Satori Smiles

Reading has been our number one priority this past year. We’ve been using Ordinary Parent’s Guide to Teaching Reading as our main reading/phonics program. I chose OPG as I wanted a very systematic way to go through all the phonics, and it was just the most thorough program I could find. I even started pronouncing some of the tougher words correctly after going through this! For example, I always pronounced “cordial” with a d, not a j sound. Even though I was taught phonics when I grew up, I don’t think it was as complete as this. Combined with our spelling program, I just see words in better clarity now (if that makes sense).

There are 231 lessons, although we did the first 30 lessons in one day. Satori had learned all her letter sounds in one evening by watching the  Letter Factory DVD. So we got to breeze through the first section, as she could already read/spell CVC words. So that leaves 200 lessons that we did one lesson per day, so it took us 14 months to complete the book. I think it was designed to take a few years. The last lessons were tough, we took two days per lesson to finish the last section, which consisted of 7-syllable words. This is one of the shorter pages from these last few chapters. Talk about tongue twisters for a 5 year old girl!

And our final lesson – a fourteen syllable word!

One of my next posts will talk about what we’ll be using next for our reading lessons – Beyond the Code. I talk about the good and bad for our experience this month with it.

My goal this summer was to have Satori reading chapter books. We took a pretty long spring break, and still have about a month of our reading program to go. Even taking two weeks off, we should be finishing Ordinary Parent’s Guide to Teaching Reading around mid-August. After that, we’ll be reading for fun, improving fluency and vocabulary.

I took this photo a few weeks ago, but thought I better post it now before it becomes seriously outdated. But here’s her lesson from a few weeks ago and an example of what she can read. She’s now into 3-syllable words and learning new word endings.

Just out of curiosity, I did place an easy chapter book in front of her and she read the first chapter no problem. Most of you will probably be familiar with The Magic Tree House series. I took a video of her reading, I’ll try to post that soon.

I am so tempted to get their 28-book Boxed Set, they come with a timeline and world map, but I’m just not sure as anything could happen. She might not get into these books, could find them boring, she might move past them quicker than anticipated… Some people consider them twaddle, but they all have some kind of useful lesson in them.

We’ve also started our Nora Gaydos readers again, we’re on Level 4 (the last level before the Independent topic books). I have the Science book lined up next, it looks pretty neat. These books come in a set of 10 books in a magnetic binder and have stickers in the front, 4 for each story. They’re cute and colorful and make Satori laugh, so I’m glad we have them.

I really want Satori to love reading as much as I do, but she doesn’t pick up books to read as often as she sits down to write a story. I do not push her to read on her own, and we’ve never really focused on early readers, as I want her to read books that are more exciting. This fall, after we finish OPG, we will start practicing our reading until she’s fast and fluent. Here’s my methods:

1. Mom continues to read-aloud good literature.
2. Satori works on Explode the Code workbooks as long as she wants for phonics practice.
3. To take the place of our 20 minute OPG reading lessons, she will read 10 minutes of reading that I’ll select to be a bit of a challenge.
4. At night she will read material that is easy for her, to build confidence and speed.

We’re on a big ETC kick! Explode the Code is an inexpensive phonics workbook series, that is great to supplement our reading program. Since we’re almost finished with our formal phonics (OPG), we’re back to these workbooks and just started ETC 3. This level will be all review in terms of phonics/reading, and we’ll be hitting ETC 4 later this summer, which will be closer to her current level.

ETC 3 introduces handy little rules which enforce what we already know. For example, “If a little word ends in y, the y says long-i.”

If Satori didn’t like these workbooks, I wouldn’t make her do them, but she totally loves them. She asks to do them everyday lately. She averages 6-8 pages a day right now, that would be 2-3 page spreads like this. Oops, I forgot to take a photo of an example of one of their sentence pages. Last spring, the sentences were just too much for a new reader, now they’re a breeze. We always laugh at the sentences/pictures.

She always makes sure to put a smile on my face or a laugh in my day when I correct the pages. She can find a way to insert a joke or something cute in almost everything she touches.

So we’re enjoying our ETC program right now and seeing I just ordered ETC 4-8, I hope we continue to do them, especially when our phonics program ends. As you can see above, they’re also great to supplement handwriting, spelling and even a bit of vocabulary.

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.

Chugging away at our reading program, Ordinary Parent’s Guide to Teaching Reading (OPG), I have gotten a few emails asking how we’re using it. Do we read all the sentences? Does Satori still sound out the words? I also find myself writing the same things over and over in the homeschooling forums I frequent. So here’s just a little update on our reading!

We just finished all the sections on the most Common Spellings for Long vowel sounds, like AI, EA, EI, EY, EE, EA, IE, OA, OW, UE, OO as some examples. Silent-E words are easy to figure out (Section 7), but all these vowel pairs (Sections 8-12) could get confusing! Here’s an OPG game we played this week as a review for all the different long vowel pair words we’ve learned so far. Coincidentally, it was about “Cross the River”, so we made that river the Nile (tying in with our Egypt lessons), and used a crocodile to hop across the stones. Here, her crocodile is hopping on all the long-U words to get to the other side of the river.

