Satori Smiles

We’ve just finished our 9th week this semester. Looking back on my handy online tracker (Homeschool Skedtrack), I see we only skipped two days. We’re due for a vacation! We will be trekking to Wisconsin the week of Easter, that might end up being a two week vacation.

Almost everything we planned for our Kindergarten semester is going quite well. I would hardly call our stuff kindy stuff anymore, so next fall we’ll call it First Grade year.

Reading – going swimmingly, I love Ordinary Parent’s Guide to Teaching Reading. I firmly believe in phonics and very few sight words so this is perfect. We cover about 1-2 lessons a day, 5x a week. Satori is trying to read things she hasn’t learned the phonics rules yet, but I’m only giving her beginner reader books until we get a little further. We haven’t covered R-Changed words yet, nor multi-syllable ones, so I can’t wait to reach those lessons, then I’ll feel a little better having her read bigger books. Right now we’re on lesson 134, just starting Silent Letters. Here’s a sample in case you were curious about this book, it covers sample lessons and shows an index to all 231 lessons.

This lesson is from last week and shows a sample of what she can read now.

We gave up on Explode the Code, it was just redundant. I don’t miss it. She is still barreling through ReadingEggs, she needs virtually no assistance from me, and everytime she sits down she gets through 3-5 lessons. One day she went through an entire map, but that was probably a mistake giving her that much computer time. I love that it teaches her to “save up” her eggs. For every lesson she gets several eggs, and she can use those to buy things for her virtual house and garden. She understands the concept of saving up, much better than Mama does!

Handwriting is closely being watched now, I mentioned her bad grip in the previous post. We’re rectifying this now, but it will take some time to get used to using a correct grip, slowing down, and trying to write neatly. We cover handwriting via copywork in a few other lessons as well.

Spelling is going well. We started Level 2, and zoomed through the first few lessons, as they were things she already knew (a review, beginning and ending blends, and Y-ending words). We’ll now take it more slowly I’m not afraid to take 2 weeks to finish a lesson, rather than the 3 days we usually take (we do Spelling 3 times a week).

Math – we just learned our hundreds, it is going well. For some reason I don’t get to this subject 4x a week as planned, but we both do really enjoy our RightStart math lessons. We’ve gotten addicted to logic games.

Vocabulary – we started Wordly Wise First Grade, which is still the colorful, fun program. She still absolutely loves this program. Is it too easy? Perhaps a bit so, but now I’ve got a daughter who loves words and I can’t say no to that!

History just rocks. So glad we started this. We’re averaging a SOTW lesson per week, which I didn’t expect to go through so fast at age 5. The next month we’ll be studying the ancient cultures of India, China and Africa, and SOTW dedicates only one lesson per region, so I think we can slow down and take our time on these cultures.

Science – Eek, totally slacking! I am working on fixing this. I’ve been working non-stop on how to make my favorite science curriculum work for us. More to come in the next few days.

Art – Bah, we haven’t done our art program at all this spring. Not too important, as we do artistic things all the time. If I can get more organized, we’ll start this again.

Writing – Just started Writing With Ease, and it is so easy. We learn about great children’s literature while working on narration and copywork. Answering in complete sentences is throwing Satori off a bit though, I can’t wait to cover more grammar so she understands what that means. She’ll reword my question and stick in her answer instead of giving me a natural complete sentence.

Grammar – First Language Lessons is going very well, also easy. Going over proper and common nouns. This program has given her a love for poetry already, or at least memorizing it and reciting it.

You know, looking back, all of the books written by Well-Trained Mind ladies are some of the easiest and most effective programs of the day.

Second half of spring plans

I am planning on adding Geography and Nature Studies as separate subjects. I am so, so psyched about adding these, even if we already have quite a full schedule! I have all materials here ready to go, just have to narrow down what to use and how to use it.

Have you noticed a lot of geography posts lately?

I recently finished reading The Latin-Centered Curriculum by Andrew Campbell. I had to purchase it used, but I did get the second edition version that was written in the past year. You can get new in stock at the Memoria Press website, including an eBook version.

It has given me several things to think about for our classical education style of homeschooling. I already knew we have been following more of a neo-classical style, but wanted to see what this book had to offer. I won’t be following it 100%, like everything, we’ll take what we like and leave what we don’t. I appreciated the inclusive manner the book spoke to me, and am considering adding a few more subjects to our lineup now. (Namely geography and I’m still debating about a few more I’ll post on my self-education blog soon.) I read this book to help convince myself to include Latin in our homeschool subjects, but mostly what I came away with was the urge to simplify and streamline our studies. Due to my personality, I would find it hard to let go of a subject, but now I’ll be looking at all our subjects with a critical eye and deciding whether they are necessary. Ironically, mostly I came away compelled to add several new subjects to our already full schedule!

