Thoughtful Thursday

The Lord is my light and my salvation;
whom shall I fear?
The Lord is the stronghold of my life;
of whom shall I be afraid?

~Psalm 27:1

Thoughtful Thursday

The probability of life originating from accident is comparable to the unabridged dictionary resulting from an explosion in a printing shop.

~Dr. Edwin Conklin

Little Readers & Writers

Last year I taught Carson to read using Reading Made Easy by Valerie Bendt, and although it wasn't his favorite subject (by a long shot), he learned to read fairly easily and now as a seven year old is a good reader. For handwriting he uses Handwriting Without Tears, and again we have a very unpopular subject, but he is doing well.

I love this reminder (for after his shower) that he wrote on a post-it in November and stuck on the bathroom wall.

Translation: Lotion

A page from his handwriting book this week:

So at the beginning of the current school year I was trying to decide what to do with Corinne who is four. She went to preschool last year, but we decided not to send her this year for various reasons. Since she wouldn't be going to preschool my plan for this year was to work with her at home on letters and numbers at the beginning of the year and then move onto sounds and basic math (patterns, counting, etc.). 

A few months in I was finally ready to start working with her, but I quickly discovered that not only did she already recognize all of her letters and numbers (which I had a feeling was the case), but she also already knew all of the consonant sounds. OK, good. We will move onto step two then and start working on vowel sounds, short first and then long. Before Christmas I sat down with her to start on letter A, and find that she knows all of the long vowel sounds, and most of the short vowels sounds with only the occasional mix up!

At that point I didn't really have a plan for what to do next because I wasn't expecting her to be so far along, so I wrack my brain with what to do and decide the logical next step is to try to teach her to read and see if she is ready. I decided wait and start after winter break, so at the beginning of January we started working on rhyming, blending sounds, and practicing sight words. I pulled out the Reading Made Easy book and activity sheet CD ROM, and we dug into Lesson 1 in mid January.

It is now mid February and she is doing quite well. Yesterday we completed Lesson 23. We don't necessarily do a lesson every day, but unlike her brother, she likes doing it and if we don't 'do reading' she will usually ask to do it. She has been doing the Handwriting Without Tears preschool workbook on her own, but I'm fairly certain she makes the letters her own way so we haven't officially started handwriting. This has not stopped her from writing and drawing all the time (she is just like her sister).

The picture below was my first discovery of her budding writing and phonics skills. She had gotten mad about something and was pouting in the basement, so she wrote this note on one of the Magna-Doodles and posted it at the bottom of the steps (I actually didn't find it until after dinner that night).

Translation: Corinne is downstairs

(I had to ask her what the last word was)

A few weeks later she wrote this note when we had a friend over and the friend took Corinne's stuffed animal (see translation) and wouldn't give it back.

Translation: Zebra

(I had to ask her for the translation on this one, too)

In this picture she is working on one of the Reading Made Easy activity sheets and you will notice that she is a lefty! (I have no idea how I am going to teach her to write - everyone else in our household is right handed.)

Thoughtful Thursday

But let it be the hidden man of the heart, in that which is not corruptible, even the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit, which is in the sight of God of great price.

~1 Peter 3:4

Thoughtful Thursday

Too often in our lives, accomplishment and doing overshadow growth and becoming. We frantically scurry around, trying to paint the picture with our activites, but our being must be settled before our doing. George MacDonald said it well:  "He thought to gain a thing by doing, when the very thing desired was a being."

From Calm My Anxious Heart by Linda Dillow