Weekly Update: August 20-24

Well...life happens, right? My girls got to spend the previous week in Florida with their grandparents and two of them came back with colds. Then they graciously shared those germs with me! So needless to say, I wasn't at the top of my teaching game! We got through the week and the girls learned, it was just a little less exciting than normal.

Little Hands to Heaven: Unit 3

We completed three days of unit three and will finish the unit this week. I'm still trying to tweak how we do this program. I'm not trying to rush through it, but our schedule makes it easier to only teach it three days a week. I've tried squeezing all 5 days into 3, which was doable, but not as much fun. This week was much better, so we'll see how it goes.

Grace is really enjoying the rhymes which teach about our Bible story as well as reinforce letter sounds. Her other favorite thing is the Bible story. She enjoyed counting the stars on the page with Abraham over and over again!


Little Hearts for His Glory: Unit 4
Beth did not ask one time this week why she couldn't go to school for kindergarten and I'm so happy! I hate for her to feel like she is missing out on something, but we know this is the right thing for all of us during this season. Next year she'll get to be in a class at Deerstream Learning Center where her big sister attends and which is something to look forward to.

She continues to amaze me with how quickly she picks up on reading. We are working with a 1st grade phonics curriculum now and she is breezing through. Even though it is easy, I feel the reinforcement is necesessary to cement some of this in her mind. Her favorite part is still reading Dick and Jane. I would love to get her some more of these, but they are so expensive because of their value.

Math is also an easy subject for her, probably from listening in on her sister's math lesson last year, but we have finally reached something new in her math book! Place Values. I was all prepared with our manipulatives, but forgot to snap a picture. I picked up some little erasers from the dollar bin at Target which were perfect for sorting. groups of 10. This picture is from an earlier lesson when she was counting. I'm also excited to see how nicely her handwriting is coming along!


Bigger Hearts for His Glory: Unit 3
This week was a lot of fun for Rose. She really loves science and it was our week to work on science! I'm going to try full speed next week for her because we are finishing so fast. I'm glad we started at half speed, but now that she is back into school mode she is working quickly now.

One of her many talents is drawing and she is really enjoying the notebooking assignments. This week she drew pictures of two animals from different areas near the shore. She enjoyed picking them out from the book and worked hard to make them look like the pictures.

The highlight of the week for me came from highlighters! I decided to try something new with poetry to help her see rhyming patterns and it worked! We highlighted the words that rhymed at the ends of the lines with the same colors. I ran out of colors, so I know now to use the same colors from stanza to stanza. This helped her see the pattern easier. Since I'm also a junior high literature teacher I introduced her to rhyme scheme using the alphabet which she caught on to very quickly. This idea is DEFINITELY a keeper!