it so far.

To begin with, I completely skip Lessons 1-26.  They teach the sounds of each letter.  When we start OPGTR, my girls did/will know all their letter sounds already.  The way I taught them was by using Leap Frog Letter Factory and various apps on our iPad, my favorite being Alpha Tots.  I also regularly sang the alphabet song to them and pointed out letters around us.  Just through life and playing educational games and watching educational shows, my older two both knew all their letters and sounds by 3.5 years old or so.

Alpha Tots letter "L"

From there, I've used a number of different methods to teach the content in the OPGTR book.  At first, when we were focusing on the concept of blending, I found letter magnets that I moved closer and closer to be very helpful.  This was mainly for words like "at" or "on."  In our house, once a child can blend, they are ready to learn to read.  This is a developmental milestone and in my opinion one that can't be rushed.  If a child can't blend, I wouldn't bother starting them on reading.  I did do some things to help my daughters learn to blend faster.  There are many early phonics iPad apps that they played or we did together, especially the Hooked on Phonics iPad app (but there are lots out there).  I also do a lot of phonics talking like, "What is the first letter in the word PIZZA?  p-p-p pizza."  I believe this type of learning is called phonetic awareness and it is just as important as knowing letter sounds for beginning reading.

Once my girls understood how blending worked, I started making readers out of the sentences in the book.  I made them up in Power Point, about a sentence or two per page and did a quick Google Images search for a relevant picture.  I then saved these as PDFs.  At first I made little books out these PDFs.

 

These worked ok and I will use them with my younger girls, but they took a lot of energy to make.  That, and Lydia responds much better to things on the computer. So I continued to make the PDFs, but instead of making books, I just imported them into the Notability app on our iPad.

This is how we do the majority of our reading work.  I always let Lydia pick the color for the highlighter, and I highlight each word as she comes to it.  Making these little PDFs are pretty quick and I usually do them 3 or 4 lessons at a time while watching tv in the evening.  An added bonus is that now that I have them all saved, I won't need to remake them for my younger girls!

Reading Bear

The next biggest way I teach is using Reading Bear.  This is a wonderful free resource that has interactive videos on how to read hundreds of words, and it has them divided by type of word.  We use this mainly for extra practice when we've come to a particularly difficult concept.  I also use it to review past concepts.  Lydia will spend up to 45 minutes reviewing words this way with full attention.  Eleanor's attention span is much less, but I still find it helpful.  I especially like it because it gives you the option to have them sound out the word or letting the child sound it out.  I do both fairly often.

All the different ways you can practice the words

Sometimes when we get to a difficult concept, I'll use the whiteboard, both with markers and with our magnet letters.

Practicing beginning blends.

Any doodle app on the iPad also works as a virtual white board.  When working on the "ng" digraph, for example, I used the free app Doodle Buddy as a virtual whiteboard for our words.

We still have a long ways to go in OPGTR, but it is working very well for us because it is so customizable.  Lydia has yet to ever practice reading directly out of the book, and I'm not sure if she ever will.

-------Updated 10/4/13------

Now that we are almost halfway through, Lydia is getting much faster and completing about a lesson a day. The lessons also have more reading than they did before, so while I am still using the iPad and typing up lessons for her, I type them in Word with no pictures and we read them in the Notability app.  Also, now that she doesn't sound out words out loud very much, I found that it is better to highlight a sentence at a time rather than a word at a time.  It also helps her from not being distracted as much.  Notability allows for zooming, so if we meet a troublesome word, I can focus in on it. I separate the lessons by this squiggly border and it helps her to know when she is done for the day.

-------Updated 11/1/13--------
Something that I don't consider necessary, but that has really helped Lydia is learning the phonograms.  Many reading programs use the phonograms to teach phonics, and while OPGTR isn't one of them, they have still been very helpful and I plan on having my other daughters learn them too.  If you aren't familiar with the phonograms, here's a website with some information.  Different sources differ on certain ones, but for the most part, they are fairly consistent.  Basically rather than just teaching that "a" says "ah," they teach that ''a" has lots of different sounds and the child lists them.  This type of reading/spelling method is used in All About Spelling, Writing Road to Reading, and the Logic of English, (among others) but I found it overwhelming at first because I wasn't taught that way and didn't want to memorize them all myself.

All of this to say, I found Logic of English's phonogram app for the iPad to be very helpful.  It is a simple app that basically just quizzes the child on phonogram sounds.  Because Lydia and Eleanor dabble in it occasionally, they have both had a much easier time now that we have gotten into the more complicated phonics of different vowel sounds and combinations than I think they might otherwise have had.

-------Updated 3/22/14--------
Somewhere around Lesson 150, we were able to start doing lessons directly out of the book without it being an issue at all.  Lydia was reading fast enough and her tracking was good enough that the words on the page weren't confusing.  This is really nice because it means literally no prep for me.

A basic knowledge of the phonograms have continued to be a big asset in her reading as well.  And with the app they've been fairly painless for my girls to learn.  Even my three year old knows that "a" says "ah, ay, aw" and that c says "k, s," after a very minimal amount of exposure.  As we go through it, I can see the OPGTR teaches all of these sounds, just as they come up rather than learning them up front.  I'm finding the memorized list to be a helpful reference point for Lydia when she gets stuck on a word, so I do recommend teaching them if you feel so inclined.

Weekly Report: Weeks 19-21

Well, I haven't been great about posting my Weekly Report the last few weeks.  Oh well.  They've been a good few weeks though.  Since it has been a while, I won't detail exactly what we've done.  I'll just go over a more broad idea.

Math:
I've decided to take a short break from our current curricula and just focus on concepts and practice that way.  I've been making especially good use of the wonderful Cuisenaire Rod videos on Education Unboxed.  After a day or two of working on the place value activity, Lydia is well on her way to having a simple understanding of place value!  I think we'll keep taking a break for another week or two, working on mostly addition-related concepts.

Reading:
Lydia continues to amaze me in her progress.  We've officially entered digraphs (Lesson 54 in OPGTR)!  Specifically Lydia is mastering "ng" endings, including "ing", "ong", etc.  I love hearing her read.

Memorization:
Lydia almost has Amos 3:7.  We've also started adding in countries to her mapwork.  So far, we've added China, USA, Canada, Brazil, India, Egypt, and France.  Eleanor, especially, has been enjoying this part.  Any time any of those countries get mentioned in her movies, Story of the World, or anywhere else, she gets excited.  China is a favorite of hers.  "Mulan in China like Story of the World," she tells me.

Handwriting:
Lydia's handwriting is coming along.  She still has a long way to go, but it is quickly becoming one of her favorite subjects.  Most days we will make letters with the shapes and then make those same letters on her chalk slate.  Then we'll do a page out of her workbook.  Right now we are focusing on the letters of her name, and "y" in particular is giving her trouble.  Yesterday she did it correctly all by herself the first time, though!



That's our last few weeks.  We're still trucking and are enjoying preschool quite a bit!