We’re about to head to Wisconsin for a week, so I’m considering most of it vacation. All I have planned for the next 10 days is to get 4 reading lessons in, and hopefully do some nice read-alouds, both in the car driving (checking out AudibleKids.com now) and having David and myself read. A trip to my childhood library would be nice…
Here’s what’s happening lately at the “Fox Mountain Academy” (SatoriSmiles homeschool tentative name)!
If you couldn’t tell already, I’ve been painting many rooms in our house, most rooms are homeschool-related. In our basement I painted this wall orange-red. For this I wanted an energetic color as this is also a fitness gym (on the other side), yet also be rich and mysterious for our history timelines, and stimulating enough for our Science station corner. I like it! Hope David isn’t too horrified by it, it is quite a bold color! On our return from Wisconsin, I’ll be working on putting up our timelines (with their own picture light shining down onto them) and setting up the science station with microscope, magnifying glass and experiment books.
Basement wall
I’ll just give a brief update on how all our subjects are coming along, as we’ve now finished exactly four weeks of “kindergarten”! First off, Homeschool Skedtrack rocks. It is certainly keeping me on track, yet I love it’s flexibility. I need to dedicate a new blog post review on that free tool. Now for the subjects:
READING
We’re now on lesson 75 in OPG, our main reading program. This program will take her to a 4th grade reading level, which at her pace, will probably hit sometime next year, all before the official Colorado kindergarten age! We’ve moved on past consonants/short vowels and blends, now we’re learning long vowel sounds, and digraphs such ph.
Here’s the pages we did today.
She picks up this stuff pretty fast, we learn a new rule, she masters it right away, we finish the lesson. I then review to make sure she’s got previous lessons still memorized and yep, she remembers. If that all takes less than 10 minutes, we might stop there or start a new lesson. Tonight we did two lessons. Here’s a sample of what she read tonight.
Mack, Mike and I will go on a trip.
With luck, Mack and I will get a snack of chips.
For fun, we’re whipping (literally) through our ETC workbooks. She should be finishing up the ETC A-C books which are just easy primers and should be starting Book 1. Still just a review, we’ll whip through that and then finally slow down when we hit book 2, which will be a review on blends. Not until book 3 will we be caught up with the approximate OPG level. For fun, we’ve read through the highly entertaining (and free) ProgressivePhonics.com Alphabetti books and are sad to say our goodbyes to Sid/Sis and Dod/Bob. They haven’t updated that site with the rest of the Alphabetti books, so we will start the more boring real phonics books. No lovable characters to get to know, as far as I’ve looked…
WRITING
We just have a few pages left in her Handwriting Without Tears Kindergarten book, which means we’ve finally covered all the lowercase letters! The few pages left are practice with whole words/sentences/paragraphs. Here’s her writing the alphabet (upper and lowercase) tonight:
As you can see, she’s got it down pretty well. Sometimes she writes the lowercase “g” backwards, and I see that she totally left that off. She also writes the Z backwards, also left off conveniently… Hmm… We will take at least a month off before starting the first grade book, but still practice handwriting at least 3x a week. We will work on noticing those lines and getting the lowercase letters in the right places. 
I suppose I should mention that she is constantly writing books and letters, they are very entertaining!
SPELLING
This kinda goes with the above two subjects. She will sit down and want to have spelling quizzes even on days that I do not plan for Spelling! She’s pretty good at it too, for a 4 year old. She LOVES writing these on paper, and we haven’t pulled out the big whiteboard with letter tiles at all lately.
We’re on Lesson 15 in All About Spelling, which is covering initial blends. Here’s our spelling list for tonight.
Of these 10 words she spelled 8 perfectly. Every now and then she gets “i” and “e” short vowel sounds mixed up, even though she knows their sounds and can read them perfectly. So she spelled “sled” as “slid”. The other word she spelled wrong was “trip”. She spelled “chrip” instead. If you can read the gray paragraph, it specifically says the child may spell “tr” as “ch”, so I should have read that and enunciated more carefully!
On these spelling quizzes, she reverts to capital letters and sometimes they’re a bit sloppy, but I’m not complaining – I know she’s thinking intensely while she writes and this is all new to her. Each lesson takes us anywhere from 2-3 days to complete now that we’re covering more difficult material.
MATH
We’re getting the hang of RightStart math level A and have hit a few of their games, which she loves. She has been waking up and after talking about her current favorite animal (Wooly Mammoths this month), she then asks to do a math game with her dolls. Tonight we played a game that reinforced Even/Odd. Her she is posing with her American Girl doll Danna, who played with us. Although it takes longer for 3 “people” to play a game, she insists to give Danna a turn too, in addition to myself and Satori.
Since we started all over with RightStart A after doing Math-U-See all spring/summer, it doesn’t seem like we’ve made much math progress this year, but I know she’s really getting these new RS concepts. So glad we switched to RightStart. On Fridays I have Singapore workbook lessons scheduled, although we are not as consistent with math as we are with the above 3 subjects.
HISTORY
We’ve wrapped up Prehistory! I know I started off documenting this stuff pretty thoroughly, but we really had a blast all the way through. The next History we cover will be actual human-written History! It is killing me to wait to start Story of the World, but I really think 4 years old is too early. We’ll start after she turns 5. 
I’m really planning on documenting the heck out of our history studies, look forward to our blog posts of Ancients in 2010.
SCIENCE
We covered Gravity this week, which I can tell we will need to cover a bit more, so in Wisconsin, I hope to find some good books on Gravity and Forces. When I get all the science experiment materials out, it excites her so much that she has a hard time focusing on the lesson, lol. Our first 3 science lessons she mastered the concepts immediately, this Gravity force (our 4th lesson) is something that I can tell was hard for her to understand immediately.
LOGIC
We’re doing 2 pages a week out of our Lollipop Logic book. Going well. She could most definitely handle more than 2 pages, but I haven’t researched this enough to figure out where to go after Lollipop Logic, which covers K-2 and is for prereaders. I want her to be reading fluently before she tackles the next books.
ART
We do art and drawing multiple times a week. The Drawing With Children book is a bit more complex than I anticipated, but out of all homeschooling moms, with only one child, I have the time and still plan to step up to that challenge! Other than DWC, we do Artistic Pursuits but the preschooler lessons are pretty simple, I don’t talk about them too much.
