Satori and Mom created these puppets for our Artistic Pursuits Puppet Project lesson. This project utilized the “odds-and-ends” drawer, encouraging us to use those art scraps we keep in a special drawer.
It was a simple, fast and fun project, Satori made a bird, Mom made a cat (whiskers fell off right away). We then ran up to scare Daddy who was watching TV.
I haven’t been the best teacher this spring. We skipped several subjects for entire months, unfortunately, all the creative and fun ones. Science, history, art, music, and math… yes we consider math creative and fun when we use RightStart. I am excited to start in again on the fun activities and projects, and of course photograph and blog accordingly!
My excuse for slacking this time – I am on a mega huge health kick this spring, and it seems that all my energy went towards that. On the plus side, I weigh less than I’ve weighed in at least the past 7 years! Satori has been such a great sport and is eating very healthy too. We hike a lot and are just having a blast this year.
Here’s some updates on how our lessons are going.
RightStart Math A
Last month we finally learned the “proper” names of numbers. One of the most appealing aspects of RightStart is that they emulate the Asian way of naming numbers: “ten 1″ (11), “ten 2″ (12), “5 ten 8″ (58). This makes so much more sense, and comes in handy in understanding place value and visualizing math concepts. Now that Satori understands numbers in this way, she now can also say them in the normal way – eleven, twelve, thirteen… twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, and so on. I loved the lessons that taught her the new names. Now I know how we came up with “eleven” (left one) and “twelve” (two left) and so on. We still use the special AL Abacus every day we do our math lessons.
We’re also in the middle of learning clocks. Here’s our little gear clock that came with our RightStart A kit. I love how they taught these lessons as well, such a great job! As we move the longer blue minutes hand, the short orange hour hand will move as well. Behind the blue hand, is a display that shows night or day, making it easy to show if 12:00 is midnight or noon.
Of course we finish up math lessons with a fun math card game, they have clock cards, time cards, hour cards, and Satori is totally thrilled to play these games.
Every now and then they have her do a short worksheet, which is no problem…
Reading
Reading is one subject we finished all our lessons in this spring, as some days we’d do multiple lessons. My goal was to have her reading chapter books this summer, we shall see on that, but she can read any children’s picture book. It surprised her that she could pick up any of her books and read them to us!
This summer we will have finished all of Ordinary Parent’s Guide to Teaching Reading and then she will have the tools to tackle reading her favorite chapter books like Roald Dahl, Avi, and so on (right now we are reading Ragweed).
The past month she learned to tackle two-syllable words, and so much more. Here’s what we did today – Lesson 190: The Soft Sound of the SC Blend. A short and sweet lesson, which is great on a day like Saturday when we don’t even plan to do any lessons!
Reading is becoming more and more effortless that she can read her own workbooks and answer them. How fun! Here’s her Geography workbook:
We are almost finished with Lollipop Logic. Most of this workbook was so easy, we probably could have done it all in a few weeks easily. But I’ll be progressing her logic work to be more challenging for her now. Here’s a page she did yesterday, this is one of the easiest pages. But I show it because I think her coloring is getting so neat.
It’s a beautiful summery day on the weekend and while we wait for Daddy to finish up some work, we decided to write to Satori’s pen pals. Here she is at her desk, sporting a carrot mustache. We have been making fresh juices every day and this one had carrots, apples, celery, cucumber, alfalfa sprouts and orange. What a delicious way to sneak in vegetables!
We’re excited to add a new pen pal today! The past half year we’ve really only been going back and forth with one little girl who lives in California. We’re adding a little boy today and this letter is heading out to the same state.
A bit about this particular letter. We are using our new Handwriting Without Tears “Regular Double Line Notebook Paper, where the lines are spaced 3/16″ apart. Her handwriting has been getting smaller and she started her 2nd Grade HWT printing book last month, so this paper is going to be great! The Wide Double Line we used to use was 5/16″ spaced lines.
I really wanted her to write this all on her own, mispellings and all, but she was adamant that she spell everything correctly. So she asked for help on which “OW” sound the word “mountains” had. After I said to use the “ou” spelling, she then proceeded to spell “how” as “hou”, hehe. She still needs reminders to use periods at the ends of her sentences. But she tried very hard to use her “proper grip” and write neatly for her new friend. 
Hmmm… That last sentence, let me explain. This weekend, Daddy is going to sleep in the bottom bunk of her big dollhouse bed, and she will sleep on the top bunk. She gets so excited about “sleepovers” like this, and she even packed Daddy’s toothbrush/toothpaste in her bathroom and his pillow on the bed.