Anyway, now you may understand why the sudden urge for geography in our household! We now have geography books, workbooks, coloring books and more coming in the next few weeks and I hope to officially study geography once a week from now on. Satori has missed studying it, as we did a quick burst of geography lessons a few months ago. I’m very open to any suggestions at this point – geography for the K-2 years.

Geography has been a priority for me all along, I just figured we’d include geography in our history studies. For Christmas, all I wanted was a high quality globe. Thank you Mom and Dad (Satori’s grandparents)! We totally love it. We carefully chose a globe that will reflect our family’s style. We wanted a colorful, raised relief large globe. One that would allow both adults and children to stand up, twirl around easily, and familiarize ourselves with the world.

So our Trafalgar globe is now a great addition to our household.

If the globe ever needs an update, we can get a new ball at a greatly reduced cost.

Congratulations to Michael and his wife, who both entered the contest for an Amazon $25 Gift Certificate, in celebration of SatoriSmiles One-Year Anniversary.

There were 32 contestants who commented on my blog post, and several of them got additional chances to win by commenting or linking to us.

In two more weeks, we’ll be picking yet another winner! There is still time to enter!!!

Behind the scenes I’ve been working on updating a SOTW Lessons page. I started making this page last year as I was preparing our SOTW lessons, but now I brought it into the blog for easy viewing. Seeing all the chapters lined out on one page makes it easy for me to see at a glance where we are, for current, past, and future lessons. This is a work in progress. I actually told Susan Wise Bauer’s team I was doing this, so that I could come up with something that wouldn’t infringe on her hard work. I think it will actually make people more interested in her program, as well as helping me plan, so everyone wins.

Also updated is our K-1 Weekly Lesson schedule. I’m a spontaneous person, so I don’t have a schedule down to the hour. Click to see full view, or head to the link above. You may notice I finally cut out our Explode the Code workbook, it was redundant. We cover reading/phonics with our normal reading and readingeggs.com. We cover handwriting in our normal handwriting and copywork for several subjects. Spelling is adequately covered in All-About-Spelling. There are subjects that we haven’t covered yet this year, like Science and Art. I do feel bad about that, and hope to get organized enough to include them. Other subjects, like Spanish/Latin/piano/swimming class/drama classes maybe we’ll start later this spring or summer.

A Sample Monday

If I had to describe a typical day, here’s how a typical Monday might go. As you can see from our lesson schedule above, actual sit-down work is less than two hours a day, so most of our day is spent as freetime. For some reason, we both like to do Math at night, after we both get a second wind. It has become very enjoyable, but the disadvantage is that if we’re busy, we sometimes skip it. I need to prioritize certain lessons to make sure we cover them as planned.

• 9:00: Wake up, breakfast, shower, check email.
• 10:00-10:20 – Reading (OPG)
• 10:20-10:40 – Spelling (OPG)
• 10:40-11:00 – History (SOTW)
• 11:00-12:00 – Mama reads aloud, Satori plays ReadingEggs.com, watches educational video, etc…
• 12:00-1:00 – Lunch
• 1:00-5:00 – Freetime – Play time. Possible craft. Possible educational videos/movies.
• 5:00-6:00 – Dinner
• 6:00-6:20 – Math (RS)
• 6:20-6:25 – Writing (WWE)
• 6:25-7:00 – Mama might work on blog, while Satori might color/play.
• 7:00-9:00 – Playtime, mama workout time, TV time…
• Before bedtime, Satori reads a few stories from her readers, and then Mama reads aloud from a chapter book.

February 9, 2010 marks my one-year anniversary for blogging on SatoriSmiles! To celebrate, I would like to do a giveaway. Since I love Amazon so much, I will giveaway two prizes. Two $25 Amazon Gift Certificates will be given away in the next month. One on March 1 and one on March 15.

To enter, simply comment on this post! You can get an additional entry by linking to my blog from your blog/website. You can also get 3 more entries for each comment on this blog from now until the giveaway date – for a total of 5 entries.

Thanks for reading!

Blog comments (if you do not have two previously approved comments) will need to be approved before they go live. I’ll do this throughout the day.

Here are some photos of our newly decorated living room/family room. (I had promised my mom to take these.) This is just below our Loft area where we do most of our lessons. So you can see that the family can stay connected if some of us are hanging out in the Loft or in the living room watching TV.

This new furniture kicks out and reclines, and most of it even rocks back and forth. It’s so comfy to curl up and watch movies or read.

