School

I figure a school update is long overdue.  We took a pretty long holiday break which was nice.  And now we're back into it, getting everything finished so that we can fully enjoy our summer this year.  I can't wait for warm weather and spending all day outside.

So today Bella finished up level one of her Hooked on Phonics.  She got off to a very slow start.  For each lesson they say don't move on till they have mastered the lesson.  Well we spent weeks on the first 3 lessons and for awhile it felt like we'd never get anywhere.  Finally it clicked and she was moving through them quickly and remembering what she learned.



She can now read all of these books


And here's a video of her reading one of the small ones.  This was the first time she read it.



This is the big book they read at the end of the level.  I got a video are her reading it for the first time but it's long and she went pretty slow so the video ended up being 8 minutes long.  I don't think I'll be posting that.




I'm not really doing phonics with John right now.  He wants to learn but is still majorly guessing with all the words.  He sees one letter and then randomly guesses any word that contains that one letter.  So "sat" will be "tap" and "can" will be "nap."  And still his attention span is so small.  I think I'm going to work with him more on phonics this summer so that all he has to do is work on that for a few minutes and that's it.  Not in the middle of all the other subjects.  Hopefully that will help some.  And as much as I like the Hooked on Phonics program he might need something else, we'll see.

He is loving math though right now.  So he's been doing lots of that.  The math books I got them from the dollar section at Target are a big hit.  I like them because they can do them by themselves without me helping.  With our regular math lessons I have to sit down and teach them, and with those we haven't really gotten to adding numbers yet (just patterns and shapes etc.) so they love to sit and add with their books.


And now that Hazel is crawling it's even harder to get things done.  Before she just layed on the blanket pretty happy.  Now she into everything like Phoebe.  It's a bit crazy.





And this last one is kind of old, but Bella wanted to learn to write her name in "curly" letters.  So I taught her.  She thinks you can't buy things at the store if you don't know how to write you name this way.