Almost Four!

I cannot believe my baby is turning four tomorrow! Time has been speeding up lately.

Henry is reading well with books for 2nd or 3rd grade.

He has learned about multiplication and division (from a TV show, I guess?) and loves to do simple math problems. I try to present him with word problems from real life and whenever we are waiting around. We just started talking about negative numbers. I guess will start to work on place values soon, but I sort of want to wait a bit to see if he figures it out on his own before I present him with anyone else's methods.

We are learning about plants (along with a Bible lesson about vines and branches :), and this is the first topic where he seems to really understand the books we're reading. It probably helps that I actually bought the books for this topic from scholastic instead of just collecting whatever we had lying around! Henry actually dug through the learning games to find a "root viewer" activity (a deep pot with a plastic window on one side so you can observe the roots), after we read the books about growing plants. I plan on doing the carnation in colored water experiment and a few others when we get home from our vacation, as well as some leaf crafts. Our next science topic is "Nest", or animal homes, which I think will make a good overview topic for a more complicated animal study I am planning for later in the year. Eventually I want to tie together an animal study with a geographical study/continent boxes. Basically we will study a continent, going through some of the countries and talking about the cultures, etc. While we are reading about that country we will study some animals from that place and classify them on a chart.

The final area I am thinking about is handwriting. I was sure that Henry was either behind in fine motor skills or else too much of a perfectionist to try writing. Every time I suggested he try he refused. Then tonight at dinner he started to do a word puzzle on a restaurant place mat and formed nearly perfect letters. I couldn't believe it! That stinker was holding out on me :) I think I may need to find a good incentive to get him interested in practicing more. We shall see...

Homeschool Update

We've been taking it easy here this year, working on things as we like. My main goals are to progress with reading, writing, and math skills and to focus on Bible and character training. We switched our Bible story and devotion time to just before bed and got Daddy involved, and now our whole family gets to talk and pray together before bed. In an ideal world we'd all be alive enough to do this at breakfast but Mommy is not a morning person :), and the kids are not always the easiest in the morning either.

For the reading we've been practicing reading books that are for second grade, and working our way through the Starfall website's first grade readers just to make sure we aren't skipping any skills. Last year we finished classical phonics which was supposed to cover phonics rules through second grade but I feel like we still could use some practice so I'm not moving further ahead just yet. We are also reading books from the My Father's World kindergarten themes, although I've been mixing them up so that we're reading the ones that interest us.

For math we do starfall, add and subtract objects, play games, quiz each other in the tub. Basically just practice when we feel like practicing.

For writing we just finished the Rod and Staff About Three workbook, which gives lots of fine motor skill practice, and we started the bigger steps workbook which is for four-year-olds. I also have some letter tracing worksheets in page protectors that Henry likes to do with dry erase markers so he can do them over and over again. For fine motor skill practice we do coloring and other crafts every day.

For science we stick to the My Father's World books and activity suggestions, and this is the area that I let slide when we get too busy.