Very important to me in this little redesign of this room was a place to read comfortably. With the adoption coming up, we may be losing our Library room to a bedroom, so I still wanted a place to curl up with my children and read. This recliner chair certainly fills that need!

This piece below was sitting in our basement playroom unused. It is supposed to be a media center, but we decided to convert it to a bookcase showcasing large hardcover books, like the kind you’d put on a coffee table. I’ll get a swivel dictionary stand to hold our unabridged New Oxford American dictionary.

When we bought this house, we inherited all this rustic Aspen furniture. We added two new pieces to this room, the bookcase above, and the end table. These join the huge entertainment center in the room, as well as all the window sills and railings in the room.

This weekend, we  got some beautiful Colorado snow. You can’t see all the windows, but this room has windows climbing way up high and we can see the snow-covered trees surrounding the house.

I just wanted to share a little update on what our life has been like in the week I haven’t been blogging. We are going to be adopting a child (or two), and it most likely will happen this year! Being adopted myself, this is something I have always wanted to do, and this year is finally the perfect time for our family to take on this next part of our life. We are pursuing the Waiting Child program, and are expecting a 4-5 year old child, perhaps even a sibling pair.

In just a short amount of time, David and I have had about 10 hours of training. Mama has been reading up about adopting an older child. We are trying to prepare the house for a home study. David thought it was time for us to replace my old furniture I bought straight out of college, and now we have a living room that I’d be proud to invite people over and hang out in. I’m also preparing the child’s bedroom and bathroom areas, which I won’t get around to finishing until we know the gender when we are matched.

Satori is sooo excited about getting a new baby sister or brother, she keeps talking about her new sibling. She knows that this new sibling could be up to 5 years old, but we had been talking about a baby sibling for several years now, it is hard to stop saying “baby”.

We are still doing lessons, and I’ll be posting about our days once again very soon…

We are now well in our Kindergarten Spring 2010 semester so I feel qualified to muse on Satori’s progress and to reflect on new curriculum choices. I want to start off giving myself a pat on the back for staying on top of our homeschool schedule and getting most lessons done by 11am everyday, considering my spontaneous personality. Huge hugs to Satori for participating with such joy, and for going along with some lessons that I know aren’t the most exciting.

READING

We’re using Ordinary Parent’s Guide to Teaching Reading, and the more I read about other homeschoolers and books on reading, the more glad I am to have chosen this book as our main reading program. It’s so systematic and thorough. Within our allocated 20 minutes, we easily cover a lesson a day, and a thorough review of recently covered lessons and then touch a few lessons covered months ago. Every 7-10 days we take a thorough review day, although our reviews are already thorough, so we’ll be stopping review day. We’re on lesson 118 now, in Section 13 “Common Spellings for Other Vowel Sounds” like AW, AU, OO, OU, OI, EA and so on.

Aside from the 20 minute lessons five days a week, I do not push Satori to read on her own. I want her to learn to enjoy reading and am afraid if I push it, she might get burned out or turned off by reading. Only until last month did I encourage her to read off her easy readers, which are totally below her level, but gives her the confidence of reading. So we do try to have Satori read a few books, then mama read a read-aloud, but I haven’t been consistent.

One milestone we have finally reached is Satori’s eagerness to read books. Monday night (2/8) Satori just could not get enough of her Nora Gaydos books, and read an entire set in one sitting. In 24 hours, we read both Level 1 and Level 1 Advanced sets of Nora Gaydos. She loves the stickers and laughs at the stories. (Ah, the simple things…) We’ve started Volume 2, with sentences like “The gray ape places the cake to bake on a tray.” and “The crazy snakes danced into the lake.”  This is more her level. She also started reading the Biscuit books. I’m so glad that we got this far in our reading program, it has given her the confidence to tackle beginning reading books with ease. I’m afraid she might be getting a bit too over-eager, as she sometimes wants to try to read “my” books, lol!

On a final reading note, last week Satori went gung-ho with her ReadingEggs.com online reading subscription, which we recently renewed after several months. I think she went through several maps in one day! She does this completely independently, which is a nice break for mama. She’s now on Level 2, Lesson 64, although at this point, I think she could get through all of level 3 without learning anything new that she hasn’t already learned through OPG. She is using her math skills to earn her eggs. For example, she wanted to purchase a piano for 84 eggs, but only had 24 at the time. So she worked extra hard and saved up all her eggs until she could purchase her piano.