Our lessons are only taking 8-10 minutes.  This includes the 2 review, where I’ll write down sample words from the previous 2 lessons. I have said in the past we didn’t do all the sentences in each lesson, but since the lessons are going faster, we’re starting to read more of the sentences, and will probably start reading them all.

Lately we’ve also taking 10 minutes to do thorough reviews of lessons we’ve done long ago. So, in addition to our main lesson, we are doing 2-3 lessons way back in lessons 58-60. We’ll continue to do this to make sure that she doesn’t forget how to read any words. This intense review and thoroughly doing each lesson will take up the 20 minutes a day we’re allocating for Reading lessons.

Satori looks at a word, sounds it out quickly in her mind, and then says it. The above photo of words she does not have fluently memorized, she’ll take a moment to say each word. Some like “break”, she might pronounce “breek”, as normally “ea” has a long-e sound. It’s challenging to keep them all straight! By including all the sentences in each lesson (which is a review in itself), and intense review of past lessons, and having her read books every night, hopefully this is a good start to reading fluency.

I was a bit premature on my “First Week Back” post, and only when I realized that homeschooling forums/email lists are all talking about their first complete week back on Friday (not as early as Wednesday), did I decide to do a Part II!

I’m excited about all the new curriculum we are adding to our year (and leaving out things we never got to last fall). We’re starting the subjects Writing, Grammar and Vocabulary. Today I’ll cover the writing.

We are using The Complete Writer: Writing With Ease: Strong Fundamentals by Susan Wise Bauer. For those of you who don’t know that name, she’s the one who has inspired our method of classical education homeschooling, and we have all of her curriculum (reading, history, grammar, writing). Before you make the mistake I did, the hardcover book linked above is repeated in the companion Student Workbook. The lessons are totally scripted in the workbook, with tear-out pages for the student to write as well. In fact, the hardcover book isn’t as complete as the workbook, so it’s not needed. I actually downloaded the PDF file of the student pages ($9.50), so now all I have to do is print out using my printer, unlimited copies for my family! These worksheet pages don’t need to be downloaded or bought, you can make your own easily. Next time around, I’ve learned my lesson and will only download the complete Workbook 2 PDF file.

Each week covers 4 lessons to gently introduce a first grader to copywork and narration. Monday our copywork consisted of “Pa owned a pig.” This took Satori only a few seconds, so we just wrote it over one more time, focusing on proper capitalization and a period for the sentence. I am debating whether to use our StartWrite software in HWT font for her copywork pages…

The narration consisted of reading a short fable, and then asking several questions. Answers are required to be in complete sentences. I am going to try and speak in complete sentences more often myself, and minimize my use of contractions, to assist Satori in proper language.

We’re trying to keep lessons 20 minutes or less for the big subjects like Reading and Math, and under 10 minutes for the  easy stuff like Handwriting, Writing, and Grammar. Here’s my little reminder tool we’re using, I love it! As you can see, our Reading lesson (OPG) just took 8 minutes to complete, and since it is a Friday, I was okay with that. I do not require her to read every single sentence though, we do a quick review, cover the new rule, read all the new words, and then read a couple sentences.

Satori continued to make me laugh throughout the week…

We still have the occasional inversions on “g” and “p”, but I’m told this will be completely normal these first few years. We’re going over printing lowercase once again in Handwriting Without Tears, and this time we’re going through it very slowly.

One curriculum decision I was going to make was to ditch ETC workbooks completely (pictures shown above and below). However, Satori said she enjoyed doing them. Since we are so far behind in these workbooks compared to her actual reading level, we’re going to go through them at an even more accelerated pace. I’m choosing just two pages out of each lesson, and these lessons will cover a multitude of subjects – reading, handwriting, and spelling!

If we keep the accelerated pace up, we should be caught up in ETC Book 3 or 4 to her reading level by late spring.

For our reading program (OPG – Ordinary Parent’s Guide to Teaching Reading) Satori has been learning many different ways that long-vowel words are spelled. This time we actually did one of their games! (Usually we just learn the new rule, read the words and that’s pretty much it.) But once I realized that I could purchase and download a PDF file of their flashcards, I realized there is no excuse why we can’t do the games.

You don’t need to purchase anything, of course you can make your own flashcards. However, if you’re lazy you’ll never get to that! You could also order the flashcards for $5.95 and get them sent to you all printed out, you simply cut them up. Or, you can do what I did, order the PDF file of OPG Flashcards for immediate gratification for $4.75. Since I figured that was worth my time to print out 320 cards all nice and neat, I decided to do the splurge.

