April Showers of blessings continued…

Monday making pizza time-

Reagan having daily reading time with me (one of my fav parts of the day)-

I have used a pretty well-rounded approach to teaching her to read, I think. Here’s one of the tools that I have used to teach her phonics- Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons by Siegfried Engelmann. It is one of the less colorful and fun tools that I have used with her, but it has helped her a lot. She is over half way through the book and gets excited every time she successfully reads a harder/longer story.

Here’s a video of her reading the story portion of her lesson (a new story)-

I have a good friend who is teaching Kindergarten in our public school system. She has been an encouragement and good resource during my homeschooling moments of weakness! She does a “Daily Fix It” with her kids every morning to help them with simple writing rules (first letter of sentence capitalization, ending punctuation, etc.) I started doing this with Reagan to give her an opportunity to work on these skills. Keeping the skills learning time separate from her personal writing time has lessened her frustration with writing and allowed her to do her own thing. I write a sentence with mistakes and a picture. The picture is probably unnecessary, but she enjoys seeing what I have come up with! She has to re-write the sentences and fix the mistakes. Sometimes, she will color my picture or add to it (like the sad face heart in this one! haha). I have kept the sentences pretty easy and basic so she can easily read them.

Home school on a nice Spring morning on the deck-

Reading Junie B. Jones to her while she colors- she LOVES Junie B. I admit, I do, too.

Reagan on first base and Emmy playing in the dirt-

Max enjoys climbing on the bleachers at Rea & Emmy’s baseball games-

I introduced Max to abcmouse.com. He learned how to use my computer mouse.

Early AM Thursday morning- “I-75 and Hardees”

They barely stay awake to eat there breakfast-

Rea’s art from Miss Margaret’s class – “GYOTAKU”

Some things I like about this class is that Reagan learns all sorts of art methods, is exposed to a variety of materials, and learns art history! Miss Margaret crams a lot of material into a short period of time every Thursday.

Here’s the scoop from Miss Margaret on this piece-

“Gyotaku (gyo = fish, taku = rubbing) was invented in the early 1800s in Japan by fishermen who wanted to record their catch. This was their livelihood (not sport fishing as we have today) and the print allowed them to document the size and types of fish caught and still take them back to be sold or eaten. Also, because certain fish in Japan are revered, the fisherman could release these fish back into the water after taking their rubbings. Japanese fishermen took newsprint, ink and brush out to sea with them. It has also developed into an art form; many now create prints for their beauty and artistic elements.

Our artists used their choices of printmaking ink colors to paint life size fish cast from real fish. Students chose one of an assortment of species, Blue Gill, Star Fish, Flounder, Piranha, Angel Fish, Trout, Perch, Bass, or small Walleye Pike. They then placed their paper over the fish and rubbed for a monoprint.”

Emmy and I had some zoo time while Rea was in class. I like getting opportunities for one-on-one with her. I feel like she needs more of that being our middle child! Here she is putting on some lipstick before we go in at the zoo.

Girls playing DDG with friends at TC…

My air conditioner or windows wasn’t working on this super hot day so we had to make a pit stop at Walgreens to buy some of these water bottle fans. They helped, but we were still pretty much miserable.