Last Week's Homeschool

We had abit of a break last week with Christmas and such.

We finished our Jesse Tree devotions for Christmas. While I love the concept, the devotions we used were abit over the girls' heads. Next year I want to either find a set of devotions that are geared for younger kids, find other Bible story books with the various stories in them and use those, or just read the Bible texts and then discuss rather than using the additional text in this particular version. But the ornaments and the overall concept worked well.

For history we took a semi-break and used the time to finish the Kaya books and start the Felicity books (that we also read at bedtime, but Kaya & Felicity are so close together (chronologically) that I wanted to "catch us up" to correspond with the history curriculum).

Reading we pretty much took a break from. We didn't do the phonics sheets, and I gave them the choice of reading from the Primer or not. I think they each chose to read one day.

But we enjoyed lots of cookie baking, Christmas decorating, and such with our extra time. We also did some extra cleaning in preparation for having family here on Christmas.

Since Christmas, time has been spent DAILY using the pothoder loop loom (L) and learning to knit (A) these have definitely been the most used Christmas gifts so far. The girls also got some "I Can Read" Bible stories (this, and the other Bible stories in the set) for Christmas and L has been enjoying reading them for bedtime stories (A tells me she's not reading anything until we start the January pizza chart (for book-it) LOL). Interestingly, last night L picked up one of the "real" My Bible Friends books (the I Can Read books use the artwork from MBF, which are favorites around here, and were favorites when I was a kid) and read close to half of the Baby Jesus story out of it, granted she's heard the story enough that she was able to figure out some words she doesn't know based on context alone (I was able to "read" that story in German when I was taking German in high school, not because my German was anywhere near that good, but because I pretty much had the story memorized so the few german words I DID known were enough to trigger my memory to quote the story LOL) but for the most part she did actually look at/sound out as needed the words, not just "tell the story" like she has "read" longer books up to this point.

My grandparents gave the girls their own International Children's Bibles for Christmas. We have one ICB Bible that I use to look up texts in their Sabbath School lesson and such (though word of warning, in the last few weeks I've found some inaccuracies in this version . . . for example the verse where Jesus tells Peter to forgive his neighbor "Seventy times seven" times, is translated in the ICB to forgive 77 times (which isn't how *I* do the math of 70x7 LOL) and there was another text in the last month or so that also mis-translated a number thing, but I'm not remembering what it was now). Still, this is a complete Bible (not just a collection of Bible stories) written at a 3rd grade level, which I think can be valuable with young kids. I talked to them briefly today (L was in a mood, so we kept it short) about using their new Bibles to read one verse each morning when they wake up (they know Mommy reads the Bible every morning when I get up, so I'm hoping to springboard off of that and instill the habit of morning quiet time in them while they're young). Like I said, L was in a mood this morning, but A seemed to like the idea and went ahead and read through a verse with me during our school time and I think read some more later. I'll bring the idea up again at bedtime tonight and we'll see . . .