3rd 6 Weeks

It’s already time to update again . . . wow!

Core:
We fought through the sickness in the house and finished week 18 last week (well, before Monday morning). One of the benefits of homeschooling is that even though Hannah had a couple days off, she wasn’t “behind” when we got back to it. This puts us halfway through the P4/5 core. Hannah always really enjoys the science books, right now we are reading “What’s Under the Sea”. Hannah was thrilled to see a picture of “Nemo and his anemone” in the book when we read about coral reefs. Still continuing with the daily Mother Goose and weekly Uncle Wiggly stories. I think we will start a book called Milly-Molly-Mandy soon, which Hannah has already peeked at and is excited about. For social studies, we are starting a new book called “Stories from Africa”. I’ve only read one so far, but I really liked it. I think that this one is a Sonlight exclusive.

LAK:
Hannah has about 4 weeks left of LAK. We didn’t do all the activities and all the reading this first time through. She is starting to show a little more interest in reading and we’ve been averaging one book a week of the Fun Tales set from Sonlight, but I don’t think we will catch up before we are done. My original plan was for H was to go back through LAK and hit some of the activities we missed and complete the reading assignments. However, due to having the girls and summer looming over my head I have decided to attempt to do LA1 with all three of them instead.

LA1:
Hannah and our oldest will be ready to start LA1 at the end of May when school lets out. The middle one hasn’t had as much reading background, but knows all her letter sounds and is starting to blend. It may be a little bit difficult for her, but she catches on pretty quickly and I think we can make this work. If I need to back off on some of the reading, I can. I want them all to be doing the same thing to simplify MY life. Right now we have homework time before dinner, but everyone is doing different work and distracting each other and it drives me nuts. I can work other subjects with Hannah before the girls get home and we can focus on LA with all three of them for writing and grammar. I think my biggest problem is going to be the reading practice. They all are pretty smart, so if one of them hears the other one reading a story, they will try to memorize it and when it is their turn will try to recall instead of read. I’m going to either have to do a rotation each day or split them up to do it. . . haven’t decided how that will work yet. I’m also hoping there may be a little bit of competition in the writing assignments to make them nice and neat and do things correctly. This could backfire on me, but we’re gonna try.

Math:
We’ve stalled a little bit on math lately. H has been doing numbers up to 30 and +1s. So she does the number line up to 30 then a set of questions like 17 + 1 = up to 29 + 1 =. I’ve discovered that she knows the answers but she doesn’t feel as confident writing her numbers, and gets frustrated. So if I offer to write half of the answers for her, she will do the whole page without complaining.

Karate:
I tried the girls on a karate class that was a disaster. Mostly because the two fosters aren’t very good with following directions and listening. Hannah has also been frustrating because once it gets to something that she thinks is too hard, she just stops participating. So . . . we attended about half of the classes and won’t be going anymore. Maybe we’ll try a dance class over the summer. . .

From the teacher’s point of view:
I finally feel like I’m starting to figure out how to organize things and make sure I’m prepared with what I need when I need it. This is a picture of the school bookshelf. Sonlight sells ‘sticker labels’ for each core so they each have their own color. I think its a great idea, and helps my household recognize the school books so they get back on the shelf eventually. Its also helpful to keep the cores separated. I think this will really start to save my bacon when we start Ben on P3/4 in the fall. We’ll have two different cores going and the labels will help keep us organized. 🙂