Dd6 is doing awesome with her reading! She picks her own books to read, and reads to her sister, to me, or to anyone that will listen. She reads just for fun. She enjoys reading. She picks books that are easy, on level, and amazingly difficult. Just the other day, she read through Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, which is leveled at 3.9 grade level reading material. It was difficult for her and she needed some help with some words, but I was amazed at her ability to work through some of the words, and even more amazed at her willingness to tackle such a book! We are sort of "relaxed schooling" her reading, because I feel she is doing a good job of picking books and practicing on her own.

She has also caught on to spelling. We altered SWR to a point that it is hardly recognizable as SWR. We do 3 new words per day, and practice the past 6 words, for a total of 9 words total. She masters 12-15 words per week. This approach is working wonderfully, since it goes very quickly, is very little handwriting, and is very low-key. She is doing a marvelous job of applying rules to words.

She is almost finished with HWT 1st gr book, and has worked ahead of schedule in it (hooray!) She does NOT want to learn cursive, so I think I'll just print off handwriting sheets. She likes to copy, so we'll just to short copywork practice. She is finally identifying backwards Cs and Ss. She still needs practice with b, d, p, and q (and j!) 

I have not really used our Grammar book very much. Honestly, when I give spelling words and then have her write a sentence with one spelling word, she is picking up grammar (we go over spelling and grammar errors after she writes the sentence). I also occasionally do activities with our spelling words, such as making words plural, adding -ing, or -ed, or changing case (run to ran, etc.) We'll keep grammar as a guidebook, and occasionally pull a practice page from it.

Math. Oh math. Woe is math. Dd forgets just about everything in math. She won't add +1s without a battle. She has gone back into a manipulative stage, which is fine - but I'm not exactly sure how to proceed. Do we go back to basics? Keep plugging ahead? So far, we're using the "keep moving" method in Horizons 1 bk 2.  She understands the concepts. She understands adding, multi-digit adding, place value, subtracting, etc. but has trouble with the practice. She can function pretty well in Horizons, but takes a long time in adding & subtracting. When she counts out the answer, she'll start at 1 and count all the way up (4+2 is 1,2,3,4...5,6 instead of 4...5,6). She CAN count up taking the shortcut, but prefers not to.  It doesn't help that I've thrown several different methods out to her in the hopes that one method will catch on. Now she's just sort of confused.  Wow, it sounds a lot like our reading issue last year!! Although I don't know what to do, I'm confident that she'll get past this little hurdle...all in good time.