And just like that, month 2 of this school year is complete! It is awesome that we have 6 weeks of school under our belts thanks to year-round schooling!

Language Arts

We’ve completed 20 All About Reading Level 1 lessons which means Little Bug has just about read all the stories in the first reader! Her favorite story to read is “Fox in a Box”. She is learning about Consonant Teams now and has learned th, sh and ch. I am pleased with the progress Little Bug is making with this program. Little Bug continues to work through A Reason for Handwriting K. She’s on Lesson 16 and is working on lowercase letters. She is just about finished with the Explode the Code primer set that she began this summer! Once she completes this, she will begin Book 1.

Sweet Pea is 9 lessons in to All About Reading Pre-Level. She loves Ziggy and carries him around the house with her. We are working through the capital letters. Sweet Pea’s fine motor skills are improving as she works on writing her letters with The Measured Mom’s preschool handwriting pages. Sweet Pea has done a few of The Measured Mom’s Find the Letter Worksheets. The last week of August we did lessons from Ready-Made Preschool Level 1 and read the book The Season’s of Arnolds Apple Tree.

Math

At the end of July I wrote about classically teaching math. I had noticed that Little Bug wasn’t learning her basic facts with our current math curriculum (Horizons Math) and so I began exploring ways to get her to memorize her basic math facts. In my research, I discovered Saxon Math 1 provides much practice for learning and memorizing basic math facts. On a used curriculum sight I found the teacher’s book and the 2 student workbooks for $30 and I decided to go for it. We began Saxon Math 1 with the lessons that teach the doubles facts (1+1=2, 2+2=4, etc.). First we learned the doubles facts 0-5 and then we worked on doubles 6-9. Saxon has students memorizing these facts by varied repetitious activities (linking cubes, writing the facts on the board, flashcards, Fact Sheets). So far, this has been the perfect supplement for Little Bug. My plan is to go through the basic facts math lessons (with a few other math concepts/lessons thrown in for fun) and then we will go back to Horizon’s Math K. We are also playing games and doing math activities to help with basic fact memorization. Pictured below (bottom center) is an Addition Game with dice from The Measured Mom.

Sweet Pea’s math is all games and fun activities! On the left, she is making Towers of 10. On the right is a Counting Game. The Measured Mom (can you tell I LOVE her site?!) did a series recently of Print and Play games (literacy and math). If you want some fun games for your child to practice literacy and math skills, go check that link out. I have printed just about all the math games for my girls to play!

Sonlight

For me, Classical Conversations has trumped Sonlight. I don’t necessarily have anything against Sonlight, however, over the past month and a half that we have incorporated Sonlight into our homeschool, it has become clear to me Sonlight’s place in our homeschool. I don’t see myself purchasing the next Core after Sonlight P4/5. For our family, the cost just doesn’t make sense because we are doing CC. Sonlight has some very rich literature and I will use their lists of books to choose books I want to read to my children instead of purchasing a complete Core! I bought Sonlight P4/5 on a used curriculum site and I am glad I did not pay full-price for it.

We have completed 7 weeks of Sonlight P4/5. I am not using the Instructional Guide except to know what to read each week. There are activities you can do and if Sonlight was our only curriculum, I would probably do more, but my focus is on CC with my girls. We enjoy reading Sonlight books before nap/rest time and before bedtime. For our family and our homeschool, we don’t need to spend hundreds of dollars on bedtime books! However, if you are looking for a curriculum that is literature based, Sonlight would probably be a good fit for you. My girls enjoy the majority of the books we’ve read so far. Uncle Wiggly’s Story Book is their favorite, followed by The Berenstain Bears’ Big Book of Science and Nature and The Usborne Book of Things People Do. There are 5 other books read in the first 7 weeks that have been enjoyed as well.

We keep our Sonlight books on the book shelf my dad made for me for Christmas last year! It is in our living room so the books are accessible throughout the week.

Classical Conversations

Our first day of Classical Conversations was August 18th! We are loving it! Community Day is so fun. We begin by learning new Memory Work. I video all the songs and hand motions and then Dave puts all the videos together in a playlist. Every day for Memory Work review, the girls watch the playlist several times! It is a fun way for them to review their Memory Work and it is an easy way for me to ensure it gets done daily! After watching it several times I have them get up and do the hand motions. Sometimes they are doing the hand motions as they watch. We review the Geography Memory work on the map. I play the Timeline Song during breakfast every morning. Little Bug heard the name of something one day (I’ve forgotten what it was) and recognized whatever it was from the Timeline Song! She started singing the Timeline song from where that was mentioned. CC works!

I am keeping a very “stick in the sand” mentality for our first year of CC. If we stick with CC (which I could very well see us continuing on with CC through highschool, even though I take our homeschool one year at a time!), Sweet Pea will get 8 years of Foundations and Little Bug will get 6 years, which means both girls will go through each cycle multiple times. They have time to master the Memory Work; it doesn’t all have to be done this year! This year, we are getting our feet wet with CC, reviewing the Memory Work mostly by watching the videos I take on Community day and if a particular topic becomes of interest to the girls, we will read books about it to dig deeper and learn more. The purpose of Foundations is to hang pegs of information in their minds that we can later hang more information on as they grow and mature. I can already see this process starting after just two weeks of CC. It is fascinating.

Other Highlights!

The month of August brought my baby cousin (I was 12 when she was born) and her fiancé to town! I had not seen her in 3 years. They were in our state for a wedding and stopped by our house for several days before driving back home. It was so good to see them! We celebrated 2 birthdays this month! Sarge turned 1 and Sweet Pea turned 4! The first week of August was spent in the mountains at the family cabin.

Fall is around the corner although our weather would suggest otherwise!

- Elaine