I am going to try to do a weekly wrap-up to keep up with what we are doing school-wise. I keep it all in my planner, written each day in red pencil, the observations I make and what Levi picked up or asked or a new skill he achieved...but I plan to transfer it over here as well, to keep it archived in my "memory" along with everything else.
I am in love with Sonlight P4/P5 and my revamped plan. In love!!! The curriculum itself is easy to "knit" into our day, and if 'all' I do is our Sonlight stuff, the daily commitment is 20 minutes. But man, it's a rich 20 minutes. Some of the books that come with the set at first blush may seem kind of blah and and maybe even hokey - but boy was I wrong about that! One of the books we read on a fairly regular basis is Mother Goose's Nursery Rhymes...something I would not normally just pick up and read to Levi. He knows plenty of nursery rhymes, but I don't normally read them to him. But these are the full-length, original proper-English rhymes. We read them during snack time so Luke can hear them too...and I have to stop several times during each one to explain a word or a sentence that was structured very...properly. And then we read the whole thing again.
The book we read at breakfast each morning is a book of favorite Bible stories. We read Levi his Jesus Storybook Bible each night so he knows all the stories, and the one that came with Sonlight was kind of...hokeyville. Or so I thought. Levi loves it. It condenses the stories into one page and then follows up with three comprehension questions that, surprisingly, Levi answers thoughtfully (he usually resists stuff like that).
There is a book that is a full chapter book with no pictures. Levi likes stories enough that I figured he would at least pay attention for a little bit. I took an idea from another friend and gave him a notebook and colored pencils and told him to draw (scribble) and color while I read to him. This book, again, had pretty high language in it but was a very amusing little story. Levi colored quietly (again, shocking) next to me while I read, and then asked for another chapter.
Another book contains folk stories from around the world. I love them! I am having so much fun learning through these kid's stories!!
I could go on and on about each book. There's a pile of them. I would honestly recommend this so highly that even if you AREN'T planning to homeschool or even hate the thought of it, but love to read with your kids and are tired of Berenstain Bears, get the teacher's guide (so you can follow the easy and well-laid-out schedule) and grab the book titles off the Sonlight website so you can check the books out at the library. They are just wonderful, deep, insightful books that gently introduce science, history, language arts, social studies, and the Bible.
This week we focused on the verse Proverbs 4:20 - Pay attention, my child, to what I say. Listen carefully. We talked about what attentiveness means. One morning Levi came into the kitchen and asked what his verse was. I recited it for him. He said, "I know. So what's my verse?" I guess I must say things like pay attention and listen carefully frequently enough because he didn't notice that I was actually reciting his verse. hahahahaha
I did not feel the pressure to print off reams of papers, come up with Pinterest-y activities, or cobble together manipulatives. I had a loose plan for each day and am learning to see the learning that takes place during their imaginative play. Levi pretending to take everyone's ice cream orders at the park (yes, to all the kids that were there) and then 'serve' each of them ice cream and water and making sure they all 'had' what they needed...and then finding a huge branch to drag through the park pretending he was a farmer and it was his plow was WAAAAAYYYYY more important than making him stay home on a beautiful morning to practice coloring/writing skills on a stack of worksheets. Which is something I may have done last year.
So here is what I observed this week:
Levi focused a LOT on puzzles. He pays very close attention to his puzzles and works hard at them. He received a new floor puzzle that was a map of the world, and was very eager to put it together. We talked about different countries, distance and travel, continents, and how to differentiate land and water on a map. This was a ten-minute break from cleaning up the kitchen after breakfast. Not a huge planned-out thing.
He has not been able to use scissors, which is not a big deal. He just was never interested. When he told me he used them in Sunday school, I handed him a pair and told him to prove it. He did!!! Ha!
Josiah's favorite game is the alphabet version of Sequence. Ergo, Levi wanted to learn it too. So I taught him how to play, and then he taught Luke. Luke just stuffed all the pieces in his mouth.
He drew quietly while I read from his Mr. Wiggly book.
One morning I set out a bucket of popsicle sticks for his morning project. He grabbed Scotch Tape and spent the better part of the morning creating things.
He has a list of chores to do each day and gets paid twenty cents each evening. He was very enthusiastic to do his chores now that he gets something for them, and he was terribly proud to receive his allowance. He will save 10%, tithe 10%, and keep the rest. He wants to stay in the church service with us on Sunday so he can put his money in the offering plate.
We harvested a ton from our garden this week.
He has been asking SO MANY questions about God lately. Where is God, where is heaven, etc. And he listens very carefully when I have the radio on - and asks questions about news reports (which means that even on a Christian radio station listening to the news, I have to turn it down frequently because I'm not ready to field questions about birth control, abortion, homosexuality, and mass killings) and Bible verses he hears quoted. Being "prepared to have an answer" has taken on a whole new meaning. He's a deep thinker, this one.
ALLLLLLL of this to say....let me be clear that life ain't perfect here. We have dealt immensely this summer with (typical three year old but not necessarily diminishable) discipline issues. I won't go into detail, but suffice to say some of the things we've dealt with have surprised us, shocked us, and left us literally in tears. It seems like we have exhausted every sane form of discipline, loss of privileges, tone of voice, being firm, being gracious...and usually seem to be hitting our heads against the same wall. I don't say this to be disparaging to Levi - he's a normal kid!!! I just don't want to paint the picture that we're singing hymns and finger painting and having a grand old time here every day. It's hard being three, and it's hard to be a parent to someone who's three. Oh- and throw in a little brother who screams, kicks, bites, and pinches all of us. Some days - this week included - I'm ready to stick a fork in myself and declare "DONE" before 8am.
BUT - I do see a significant shift in the attitude issues this week when I'm being intentional about setting aside some time for each boy. So that's a score. So far.
Lukie J. - he started pairing words this week, and once he started he took OFF with it. We are likely the only people who can understand him, which I'm sure is normal. He says stuff like more please, more cheese, more (of a lot of stuff), bye-bye mama, etc. Today at the farm he pointed to the tractor that was broken and said, tractor broke now. He deletes most of his end consonants so most of his words are only half said. He really likes to sing and was actually trying to sing a verse of a song from VBS (I am a! I am a! I am a indecipherable garble chi' o' Godddddd) and the end of the ABC song (Now I indecipherable garble sung in the tune of the end of the song). He turns 2 three weeks today and Levi starts school the same day and I think I'm going to be a bawling hot mess on that day.
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