Learning to Read 3 month update

We finished lesson 17 of Christian Light Education’s Learning to Read today. We’re taking it pretty slow since she isn’t 5 yet. Still, she’s made wonderful progress and is reading already! Simple short words like pat, cap, and pot. They have some more advanced “sight words” like brown, some, and many but we haven’t been [...]

Sticker chart

A couple of weeks ago, someone left a soccer table (fooseball?) at the freecycle area. Wow! It was in good condition, so I brought it home. Richard had been having trouble getting his schoolwork done in a reasonable amount of time without tons of frustration and pestering by me and my husband. He’s also been [...]

Our weekly schedule

I have finally settled into a weekly school schedule. We do 3 subjects everyday: language arts, reading and handwriting. The others we do 1 or 2 days each week. That way we can cover them in more detail at once without making our days too long, usually about 3-4 hours not including breaks. So [...]

Fun with science: inclined planes

Since today was another gorgeous Indian Summer day, we did our Fun With Science day outside. The topic was inclined planes, aka ramps and slides. After reading the sections of his book introducing simple machines and inclined planes, my son did the top part of a worksheet I made up. Then I took him and [...]

09-10 homeschool 2 month update

Where did the last 2 months go? It seems time just flew by. We got off to a bit of a rough start as the kids settled into school. Recently, they were sick then I went away for a 3 day weekend, so we’re a few days “behind”. I try to do school 5 days/week, [...]

Fun with science: gears, wheels, axles

The science order from Rainbow Resource arrived today. Yeah! It looks just perfect for us this year. We’ll be studying matter & physics for science and the human body for health.
Rather than just reading the books and taking tests or doing worksheets, we will be making practical applications whenever possible. So today we started playing [...]

Math is here

Richard’s math arrived today. Good timing because we do math on Tuesday’s and Thursdays so we can start tomorrow. He actually watched the first lesson video tonight and seemed to understand it.
He’s doing Math-U-See Gama which covers multiplication. He’s had a vague idea of what multiplication was, but this first lesson explained it well. The [...]

2009 homeschool week 1

Today ends our first week of 2009-2010 homeschool year. It had its ups and downs as expected.
Karen did the first 6 lessons of Learning to Read. She learned letters d, s, m, f, and short a. It was hard for her to learn to listen for sounds in words but by the end of the [...]

Fitness update 2009 #14

This week was awful. We ate out a lot. I was rushed everywhere and didn’t take time for myself. It was extremely smoky outside from the more than half million acre forest fire burning less than 30 miles away.
We’re starting homeschool Monday. This means I need to set aside a specific time again to exercise [...]

Learning to Read, lesson 1

Today Karen started Learning to Read from Christian Light Education. Lesson 1 was /d/. They have a rhyme and story that go along with the letter. D is about a duck. They call her Debbie Duck but I renamed it DeeDee Duck to reinforce the D. Karen had a bit of trouble. She’s not used [...]