I am the wife of a soldier, and the mother of two little ones (ages 3 and 1). I am passionate about my God, my family, and my country. I chose the title for my blog because I started it around the time that we found out my husband would be going to Iraq. I am so proud of his service to our country. Also I am constantly striveing to become more like christ. Hence the title "passionate patriot conforming to 'His' image.
I will be ordering some more Thoene books to read
Jun. 22, 2008~ Our homeschool this year. ~
My blogs have been very uninteresting lately. I have not been able to post pictures, because my hubby took the camera with him to Iraq last fall. He actually emailed me and said that he wanted me to send him pictures of the kids. I told him that I have been unable to take pictures of the kids, because he took the camera with him. Yet he still kept begging for pictures. I don't know why it took me all this time to realize that I could just get those disposable cameras and mail him the pictures. Duh!
Anyway, I don't have pictures to show you but I can tell you about our home school this year. Basically it has been nothing exciting. My son is 4 and my daughter is 2. So we do not do a lot of school. We play, clean house, read books, travel a lot to visit family, basically try to stay busy so that we don't miss daddy so much. The only curriculum we are doing, is the book "teach your child to read in 100 easy lessons." I am proud to say that my son has made it through lesson 26. He is doing well, however the book is starting to go too fast. He is learning a new sound every other lesson, and he is struggling to remember the last five we have learned. So we have decided to take a break and review those sounds for a while. I still wanted to make it fun, so I made up a game.
I went to walmart and spent $3.00 on a sticker book that has pages and pages of stickers. Then I cut all the stickers out and gave him the book with just the pages to stick the stickers on. I also made up some flash card with the letter sounds that he has learned so far. Out of the 13 letter sounds he has learned so far, he struggles with remembering five of them. So we play a game. We go through the cards, and he gets a sticker for every sound he gets right, but he loses a sticker for every sound he gets wrong. Because there are only five sounds that he is struggling with, I was not worried about him not having stickers when the game is over. We play this for about 10 minutes, (in place of a lesson) and when he is done he gets to put all the stickers he won in his sticker book.
So far it has been really good, and by the time we were done with the first game, he was consistently getting 3 of the 5 he was struggling with right. So I think that we are just going to do two lessons a week for now, and play the review game the rest of the week.
My daughter who is not even t 1/2 yet is now on lesson 7 in the "teach your child to read in 100 easy lessons book" I do not push her at all. I kept doing lessons with my son, and she kept trying to do it too. I would teach him a sound and she kept repeating it. Then she would say that she wanted to do a lesson. At first I kept telling her no. I thought she was too young, and she wouldn't be able to do it. Then I thought. Well if she keeps insisting, I will do the first lesson with her. I didn't do the whole first lesson, I just showed her the sounds for "m" and "s". Then a couple of days later, I was doing a lesson with my son and she wanted to do another one. So I thought she wouldn't remember the first lesson so I thought I would just review it again to make her happy. She remembered the sounds, and my mouth about hit the floor. So I took her through the whole lesson, and she was catching on better than my son did when i first tried to do it with him at 3. (I had to back off with him and wait until he was 4) Now we are on lesson 7. We don't do it everyday, and we stop when she wants to stop.
I am so amazed at how smart my daughter is. She also counts, knows all her shapes and colors, and has an amazing vocabulary, and I haven't even done anything with her. I may have worked with her one day on her shapes and colors, and then the next thing I know she knows them.
I think my biggest challenge in the future with schooling these two, is trying to keep my daughter challenged, and trying to keep her older brother from feeling hurt and giving up learning, when his sister passes him up. They are both very smart. She just seems to ketch on much faster.
The other thing that we have been doing in our school is writing letters to daddy. I have my son dictate to me what he wants to say, and then I have been showing him letter by letter how to write it. It takes a couple of weeks to finish a letter, but my husband is so excited that his 4 year old son is writing him letters.
Other than reading and writing, everything else we do is just living life and waiting for daddy to come back home. It is amazing how much math, science, language arts, and geography they learn just through every day living.
