Language Arts

Little Bug completed All About Spelling Level 2 on April 20th! This program is a great fit for her. The lessons can be as long or as short as we need them to be for the day. She is learning rules to apply to any word she reads or spells. We will take a break from spelling until the new year, but will still review from Level 2 through the summer.

Little Bug finished Book 6 of the Explode the Code series! She only has two more books to go before completing the entire Explode the Code series. She will pick up with Book 7 in the new school year.

Sweet Pea has made big strides in learning to read this month! She has become motivated to learn to read and prefers to do her phonics lessons (100 Easy Lessons to Teach Your Child to Read) right before her bedtime. I would prefer to do them during morning school time, but it became apparent recently that bedtime is the best time for Sweet Pea to do phonics. Here is another example of the flexibility homeschooling affords us! She is also working through the first set of BOB books. She has read the first six of ten books!

Math

We have paused CLE math lessons so we can take some time to get these math facts memorized! If Little Bug could just get these facts mastered, carrying and borrowing would be much easier tasks for her. I bought an app (xtramath) that she started today. I am hopeful this app is going to make this fun and exciting for her because that is the problem. Little Bug’s interests do not lie in numbers and math concepts!

Sweet Pea is making much progress in her math skills as well using Math Lessons for a Living Education! She’s over half-way finished with this book.

Science

We continue to learn about the human body once or twice per week! The Magic School Bus experiments have been so educational and fun for us to do together. Here we made a stethoscope! I had my doubts that this was going to work, but it did! We could hear our heartbeats!

One day Daddy came home early from work and little did he know what he was walking in to! We were in the middle of science and volunteered him to help with our experiment on lung capacity! Daddy’s lung capacity was so great, he blew the water right out of the bucket! That was a fun one!

When we studied digestion, we demonstrated “digestion in a bag”. Little Bug enjoyed this so much that she decided to do this experiment as her CC presentation that week!

Geography

We’ve completed our USA geography studies for this year and both girls can put this USA puzzle together with no guide!

Classical Conversations

Week 24 was April 18th and this means we have now completed all three Classical Conversations cycles! Next year will be our first repeat year.

I’m thankful that the girls get Fine Arts at CC!

We will stay at this Community next year. We’ve moved communities for one reason or another every year and this year we are staying put. It’s a sweet community and the girls have made some sweet friends. We also have some good friends moving to our community next year which I am very excited about.

Sarge & Beau

Sarge does his “Independent Work” just about every morning. This consists of him drawing on a piece of paper or writing on a dry erase board. He feels included and then he is ready to go read books with Mama and then have his Room Time.

Sarge has been joining us for Science too. He gets so excited and says “Science!!!!” when it is time! I love the one-room-schoolhouse our homeschool is!

Beau loves his Room Time. I am so thankful the boys enjoy that time because it is necessary at their ages to have some time to work with the girls on school work without having to manage the little boys!

Beau has had a hard time going in to the church nursery (ie. being separated from me while being with strangers). We tried the nursery back in October and it did not go well, so we gave Beau more time. Six months later, his confidence and security had grown and I was hopeful he would do well in the nursery. He went back on April 22nd for the first time and did well. He stayed the two hours and even did fine when the workers changed between the hours!

Selling & Buying Houses

This month, we decided we are going to sell our beloved house and move. We moved here five years ago when we were only a family of four. Our family has doubled and our needs have changed so we want to find a house that will better suit the needs of our family and the special needs of our children. The number one thing these kids need (beside Jesus and love, of course) is ROOM TO ROAM OUTSIDE, and this house, unfortunately, does not have that.

Before we can seriously start looking for a new home, we must sell our first home that Dave and I build together back in 2006-2007! Dave lived there until I moved in too after our wedding. We lived there for six years and brought both girls home to that house before we moved in 2013.

My infertility days were spent in this house and I would often sit in the backyard and wonder if I would ever have children playing back there. We are doing work to get the house ready to sell and brought all four kids to the house to take some pictures in front of the house. Then I snapped this picture of them all running in the backyard together!

There is a little more than 2 weeks left of this school year before we go into our summer break during June! I will post our Summer Plans soon as well as a reflection on the 2017-2018 school year! In the meantime, we will be very busy will the sell of our first home and looking for a new home and then hopefully moving at some point next school year.

- Elaine