Satori and I just did the first 7 lessons in 30 minutes tonight out of Year 1A. I can her see zooming through 1A this summer and then slowing down in 1B. So far it was a fresh perspective and Satori loved it. Now we have two fun and effective math programs!

I must admit I spent the entire weekend printing out all the lessons and worksheets and then placed them in cool binders. I’ll give a more thorough review soon.

Related posts:

1. First Grade – Summer 2010 On June 1, 2010 we started “First Grade”. I will...
2. Mom, is Math all Games? I would’ve never heard Satori say the below phrase back...
3. Save up to 25% on RightStart Mathematics RightStart Math can be pricey but well worth the investment....

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!

Related posts:

1. RightStart – Sums to 10 I chose RightStart for the lack of emphasis on boring...
2. RightStart Math is a “right start” for us! All summer, I kept hearing about this awesome math curriculum...
3. RightStart – More Game We’ve been kinda slacking on math, but finally tonight Satori...

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.

Related posts:

1. Mom, is Math all Games? I would’ve never heard Satori say the below phrase back...
2. RightStart – Sums to 10 I chose RightStart for the lack of emphasis on boring...
3. RightStart – More Game We’ve been kinda slacking on math, but finally tonight Satori...

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.

Related posts:

1. OPG (reading) update Chugging away at our reading program, Ordinary Parent’s Guide to...
2. Kindergarten – 6 week update We are now well in our Kindergarten Spring 2010 semester...
3. All-About-Spelling update We’ve finished spelling compound words in our All-About-Spelling program Level...

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.

Related posts:

1. New Kindergarten Spring 2010 curriculum updated I’ve added a new page to our blog for our...
2. Kindergarten Curriculum This week I added a new page to the blog,...
3. Curriculum Homeschool Curriculum Plans I started homeschooling my daughter Satori in...