***NEWS UPDATE***
Avery is reading his first chapter book all by himself- Frog and Toad together. We are all so excited!!!




If you are interested in seeing what "level" your child reads check this out.
If you are in Louisiana and want to see what kids around the state are learning at your childs grade level look here.

I only look at these things twice a year. Once at the begining to see what direction we should take, then later in the year to see how far we've come and what we have accomplished. If there are things we missed or maybe are slacking on I save that for the spring/summer season to focus on those areas alone. So far so good!

Our Reading Corners

I have set up a few areas in our house where the boys can go for some quiet reading time, and sometimes not so quiet reading time. In our living room I set up a shelf that has our library books in it and also a nice stack of begining readers for Avery. Everyday he spends 15-30 minute reading aloud from the books from this shelf.

In the babies room I have a refrence center where we have our learning books. Feild guides, National Geographic Magazines, and the Eyewitness books sit neatly on these shelves. We also have a few treasure boxes on this book case for our nature findings and also a box with foreign coins and other rare treasures the boys acquire.

So on days when our school work becomes mundane, we go to our reading corners and always learn something new!

We are loving our new schedule lately. Wake up, eat, read, eat, read some more, eat some more. Avery is especially grateful to my extremely slow state of being these days. Audio books have become my greatest ally. We've been listening to storyteller Jim Weiss who is absolutely wonderful!! Greek myths, Shakespeare for children, American tall tales, and a favorite around here- Rip Van Winkle, complete with Rip's rap!

We have still been doing our "school" work, it's just in disguise.

We are finished the first book in the first grade math curriculum, after his review we'll take the test to see if he retained all of the concepts, if so he can move on to the second workbook that will last the rest of this year. Still not too sure if I like this math curriculum. It's either too easy or worded too weird so that even I don't understand what they want him to do. If anyone who reads this has any great math curriculum ideas please feel free to share!

Also taking a break from the human body unit this week to do science experiments. Avery's request of course. Right now we are oxidizing pennies, soaking paper towels in vinegar and recording the reaction. Interesting how the side that is not touching the vinegar turns green but the underside that is sitting in the vinegar remains the same color. The book doesn't tell me why this happens so I have to do my homework now.

My camera is still out of commission, but hopefully will be back in working order to add some pictures to these boring blog post.

A good day

I'm not too sure if I should post everyday, as most days are pretty routine and uneventful. Like yesterday for example we did our book work (spelling and math) then spent the whole day reading the rest of Harry Potter! We stayed in our jammies, locked ourselves in the boys new bedroom and ignored the rest of the world so that we could spend the day in Harry's world! It was so exciting!! We cannot wait to get started on the second book in the series. It is so wonderful to see Avery really get into a novel like this, where you are so attached to the characters and find it hard to tear yourself away from the book. Such a good feeling, so glad to share this with him!

Today we focused on our grammar lesson where we are learning about adjectives. We played a fun game kind of like I spy where one person thinks of a noun to describe and the other person has to try and figure out what the noun is according to the clues (adjectives) given. He loved that and it really helped reinforce what adjectives are.

After we got all of the writing out of the way, did some math puzzles in his workbook then onto history! This week it's all about ancient Africa, specifically west Africa. To go along with the history text and map work we drew pictures of life in this region at that time, read tons of African folk tales and today we even made handmade African beaded necklaces made from recycled magazines. Tonight I think we will cook an African inspired meal from a story we read today about Anansi the spider- Plantains, cassava (I think we will just use potatoes) and rice.

until next time...