Weekly Update: September 3-7

After 3 weeks of being off our routine because of vacation and sickness it was good to be back to our normal days. I took lots of pictures and thankfully the girls were in a mood to be photographed!

Little Hands to Heaven: Unit 4
Sweet little Grace loves her daily work so much she begs for more every day! She loves everything we do and is just sad when it's over for the day!

One of her favorite activities was "meeting" and greeting her favorite stuffed animal, Hoppy. She had so much fun asking Hoppy questions and answering Hoppy's questions to her.

She also loves her workbooks! They are a set from Rod and Staff called About Three. She loves these and they are teaching her to draw straight lines, matching, and same and different. They will become progressively difficult as she goes through all four books. She wants to do them all right now and it has been hard for her to hear that she has to wait!


Little Hearts for His Glory: Unit 5
Beth is already growing more mature as we move into a more regular routine. She works so studiously and seems to enjoy all that we do! I do have to remember to give her more breaks because it's easy for me to just forge ahead without them! Reading anything and everything is her favorite thing to do! Here she is reading one of our favorite stories: The Best Nest.
She is progressing well with spelling too! Beth has mastered all of the basic phonemes in All About Spelling and we have moved on to segmenting words by each sound. She caught on so quickly! She once again loved her poem! She learned about the 10 plagues and 10 Commandments. She wasn't so interested in actually learning about the specifics of those things, but she REALLY loved poem! Math is still a favorite subject and it's been very hard to tell her we have to stop for the day! I'm basically letting her go at her own speed and we'll just move on to 1st grade math a little early and maybe go half speed with that for a while. Over all I am just so pleased to see how grown up Beth has become!

Bigger Hearts for His Glory

Rose studied the poem, "The Arrow," by Richard Henry Stoddard this week. I was pleasantly surprised by her insights into the poem. She is still very young and needs help guiding her thinking about what the poems we study mean, but this week she was able to catch the message more than before. Just for fun she practiced her archery skills after we worked on the poem the first day.

Creating the Pocahontas acrostic was a highlight of the week for both of us. Rose really enjoyed Pocahontas and understood now why we had chosen not to watch the cartoon version. She agreed that she wanted to learn the true story about her and was so excited to know that one day she'll get to meet Pocahontas in heaven!

I'm learning more to use the white board for teaching. It was good for her to be able to brainstorm her ideas and then write them on paper rather than trying to do both at the same time.

We also tried out full speed this week. Everything went so beautifully! We started our schooling around 7:30, took a 30 minute break at 9:00 and was finished by 10:00 most of the days. She loves learning and doesn't need a lot of breaks so for now this schedule is working for us!

Overall our week was great for school! Our only snags came with getting along when we weren't schooling. It would be nice if our kids got along all the time, but then I remember my days as a full time teacher and how the kids rarely all got along. I try to give them each some attention from me individually as well as some time alone. They don't always like the idea of alone time, but it really is good for them to be apart from one another.

Next week start Deerstream Learning Center and our full school-year schedule will be in place. It will be busy, but good!