MATH

Again, I think we chose the perfect program for ourselves. We’re on RightStart A Lesson 39 today. Recently she’s been learning how to estimate, add, write equations, money, even/odd, and dozens of other things. She is not using the abacus to add things like 7+3, but she doesn’t have it memorized either. I’m trying to get her to use the abacus, but she’s doing her addition fast and without mistakes, so we’ll see how it goes. Last night we revisited a Memory Game from Lesson 9 and she wanted to do it over and over. She has a great memory, so she kicks my butt.

I love how learning our coins – penny, nickel, and dime, it reinforces the concept of grouping things in 5s and 10s. She has no problem paying me for an apple worth 87 cents, in several different ways.

HANDWRITING

Last week I posted about a handwriting emergency, letters getting sloppy/careless. We hadn’t been focusing on handwriting at all for such a long time. My mistake! As I posted a few pictures of Satori writing, I noticed a weird pencil grip. I then launched myself into researching grips and discovered I myself have an incorrect grip. I use 2 grips, both are incorrect. Satori uses a combination of Quadropod Grip (which HWT says is okay) and sometimes something totally incorrect. So both mom and daughter have been practicing using the more commonly suggested Tripod Grip.

Satori knows exactly how each letter should be written, right down to its shape and  how to write it. When people write lowercase “e” wrong on TV, she’ll catch it and tell me how they wrote it wrong. If I forget the tiniest little detail on a letter, like forgetting to come back down on lowercase “u”, she’ll point that out and correct it for me. So daughter does teach Mama sometimes!

To get back on track, we’ve started Handwriting Without Tears First Grade book, and are using StartWrite software to make practice handwriting sheets, and are constantly checking our handwriting grip. HWT has a few tricks on  how to get a correct grip, and we’re working on those.

SPELLING

One more Step left in All-About-Spelling Level 1 and we’re on to Level 2.  I couldn’t ask for more from a program, but I think I talk about AAS enough so I’ll leave it at that.

Satori has been writing books about 10-15 pages long. The classical education model doesn’t start “creative writing” until Grade 5 (the Logic stage), but this kindergartner sure loves to write stories. Using her phonics and spelling she knows so far, these are fun (and funny) to read. I really need to take a picture of these books, they come complete with cute pictures! She’s been writing a story about a cat named Liz and her adventures with Gest her friend, and her babies. Here’s a few pages of one story (some misspellings corrected):

Liz met a male. The owners of the cats are mad. (picture of happy cats with collars and mad owners)

Liz saw her owner and she ran fast. The 2 cats got home. The people left Liz and Gest home.

Liz and Gest had a idea. They ran to the cat bed. (Hmmmm….) In the mornin the 2 cats be friends.

Gest and Liz got mayed (married). (Picture of Gest with a top hat and bow on. Liz with a fancy gold collar.)

The End

OTHER SUBJECTS – WRITING, GRAMMAR and LOGIC

Not much to say about Writing, Grammar, and Logic except they’re going well and only take a few minutes a day. Nothing too exciting about these subjects, but there are some Logic problems Satori loves of which she cannot get enough. Satori wants to do several lessons of vocabulary a day. She picks up on unknown words all the time and demands a definition. She attempts to use new vocabulary in her conversation. So cute!

History is amazing, I talk enough about that, so no big updates here. I did plan on going much slower in history, but we are doing one chapter a week, which is what’s recommended. Love SOTW audio CDs to listen to in the car so we can review stories already  covered. I had no clue Satori would enjoy history so much.

SPANISH

We just started using Discovery Education streaming Elementary Spanish which rocks! Satori actually asked for Spanish videos so she can learn on her own, so I simply introduced her to these. They come with a teacher’s manual PDF file. We are only on our first week, more to say about this later.

MAJORLY SLACKING ON…

Science and Art big-time. I think the prep-time of these is daunting to this perfectionist mom. We have however, been watching lots of science videos on Discovery Streaming. I keep meaning to spend an entire day to pre-prepare lessons in these 2 subjects, and then doing several in a week (I schedule these once a week).

My dear mother recently pointed out that no one ever took photos that had me in them! That is very true, it is always me behind the camera asking to get shots of everyone else. So this morning, I figured out my self timer and we got some family photos for the first time in over a year!

I’m partial to black and white for special photos for some reason…

Yes, these photos are bigger than I normally post!

We just got back from Denver where we went to the Denver Nature and Science museum (photos to come later) and I decided to update some of the blog pages.

I’ve been busy working on some photos to update the Homeschool Room section.

Fitness gym…

Kraft Kitchen has been updated with a new child-sized adjustable height table and chair…

… as well as a new Craft Embellishment Center.

History Hangout has new timelines up…

And more… Check out the Homeschool Rooms section.