Satori Smiles

We recently started All-About-Spelling Level 3. From now on, we’re going to try to take spelling slow. Try to drag a lesson out for at least a week. It’s hard to keep slow, as she picks up spelling rules fairly quickly, but she does still need an official spelling program.

Here’s the Level 3 packet you get. All the cards are scored, so they’re easy to tear apart, but it does take some time.

We’ll be adding new phonograms to our white board as we learn them. Here’s my packet full of future tiles, and you can see the magnet sheet that comes when you order these. I cut them all out and magnetized them probably a year ago.

We’ve been wanting to get a new haircut for quite some time, and after seeing the movie about Ramona, we were ready. It was a bit shorter than I was expecting, but we all really like it! We can see her eyes and face so much easier. Satori will now be able to brush/comb her own hair everyday, what a plus!

Satori just can’t get enough of learning about the human body. She watches videos that are probably meant for children much older than her, and every night makes me read from detailed books. When she wants to learn about something, she typically ends up learning more than David and myself.

She just loves to draw and write about it. These are just samples. I’ve spared you all her illustrations of the human body sitting on a toilet with urine (uren) coming out.

You know you drink water but where it goes is first the kidneys. They get the waste that you don’t need and then it goes to your urethras, then your bladder. All of this is behind your intestines. And your kidneys have little tubes that gets the waste out. And also kidneys are the size of a bean. And the bladder looks like a white bag.

I got her some journals and she’s already filled out a dozen pages about different systems of the human body.

I do not ask her to do any of this!

I am now looking into notebooking as a homeschool tool for her.

We’ll be on our Wisconsin trip until August 1, total driving over 32 hours just there and back. I’ve loaded up my iPhone so we can listen to audiobooks in the car. Our local library has free audio downloads and we’ve gotten quite addicted to listening to audiobooks in the car on long drives. Here’s what we’ll be listening to:

• Ramona the Pest (just in time to watch Ramona and Beezus this Friday)
• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (have this timed to arrive on Netflix in Wisconsin)
• Peter Pan (will be seeing this at a dinner theater in August)
• Disney Fairies
• Ella Enchanted
• Charles and Emma (more for David and I on the ride back)
• The Sea of Monsters (Percy Jackson and the Olympians Book 2)
• Story of the World – Ancient Times (will review what we’ve read up through today)
• Burgess Bird Book for Children

The only movies I’ll have along are Anne of Green Gables (just listened to this audiobook on our last trip), Pocohontas, and King Tut’s Final Secret.

As for the blog, I’ve scheduled a bunch of posts to activate throughout the week, so no one will get bored staring at the same last post!

This is what happens when I left Satori alone to do her science lesson to pack for our trip.

It all started off proper enough…

But I came back to this skeleton who thinks he can dance! Satori always makes me laugh, I don’t know how she thinks of these things.

At least she did everything I told her to do though.

Satori loves to write and draw on our kitchen table. It’s expensive and I’d rather not have her on there, so I am putting up a little table in the kitchen for her to write and draw. Just yesterday I took advantage of Michael’s 40% off sale and got Derwent watercolor pencils, Kohl-i-noor woodless colored pencils, 50 Cray-pas Junior Pastels, 50 Crayola markers and some $1 Target containers to store them in. Messy stuff like actual watercolors and paints will stay downstairs in the craft room. I just thought it would be more inspiring to have windows and be near people when she wants to write and draw.

I don’t have an updated photo of all this.

When we get back from our trip, I’ll be on the lookout for building an accessible arts/drawing center and/or writing center. So far, Satori is using this little table all the time already! I think it’s a good idea. So right now I’m open to any ideas. I want everything easy to reach and tempting to use… I know there’s a word for this style, just haven’t looked into it much yet.

I mostly posted this because David and I thought her drawing of her flashlight was so cute and she didn’t leave out any details!

But I also love to periodically post updates on her informal handwriting, writing, and spelling skills. Satori just loves to write us notes and letters. I never correct anything on them, but it’s interesting to see how she progresses. In this note, her handwriting was pretty good, except for all the capital D’s in Daddy. Her writing was okay, the grammar is sound and she remembered one period for the first sentence. Misspellings include “plees” and “baterees”, but I’m impressed she got some words correct that we’ve never studied yet – in particular “light”, “read”, and “tonight”. I think the more she reads, the better she’ll get.