February was a month we kept plugging along in our new routine of Little Bug going to school three days a week, trying to stay warm (it has been unusually cold and I am so ready for WARM weather), and shelving some of our curriculum until school next year.

I was still doing All About Reading Level 1 with Little Bug (about 1 lesson every 1-2 weeks), but I decided that I was tired of AAR being done in such a choppy way. We started it in July, stopped in August due to Sarge’s birth, started up again in October (but barely), really picked it back up in December once life had settled down, stopped while we adjusted to Little Bug’s new school and then by the end of January I had added it back in to the weekly lesson plans on top of the Bob Jones phonics she does with her school. Choppy instruction. That drives me crazy so we are shelving AAR until the new school year!! AAR is such a GOOD, SOLID curriculum and I wanted to be able to focus on it by itself without also having to do the Bob Jones phonics (which we both don’t really like – it is very traditional school – boring, with lots of worksheets).

This school year has been absolutely crazy!!!

Little Bug was beginning to show some signs of disliking school. That is NOT cool. I had to do something quick to turn that around. I knew what the frustration was. Her phonics instruction has been so choppy and while she does the phonics worksheets with no problems, she hasn’t really taken off in learning to read. It is still a lot of work for her and she has to sound out almost every word. In my opinion, the readers that she is sent home with and expected to read, are a little too difficult for her reading level and they frustrate her. So I stopped making a big deal over her reading them. She will read when she is ready. I am confident of that.

After I relaxed on her reading assignments from school, I walked into the living room one evening and found Little Bug reading (and reading pretty fluently at that!!) the first set of Bob Books to her Gramps. She had a stack of about 2-3 books she had already read to him and she was still reading!! I sat down to listen and was amazed at the girl!! Like I said….she will read when she is ready. She just might be getting ready to turn into a little reader! Tonight, as I was reading to the girls before bed she stopped me and asked if she could try to read the book. She read a sentence pretty well and then I took back over.

I do NOT want her to turn into a reluctant reader/learner. She has always LOVED learning. She loves going to her school and the teacher is wonderful about making school hands-on. This phonics curriculum is just not the best fit for Little Bug which is one of the reasons why I wanted to homeschool in the first place! I knew traditional schooling would not go well with Little Bug! While it is not going badly by any means, there is better out there for Little Bug. That would be All About Reading, which is a curriculum that would be very hard to implement in a classroom setting with 15 students!

So, we’ve shelved AAR Level 1 until next school year and in the meantime I have printed fun, hands-on activities for Little Bug to do each week with the first set of Bob Books! She did her first activity Friday and loved it! There were small strips of paper with words from the 2nd book hidden in the bean sensory bin and Little Bug had to dig through and find each word. Then she had to mark the word on the paper. She loved this and it had her reading the words multiple times as each word was in there twice. Right now, my plan is to work through the first set of the Bob Books beginning now and through the summer. We will see if those plans actually pan out since NONE of my other homeschool plans this year have gone according to plan.

We are still plugging away at Horizons Math K. I love this math program. Perfect fit for Little Bug. We’ve been working on place value to the 10’s. She has had NO issues with the Bob Jones K5 math at school because even though we had only done a small fraction of the lessons in the Horizons Math before she started the school in January, the Horizons Math is so advanced she jumped right in with Bob Jones K5 Math mid-year and hasn’t missed a beat. Right now we are doing two Horizons Math lessons per week. At this rate, we will have completed just over half of the math lessons in this curriculum at the end of this school year. Oh well. She will end up doing Kindergarten math for a part of her 1st grade year, which is fine because Horizons is so advanced.

Little Bug’s writing has TAKEN OFF. Dave said the other day that Little Bug is either A) sleeping, B) eating or C) writing. It’s true. She writes (and eats!) ALL DAY LONG. It started with her writing little notes to her friend that lives across the street. She gave her friend a huge box full of notes she had written. Then one day she decided she wanted a notebook to write in and she asked me to take her to Target so we could buy one. I told her I had notebooks at the house she could pick from. She and Sweet Pea both picked a notebook and that morning the first hour of school time was spent writing in their notebooks! Little Bug is spelling phonetically but what she is writing is just precious.

Everything that Little Bug has written in her notebook has been 100% her doing. No prompting from me. Here are a few examples of her writing:

(Left) God is my shepherd. He guides me. (Right) Oh God, I know some people don’t believe in you, God.

(Left) My mom is the best mom in the house. (Right) Plankton is what big fish eat.

We made a Heart Garland for our fireplace mantel for Valentine’s Day!

Little Bug has showed much interest in sowing lately. Her Grams has helped her learn some basic sowing skills! When I was younger and my mom was homeschooling my brother and me, she bought a pattern to make a turkey (for Thanksgiving), a Christmas Tree and a snowman. We made the turkey and tree but never got around to making a snowman. Twenty years later, the snowman pattern was pulled out and my mom got to make it with her granddaughter Little Bug! Little Bug named the snowman Neve which means “snow” in Portuguese!

Little Bug has become quite the artist. She has art at school once a week and she loves it. She has brought home some beautiful artwork. This was her Valentine’s art. (I am going to write a separate post with pictures of her art.) This is another reason I am thrilled about Classical Conversations. There is a focus on the fine arts! I am glad she will be able to continue art instruction.

We’ve been learning about the weather and seasons in Science! We enjoyed reading many books about weather and seasons from our home library and the public library. Our main book for learning about weather and season was The Berenstain Bears’ Big Book of Science and Nature. This is such a fabulous book for learning about science in Kindergarten and preschool!

We did a few activities and experiments. The first was a Cloud Experiment. All you need is shaving cream, food coloring and a glass of water! I sprayed some shaving cream in the glass of water. The shaving cream was to be the “cloud”. Then the girls put drops of food coloring onto the shaving cream. When the drops got to heavy for the shaving cream to hold, it began to “rain”, just like rain falls from the clouds when the droplets of water get too heavy for the cloud to hold! The girls loved watching this.

One day I sprayed shaving cream on the table and let the girls have fun playing in the “clouds”! They had a ball with this and it got the table extra clean afterwards!

March, April, May and then this crazy 1st year of homeschooling will all be down in the books!!

- Elaine