Fall Term, Week Six, Day Five

Well, we made it through the first half of our fist fall term. Things are coming together nicely. I can see the girls are less resistant to their chores and to picking up after themselves.

Makenna has zipped through her Beta math and will be ready to start Gamma after next week. We've settled on the books she feels comfortable reading on her own and those she needs mom to read aloud to her. She also started teaching herself cursive handwriting so I figured I better get her a book to teach her to form the letters properly or it’s hard to tell what we’ll end up with.

Maddie's slow and careful work in math is amazing—the methods produce great results and she's adding +9's quite easily and doing easy algebra problems! She's starting to write stories (very phonetically) and is really working to understand how the letters work together. I often see her with a notebook and pencil curled up in a corner writing away. In this picture, she decided to be the teacher and read to her students (that would be me and Maya) a story from her old reader. I was pleased with how fluently she read it. She is emerging, slowly (and sometimes painfully) into an independent reader.

Maya just about has all her letters down and begs me on a daily basis to teach her to sound out words like her big sister. If she continues, I plan to start Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons after our Christmas break. She loves building addition problems with Steve and adding while the others do their math. After we work though the handwriting of her numbers, we'll go back to her math workbook. She's slowly working through Alpha, about one problem a day at this point.

So far, so good.