Satori Smiles

RightStart Math can be pricey but well worth the investment. I hear it never goes on sale, but this morning I woke up to a pleasant surprise that the Homeschool Buyers Co-op is giving a great deal on RightStart! Depending on the number ordered, you can save up to 25%. Right now it is at 20%, but I’m positive it will hit the 25% by the time the deal expires on 6/29.

What great timing, we are just finishing up RightStart A, and I couldn’t bring myself to spend the $100 to buy the A-to-B Kit to move on to the next level.

This news is making its waves on all the homeschooling boards, as people know it’s just a rockin’ program!

The only thing is, is that if I wait for the coop to mail out RightStart B, we will have almost a month of in-between time. But that’s okay! I’m a math curriculum junkie and I also have Singapore, Miquon and MEP. I would love a chance to explore MEP and Miquon a bit more, and perhaps add one as a supplement. I hear they’re all great!

Here’s the program we’re going to use to explore more writing with Satori – Write Source. The book below is the Kindergarten book, and it looks perfect to start out. I mostly hang out on classical homeschooling forums, so I very rarely hear people talk about Write Source, but I think this might work out well for us.

Satori was eager to jump in and work on the pages. The first pages do not assume that the kindergartner knows how to write words or even the the whole alphabet (it says to write letters you know), so it seems age-appropriate for kindergarten. I just wanted something very simple and colorful to introduce the basics of writing. After introducing the concept that letters make words, it goes into sentences. This is page 10.

Most of this we practice in both copywork and spelling dictation, but we haven’t formally covered what a sentence is in the first place. After covering very simple sentence basics, it introduces the Writing Process. Satori loved looking at this page and couldn’t wait to start a story. But in this book, their version of a story is just one sentence, two at the most in the end. Satori is used to writing entire stories, but I’m looking forward to the simplicity.

Following this simple model – Prewrite, Write, Revise, Edit, and Publish – should be fun. She immediately thought of a topic – cats, and then gathered some details: fast, shap (sharp claws), wiscurs (whiskers) and pointy (teeth).

Here’s her sentence. It should be a good starting point to edit today. I am not going to focus on correct spelling when we do this program, unless she requests it, all I want to do is get used to capitalizing sentences and using end marks. She should pick it up in no time.

We only spent 10 minutes yesterday on this, and she begged to continue. However we had already covered a third of the book in just one session and I want to go more slowly from here on. The rest of the book covers forms of writing (journals, lists, signs, captions, stories), and themes to write about.

In her freetime creative writing, I’m not going to worry about spelling or grammar, I never bring that up in her stories. But I’ll be quietly looking for improvements in her writing. I’ll continue to supply her with paper, bare books and more to encourage her love of writing. We’ll see how it goes!