Thursday, January 31, 2013

Preschool Reading Work

E(3) loves matching pictures to letters!


I decided a couple of weeks ago to try to do one reading activity with E(3) per day (she spends the vast majority of her time playing pretend and looking at books).  E LOVES these reading activities, and after just a couple of days, she actually started reading!   It clicked for her suddenly, and she is SO excited and proud!


These initial consonant cards are one of her favorite works to choose from her shelf.  She has been choosing this work for a few months and always does well with it.  I love it because it has a self-checking feature, so she can do it completely idependently.


To do this work, she labels the picture and puts her finger in the hole of the correct initial consonant.  She then turns the card over to see if she is right.  Fun!


After E(3) figured out how to put the sounds together to read the words, I wrote several word family words with chalk in the driveway.  I "hopped" her from one letter to the next as she said each sound.  Then I plopped her down, and she shouted the word.  So much fun!


I then wrote a sentence and she stepped on each word as she read it.  She was a little distracted at this point and wasn't that into this activity, but this is definitely something we'll do again soon.  She LOVES reading the first 4 BOB books, so I plan to write sentences from these books for her to read.




It's really important to me that she spend most of her time playing pretend, playing outside, and listening to/looking at books.  We spend 15 minutes at the very most on reading activities a day, and we don't work on this everyday.  In contrast, she spent 6 hours outside yesterday playing pretend, climbing, running, walking, exploring, collecting treasures (rocks, fossils, pine straw, dried mud), and experiencing the world.

Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Pure Joy

One of the joys of homeschooling is having the freedom to spend the entire day outside on a beautiful day. This day made the challenging days so very worth it!





Monday, January 28, 2013

A Quick Peek Into Our New Schoolroom

We have had fun having school in our new school room!  It is still chaotic and disorganized, but it's usable.  Here are some pics from the last few weeks of school in the school room.

E(3) LOVES these animal word puzzles.


We all love the bells!

The sandpaper letters are popular with E(3).  Both girls were excited that their American Girl dolls joined us for school!  They have fun making Kit and Kaya ask questions about the lessons.

E(3) is making a house on the geoboard.

O(6) loves math!

Elliott is building shelves for our schoolroom at this very moment, so hopefully it will be organized soon!

Sunday, January 27, 2013

A Delicious and Healthy Dinner

Thanks to everyone for your wonderfully kind comments!  You've inspired me to keep this blog going for a while longer.  I've been searching through my pics for inspiration for a post, and since I don't like to show my girls' faces here, I'm having trouble finding any pics that I can use.  So, a food post will work for now :)

My mom recently brought us a bag of Israeli couscous (from Whole Foods), and it was a HUGE hit with the girls.  I cooked it with pesto sauce and added in fresh tomatoes and rotisserie chicken.  E(3) said "I LOVE "raylee" couscous!!!"

Along with the Israeli couscous and pesto, we had avocados, steamed baby carrots and green beans, and oranges.  Both girls ate all of their dinner!

Tuesday, January 22, 2013

To Quit or Not...

I just can't decide if I want to continue this blog or not.  A huge part of me wants to stop blogging here, but I think that I'll regret it eventually.  Hmmm.  Thinking and wondering if continuing is worth the effort.  The huge amount of spam comments are pushing me towards saying forget it, but Mr. Ed really wants me to keep it going :)  So, we'll see...