Adelia had her very first day of preschool last week. She has the cutest teacher (a lady in our ward whom I really admire), and a class full of 5 girls and 1 boy. I opted to put her in a neighborhood preschool this year, instead of helping to teach a co-op, because I didn't think I'd be able to give the co-op my best efforts with a new baby coming around Thanksgiving. Plus, a newborn during the winter and RSV season didn't seem like the ideal time to have a ton of little kids coming over to the house. At first I was really sad not to be doing co-op with Del. I kind of felt like I was letting her down in some way. But to listen to her excited chatter every time she comes home from preschool is enough to let me know that I did the right thing. Her teacher teaches the same way I would...lots of projects, lots of stories, lots of hands on, lots of doing. And Adelia is my social child. She is thriving with this new opportunity. And so I'm finding my peace with it too.
Lincoln started up again at Harmony. This year he is in the MAP (multi-age program) and goes on Mondays and Wednesdays. It was pouring rain on his first day, so I didn't get a good picture of him. He's happy to be back. And he also has a really great teacher. She encouraged him to bring a couple of his robots and his poster that he made and share them with his class. It must have gone well, because now he wants to take something new he's working on every time he goes. One time he even took a book he was reading, and shared with the class what it was about and why he liked it. :) It's hard for me to have him gone two days a week, but he enjoys it. And it gives me an opportunity to have some really good one on one time with Ivan.
My goal this year is to get Ivan reading independently. We're using a program called All About Reading (which is made by the same company who does All About Spelling), and I really, really like it. It takes a little longer than the Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons, that I used with Lincoln, but I also feel like it develops decoding and phonics skills much better. It also switches up activities more often to keep the kids interested. Some of the time you work with magnetic letter tiles, some of the time you do flash cards, some of the time you play games, and some of the time you are reading from the readers. It's working really well for Ivan. He's funny, because he always wants to choose a really strange position to sit in to do his review flashcards. Here he is sitting in a box:
For Math, I have both Lincoln and Ivan working out of the Singapore curriculum at their appropriate level. Right now my boys are moving quickly through math, and Singapore also moves quickly, so they are staying challenged without getting bored. We'll adjust as needed when concepts get more difficult.
Lincoln also got a free subscription to Dreambox Math, which is an online program where the kids get on and play math games. I've been using "Dreambox Time" as a motivator to get the kids to finish their school work. Once they've done everything on their list for the day, the earn Dreambox time. So far it's working pretty well, and since they are still doing math it's not a complete waste of time.
I'm trying something new this year for writing, it's the Institute for Excellence in Writing's Primary Arts of Language: Writing. I like it so far because I can teach all three of my older kids, at their own level, at the same time. This program recommends using All About Spelling in conjunction with it, which I am doing with Lincoln. It also has a basic handwriting instruction, which I'm doing with Ivan for a review, and with Adelia to introduce her to writing letters. I'm also still using Handwriting Without Tears with all three kids, as an intro for Del, a review for Ivan, and cursive for Lincoln because he begged and begged for me to teach him cursive this year. (I think he sees a lot of cursive in books, and wants to be able to read it, I think that's his motivation.) Along with HWOT, Ivan and Lincoln are also doing Keyboarding Without Tears, which is a 1-year subscription to an online typing program. So far the typing is going really well, it's something the kids look forward to each day, and it's something they can do independently while I help the other practice the piano. :)
I don't currently have a specific reading program for Lincoln right now. But I do have him read a chapter or two, from a book of my choice, out loud to me each day. And he is assigned to read two non-fiction books every day and write down one thing he learned from each in his journal, and to read silently for 35 minutes from a book of his choice every day. When he finishes a book, he does a book report. I'm really trying to focus on summarizing with him right now. He really struggles with it, actually. He has such a good brain for memorization, that when you ask him to repeat what happened in a story, he usually chooses to tell the story back to you word for word. Now that he's reading a lot longer of books, this is getting harder for him to do. And I've been noticing that if he can't repeat the entire book back verbatim, then he gets frustrated, and can't tell you very much about the story in a concise way. So that's what I'm really focusing on with him these days. the IEW program is helping a lot with that. It has a story summary chart that gives you questions to ask that break the story down into it's parts, and once you do that, then it encourages you to come up with a main theme or lesson learned from the story, and state it in a single sentence. I'm surprised how hard this is for Lincoln, and how easy, and second nature it is to Ivan. Linc is making good progress though, and I think it's really good for him to see that he isn't better than Ivan at everything. :)
Even though Lincoln is my stronger reader, Ivan is showing the signs of being the better writer. He seems to just naturally understand the way a story works. And I'm excited to see this talent of his developing more and more. He's always liked rhyming words, and he caught on to those long before Lincoln did too. And now he's really interested in descriptive words, he's always trying out a new adjective just for the fun of it. And when we listen to stories or even songs or movies that have a lot of word play, he just laughs and laughs.
We had a pretty cool "homeschool moment" the other day. We were writing stories to go along with a painting the kids did for an art project. Anyways, Lincoln got really frustrated and said to me, "I am a robot builder and an inventor. I'm not a writer or an author. I like science, not writing. I don't even know how a story is supposed to start!" And all the sudden, I had an ah-ha moment. And I said, "That's a really good question, how so stories start?" I got out a white board marker, and asked them again, How do your favorite stories start? Ivan immediately gave me several options, "Once upon a time..." "It was a dark and stormy night..." "My name is..." I wrote them down, then I told the boys to go and find some of their favorite books, and that we would write down how each one of them started to get ideas for how to start our own stories. So we made a list, and by the time we were done with that, Lincoln was really excited to start his story, and no longer frustrated. Homeschool win of the day!
Speaking of art, I am having the kids to At Home Art Studio again this year, because it was so awesome last year. Our first project was a Party Pig. And after we painted it, I thought it would be a good idea to have the kids write stories about their pigs. Here is Lincoln's painting and the story he wrote to go with it. I still need to take pictures of Ivan's.
So there's a peek or two into what our back to school has been like for the last two weeks. I'm excited about our year, and the things we have planned.