Satori had a great time in this game and eagerly read all the words correctly, and ran to tape them on any appropriate things! We now have flashcards taped to our wooden “rail” on the staircase, on the oven where we “bake”, the “place” where Satori sits for dinner…

But my favorite one was the word “great”. I found it taped on my back.

This very Explode the Code workbook was one of the very first workbooks I purchased last spring once I decided to homeschool Satori. If you’re new to homeschooling, it won’t take you long before you hear about this program. Once we got it, Satori did a few pages out of it, but then I decided not to follow a “workbooky” style and set it away for months.

Then, a reader of my blog mentioned them and out they came again! This time I got the 3 pre-books, which Satori whizzed through quickly. Finally, we are on the book 1, which is still too simple for us, but I love the review. I love the handwriting practice too. Here’s a sample page she did today.

Satori just turned 5 last month and the past few months we hadn’t done much schooling at all, but I am proud that she is finally to the point where she automatically writes in lowercase for most words.

Speaking of handwriting, we use Handwriting Without Tears program and have finished their Kindergarten book. I am going to go through the rest of December reviewing some of her problem letters and doing simple copywork. She still sometimes writes “g” backwords, and does a few letters incorrectly, which will slow her down in the long run. Letters like “p” she doesn’t write below the line sometimes. “z” is sometimes written backward as well. The rest of her letters are acceptable, but we also need to learn to write on the correct lines. We need to practice on the HWT’s special paper that has only two lines. We’re going to address these inefficiencies this month, and then start with HWT’s Grade 1 book next semester, starting January 2010.

I totally wish I found this program a year ago! I may have mentioned this program a few times, but here it is more in-depth. Progressive Phonics is a free phonics reading program. You can download and print out the stories/lessons or read online. Satori cracks up over the stories. Since they just released a bunch of new Alphabetti books, we started reading the stories again. Here’s one we read a while back, but one of our favorites anyway – Who Hid Ham?

The Alphabetti books are great for beginning readers. They are too simple for Satori’s current level, but she loves them anyway. I can’t resist hearing her giggling and cracking up over the characters and then begging me to read again and again. I love how they have print for the parents to read, and larger red print for the child to read. Woe to anyone who accidentally read’s Satori’s words, or who makes her read the black text!

Everytime I check the site now, more books have been added, so we still have a few to catch up with.  The second set is about Sid the snake and his friends Sis, Dan, Ham and more. Alphabetti Parts 3-5 are not up yet and I imagine that to take quite a while. But after Alphabetti books, are the phonics books which actually teach more phonics and reading. I think we will skip the Beginning Phonics books (short vowels, they look boring anyway) and move on to the Intermediate Phonics. These will last us a long time yet. These will teach blends, long vowels, vowel digraphs… which is more of the phonics level we are at now. The books progress to more and more “red words” that Satori has to read herself.

UPDATE 2 HOURS LATER: Satori and I started the Beginner Phonics Books – Book 1 covering the short vowel “a”. She didn’t hesitate reading any of these words, she can read these simple words fluently. If you’ve read my blog, I admit that I do not force her to read simple books so we haven’t worked on fluency at all. So it was nice to read a book together with her and know that it will all come naturally! We read 10 stories which I discovered are all short but cute little poems.

Here’s a video of Satori and Daddy reading “Who Hid Ham?” together. I apologize that in the middle she shrieks to make sure I got the current page on video, lol! (David says “swandwich” on purpose, that’s how Satori used to say it last year, and we can’t resist saying it that way now.) I love how Satori reads with inflection.

Satori loves to write letters. With her beginner/intermediate knowledge of phonics, she can sound out complex words and sentences that we are able to decipher most of the time. Of course, when she writes us letters, they are full of “luv” and little hearts. I figured it wouldn’t hurt to be able to spell “love” correctly, even though we haven’t covered that word yet in our reading or spelling. So I gave her the gift of Love.

I decorated it with glitter and heart-shaped gems… <3

I even gift-wrapped it so it was extra special!

Coincidentally, the same day I gave her this tiny gift, Daddy wrote on our whiteboard “Love you!” So the next time she started to write a letter, she actually ran to the whiteboard to learn how to write “love”. With both the love card and Daddy’s message, Satori has it totally memorized now on how to spell “love” correctly!

I made a few other cards to give to her on other weeks, these are all high-frequency-Satori-use words.

I got this idea from the book Games for Reading by Peggy Kaye. It was actually the first or second game in the book. We’ve also got her games for Writing and Math books. However, some homeschooling families will take offense in Peggy’s intro where she says that in general, she agrees that teaching should be left to teachers. I always catch those little snippets now. But her books still filled me up with great ideas, so I will let her comment slide, after all, she first wrote it 25 years ago.

Phonics will always have the  highest priority for us, but little games like this will help make reading fun. I imagine I’ll be sharing our final versions of some of her ideas in the 3 books, but if you wanted to check some of her games out, head to PeggyKaye.com’s Game page!