Language Arts

Little Bug’s reading skills have exploded! She can pretty much pick up any children’s picture book and read it! We are still going to work through All About Reading Level 2 but she is zooming through the lessons! The fluency pages used to take us up to a whole WEEK to get through them, but she can now read them all in one day. She flies through them. There is absolutely NO HARM in WAITING for a child to be developmentally ready to read to start teaching them phonics. For Little Bug, it happened around 6.5 years old. At almost 7 years old, she is becoming quite the fluent little reader. She spends some of her afternoon rest time/room time reading and then she has half an hour before her bedtime to read. I’ve even caught her throughout the day reading a book to herself!

Sweet Pea has started the last part of All About Reading Pre-Level! We are working though the letter sounds and she is really enjoying that. I am supplementing with Hooked on Phonics Learn to Read Prek Level 1 workbook. She is loving this book. There is a page for every letter where she matches the pictures to the letter sound. There is another page for her to practice writing the capital and lowercase letter. I found the workbook at a consignment shop for a couple dollars. It was a good buy and goes perfectly with AAR Pre-Level letter sound lessons. We are also reading My First Steps to Reading alphabet books which focuses on the sounds the letters make throughout the books. I read other books to Sweet Pea during her school time and we just finished (for the second time this year!) The Berenstain Bear’s Big Book of Science and Nature. My girls adore this book and it so great for early elementary science concepts. A lot of our science memory work from CC can be found in this book. Sweet Pea continues to work on writing her letters. I am looking forward to starting Handwriting Without Tears K with her this summer!

Math

At the end of April Little Bug was 15 math lessons away from completing Horizons Math K! We began this curriculum in July of 2014 so it has taken us nearly 2 years to complete it, which is totally okay. Going at this snail’s pace has been good for Little Bug. She has mastered these concepts solidly. I could have skipped that last part of Kindergarten curriculum but I wanted her to have a solid foundations before moving her forward. The extra practice has benefited her. As Classical Conversations has taught me, repetition of foundational concepts never hurts!

Sarge is usually on my hip or at the table playing with something (like our puzzle clock) while we are doing the day’s math lesson. Sometimes, I have to call it a morning for school if he isn’t cooperating at letting us do school (and then we will finish school once he is down for his afternoon nap) but most days we are able to get our math lesson done in the morning while Sarge (and Sweet Pea) are tagging along. This day, it was his first time seeing our clock and he was very intrigued by it.

Classical Conversations

We had our last Community Day on April 12th. Two days later, we went back for Little Bug to try and become a History Subject Master! Students have the opportunity to become Memory Masters, which is where they memorize every single piece of memory work for all subjects. It is quite the accomplishment. I asked Little Bug if she wanted to do this out of curiosity of what she would say. She told me maybe she would do that when she was a little bit older. When I found out that students can also be “Subject Masters” I asked Little Bug if she wanted to do that. She was very interested! She had learned the History sentences each week with hardly any effort at all. She would hear them on the CD a few times and basically have the sentence memorized, word-for-word. She decided to go for History Memory Master!

April 14th I think I was way more nervous than she was! Later, I talked to the woman who proofed her and she told me that Little Bug had gone in there and rattled off all 24 history sentences in about five minutes, flat making no mistakes whatsoever! I was so proud of her! At the end of the year program on April 21st, the Memory Masters and Subject Masters were recognized and given their awards.

We’ve started working on learning how to draw a free hand blob mapping. This little girl on YouTube is teaching us. This skill is too advanced for Sweet Pea, but she still participates in the lessons. My goal is for Little Bug to master this skill by the end of summer.

We have about 3 weeks left of this school year and then year three of homeschooling will be complete!

- Elaine