We are on the downward slope of this school year! Every year zooms by faster than the one before.

Bible

We’ve been reading God’s Promise by Sally Michael. We read another book from this series last year and really enjoyed it. This series has been a perfect fit for the girls! We’ve had some deep discussions. We always begin our school morning with time spent reading the Bible. It is something I always want to do with my children before beginning our school time. I pray my faithfulness in having this time each morning with my children will yield much fruit in the future in their lives and personal walks with the Lord.

Language Arts

Little Bug has been working through A Reason for Handwriting A. She’s finished the first half and is starting the second half. She only has three more lessons in her Explode the Code Book 6. She will finish that next month and then have a break from ETC until we start the new school year in July.

I am thankful I never have to tell Little Bug to read. She naturally reads all throughout the day, from the first moments when she wakes up until the moments right before she goes to bed! I just have to keep her well stocked in good literature to read. We’ve been taking weekly trips to the library after CC to get anywhere from 5-10 chapter books for her to read.

We continue to work on the memorization of the English Grammar memory work from Cycle 3, as well as reviewing the memory work she has memorized from Cycles 1 and 2.

Sweet Pea has one more week before she completes CLE Kindergarten II! That program has been the best fit for her during this year of giving her more time to mature and grow. That program is gentle yet diligent to teach foundational language and math skills to young children. I will keep this program in mind for the boys when the time is right!

Sweet Pea has shown some interest in Bob books this month. Whenever she wants to read a Bob book, I let her!

Throughout my years of homeschooling, I’ve heard many homeschool moms rave about Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons. I knew this method would not work for teaching Little Bug to read, so I didn’t even try it with her. After hearing someone talking about it, I wondering if it would be a good fit for encouraging Sweet Pea to learn to read. When I looked it up on Amazon and it was $13, I knew it was worth a try! We did the first of 100 lessons on March 10th! The lessons take 15-20 minutes and we’ve been doing them after her bath and before she goes to bed! It’s become our special time which was also needed. I will continue these lessons with her until we finish the 100th lesson or until I think she is ready to start AAR. Either way, I still plan to work through AAR Level 1 with her as that curriculum is a solid foundation to learning phonics and I would like for all of my children to work through it as they are learning to read.

Math

Little Bug finished LU 205 mid-March. There were a few concepts I didn’t feel she had a solid understanding on yet, so I decided to take the week after Spring Break and work through several concepts from 202-205 with her again to make sure she had mastered these concepts before moving her forward in this curriculum. Plus, I looked ahead to what was coming and when I saw multiplication and borrowing to subtract was introduced in the next LU, I knew we needed to get these other concepts down before moving forward.

We took this past week to work on place value and time and Grams sent me this text tonight of something Little Bug said: “Gramps, I just want to thank you for helping me with my math. You and Mommy have helped me a lot!” Gramps worked with her some as well. Today after we finished math, she was encouraged as she had completed some problems that had been very hard to her before we worked hard this past week! This is a huge benefit of homeschooling. I am afforded the time to be able to meet her every academic need. I can move forward when she is ready and I can slow down and camp out on a concept if needed, until it is mastered. It’s a beautiful thing to be able to help my child in this way instead of having to send them to an institution where there teacher simply can’t meet the needs of every single student who walks through their doors because there isn’t enough hours in the day for that! It is a true blessing to be able to homeschool.

Sweet Pea had fun playing with the base ten blocks as well that week as we were working more on number sense and place value. Her skills have increased well with Math Lessons for a Living Education and CLE Kindergarten II. Her understanding of numbers has grown this year!

Independent Work

The girls finish breakfast and immediately start on Independent Work. Sarge announced one morning that he wanted to do “independent” so he now goes to the dinning room and draws on a small white board or coloring book (and wanders into Little Bug’s room and crawls under and over the table…) for his independent work! He is quite the little distraction, but he doesn’t stay long and he moves into the living room for his reading time with Mama.

I made those check-lists for the girls so they would know exactly what they needed to do for independent work and what they could expect to do with me on a daily basis. They don’t really check things off (Sweet Pea does sometimes) but they pretty much now know exactly what they need to do, so I guess they worked.

Science

We continue to study the human body and review the human body memory work from the first semester! We are enjoying the experiments from the Magic School Bus kit I bought from Amazon for about $15!

We talked about our five senses and then the kids painted something they could see. This was a great lesson to include the boys on! Beau had a crayon, but the other three had water color paint.

We made a model of the human brain with play-doh!

We learned about the skeletal and muscular systems!

Geography

The girls have done very well with tracing the USA map this year! They have learned to take their time and go slow and steady. I see the benefit of learning this skill and hope to making map tracing a consistent part of our homeschool at some point. For now, we do it when we can, and I’ve seen positive results even in doing this randomly and infrequently!

We like using our placemats to learn USA geographical features (such as river, trails, canals).

Classical Conversations

We have just three more weeks before we finish Cycle 3! It is crazy to think that we have now gone through all three cycles and next year will be our first repeat year. It will be interesting to see how much of the memory work the girls remember from three years ago.

On Week 20, I had to take the boys with us to CC due to Gramps being sick and Grams needing to stay home to take care of him. It was an adventure and overall, it went well. However, I would not want to have to do that every week and I am so thankful - thanks to Grams! - that I do not have to do that every week. The boys stayed in the class for the new Grammar and presentations (Sarge was Little Bug’s presentation and Beau was Sweet Pea’s!) and then Unk came to take them on a walk around 10:30 which was perfect timing. They were gone for about 45 minutes and then when they got back I walked with them in the hallways of the church while Unk went to class with the girls. We stayed for lunch and then left a little early to be able to get home and get the boys down for their nap. Sarge did well; he really enjoyed being there with his sisters. Beau was a typical toddler; into everything and he did not want to sit in his stroller at all!

We've started the orchestra part of fine arts!

Each week we've been listening to a different composer's music while doing a quiet activity with our hands.

Sarge & Beau

While the girls are working on independent work, I am in the living room reading to the boys. We first read the Bible and then the boys say their memory verse: 1 John 4:19 We love because He first loved us. At 9:30am the boys go to Room Time so that I can have some time to work with the girls!

Sarge got in to Nemours for speech!!! This was a huge answer to prayer as when he was dropped from speech at Brook’s, I was told I had to put him in a public school speech class. It was recommended that he attend all day, but that was never an option in our minds. I asked his ENT if he could be referred to Nemours and finally, on March 21st, Sarge had his first speech class! He was so excited as he loves going to speech!

Beau is leaving babyhood behind quickly at 20 months old and embracing all things toddler! He is a joy and saying more and more words every day!

Zoo!

We went to the Zoo on March 5th to see the dinosaur exhibit!

Spring Break

The week of March 19th, I did something I had not done yet in our homeschool! We had a “Spring Break”! We all needed a break. In the past, it was more of a hassle to get off our routine than to just keep plugging along and take a day or so off here and there as needed. This year, the girls are older and more able to entertain themselves, and the house was driving me crazy and I needed some time to go room by room and get rid of stuff as well as organize things. So that’s what we did: the girls had the morning to play while I worked on the house. The boys’ schedule remained the same as they thrive off their routine. By Friday, I had 15 bags full on the drive way for Vietnam Veterans! That felt sooooo good!

Now here we are staring at April! This year is winding down, but not before we finish a few things! We are on the countdown to the Homeschool Convention, which is a highlight of every year for me!

- Elaine