Weekly Homeschool Wrap-up

Felt flowers were already mentioned, that was the only "structured" thing really.

For some reason the girls re-discovered the watches they got for their last birthday and have been wearing them pretty much all week and every so often will tell me at 1 minute intervals what time it is. They tell me by just reading the numbers (so 12:05 is read one two zero five, or possibly five, zero, two, one) and have a hard time keeping track of the 2 vs the 5 (made more difficult by the fact that they put the watch on upside down half the time), but it's a start. And to continue with the time-keeping theme, A found some "telling time" flashcards in the school stuff, and was playing with them today. They have a clock face on one side & the "digital readout" of the time on the other side. I sorted them out & only gave her the ones that were on the hour (so 12:00 but not 12:10) and showed her what the first one "said" and she went through them all & could say what they all said. Then she put them in order (& as annoyed to find that all the numbers weren't there LOL), by then she was bored and didn't want to move on to adding in the 1/2 hr ones) but for spending 10 min one day, she's got a good start.

They've also re-discovered starfall.com and have been playing on it each day, so still moving forward with the reading. I looked some more at "A Time to Play" and really don't feel like it's the direction I want to go at this point. It's just too structured and not easily adaptable to keeping them moving at their own level, and . . . deals alot, at least at the beginning, with stuff where they need to remember that the girls with brown hair is named Nan & the Hispanic girl is named Rosa which wouldn't be a big deal at all in a classroom setting, but in our current setting I don't want us to "have" to do "reading homework" every day, and even at the end of "In the Beginning" L had trouble with the last page because we hadn't done much with it over Christmas and she didn't remember that Lad was the dog, and such . . .there's benefit to reviewing actual "reading pre-skills" (like letter sounds & such) when we take a break and come back, but to have to constantly be re-learning something that has no usefulness except in that "class" is too "school at home" for my style, especially for 4 yr olds.

I may have already mentioned this, and for that matter, it might have been the previous week, not this past week, but quite frequently for bedtime stories the girls choose to "read" the books themselves, quoting the books they've memorized &/or making it up as they go. One night recently when A was reading a book that she has memorized, I noticed that for the first few pages she actually was looking at the words, and getting confused if she remembered the "idea" but not the exact words (so what she was saying didn't correspond to the first letter of the next word on the page). So she's working on it too, just in her own way . . . I'm still expecting her to just suddenly start reading.