Imagine This View From Your Bedroom Window

Seriously, can you even imagine. Roo loves this picture that we found while searching France on the web. She always talks about how much she wants to live there to enjoy the cheese and chocolate. We have been focusing a lot on our French lessons lately and she seems to really want to learn. I picked up about 15 French childrens books from the Value Village today for super cheap. Although they are in complete French with no English translation she made me read two of them to her at bedtime. I had to pick through the words I knew to give her a very minimal translation of what was going on.  She seemed to enjoy it though and new some of the words herself (colours and such). I would really loves us to be fluent in this language. Not only for travel benefit, but it will open so many doors for her in the future.

Weekly Report 5/17/10 - 5/21/10

This week it feels like summer has officially hit and it is hot in my house. The central air is broken and the landlords have not gotten it fixed yet. I swear it is sometimes hotter in here than outside, the only plus is that we can sit in front of a fan in the house. If that is considered a plus. There are no plans this long weekend so I figured I would do my weekly report tonight, eat something and then read a book until whenever. We had a good school week this week and I must say her new favorite subject seems to be French.

Walking with her homemade wind sock.

In phonics we have started to cover the silent letters. Her reading is getting more fluent and we have begun the 4th set in the Bob Book series for her to read to me at bedtime. Thank goodness for inter library loans that I didn't actually have to buy the 4th set. A money saver that is:) We have begun a review of lessons 14-18 in Spelling Workout. Her writing the words out is currently our only handwriting practice, but for the moment that's all I am going to use until she gets more comfortable with printing. She doesn't really like to write a lot so I think adding handwriting again will be overkill.

Collecting Pinecones

Math has become a less time intensive subject for us since we dropped Saxon. She worked on odd and even numbers, telling time on a digital clock, and skip counting practice. In French we worked on people in a family, made a small family tree and learned how to introduce people in the family. Next week we work on colours.

Making a wish. I'm sure the neighbors love the fact that the Dandelion seeds blew all over their lawn.

Art class is always fun, but this week she got to make a fairy garden. Since fairies are close to her heart, she really enjoyed this project. We finished Pinnochio this week and have started to read The Wizard of Oz as our next read aloud. I'm trying to figure out what to read after this so I can make sure the library has it and put it on hold, but I am drawing a blank. I am open to any suggestions for books you may have enjoyed with your kids.  I think I hear rain beginning and I am keeping my fingers crossed that it will cool the temperature and not make it more humid. I need to move someplace that has cooler summers, I hate the heat:)



Fairy Garden

Weekly Report

I'm sitting here across the hall from Roo, who is in bed but refuses to sleep. Sometimes I just don't have the energy to get her to bed when she fights me, it is almost easier to sit back and ignore her. She is currently humming and singing as song about Iza the cat. I wish I had that much energy, if I even had a portion of it I would definitely be some kind of domestic goddess who has several Phd's and is fluent in 5 languages. Now it is staring to thunder, which normally I find relaxing but of course it freaks her out and she screeches at every rumble.  Now on to our week.

In phonics we finished lesson 131 in The Ordinary Parents Guide. We are doing practice reading from The McGuffey's First Eclectic Reader. I find that the sounding out is getting less and less (or at least the sounding out loud is getting less and less), so the reading sounds more fluent. We have the first 3 sets of the Bob books and I want to order the fourth, I just don't want to fork over the money for it. I wonder if I can get it from an inter library loan? That thought actually just came to me and I will try after I finish this post.

My husband bought a great child size school desk off of Kijiji for $20. The guy even threw in a child size wooden rocking chair which she seems to love for some reason. I am excited about the desk, I just need to figure out a better school set up than what we have. It's hard to carve a niche out of a apartment that has every part of it in use.




Math is smoother now that we have dropped Saxon. Our main focus this week was telling time to the half hour. We haven't practiced skip counting for a couple of days and I was a little concerned. But earlier this evening I walked into the living room and she was pretending to do sit ups with a makeshift ab roller (that she made from a really big stuffed horse) and was counting by 5's during "exercise". Strange but funny, for some reason she likes infomercials.

For Spelling we completed lesson 17 and she did her spelling test on a Magna Doodle. She got all the words correct on her first try. I'm glad we started the Spelling Workout A this year because it is easy enough for her right now and it seems to be a nice review of her phonics. For French we were still working on greetings and introductions. She has been practicing il and elle by introducing her dolls to one another. We came up to our first French quiz today. I had to hold up a picture of a historical figure (they came with the lessons) and then introduce it. She had to listen to ensure a) that I was using il and elle right, and b) that I was saying the correct name. She did really well and I was glad to see that she understood.

Magna Doodle spelling

For art class the theme was Mothers Day. So they made some crafts, the biggest one being a painted and decorated pot with a flower in it. I was impressed that she did most of it herself aside from using the hot glue gun.



Today was a rainy, colder day so we went through the "what can we do today" whines. I think she jumped from one thing to another today without finishing anything. I made a collage of photos of her started projects/activities.

She started a human body puzzle and started to use her knitting machine.

She made me some clay earrings but didn't paint them like she said she was going to. Last photo is of her attempt at redecoration. She dragged her couch and toys into the living room to set up a "house" but decided that she needed to go listen to Abba in the other room instead.

I'm tired and cranky tonight, probably from lack of sleep. I tend to stay up really late and read every night because I enjoy the solitude. The problem is, I'm not a morning person and it definitely makes it worse. Oh well, off to read anyway.  Good night.

I always feel so late with my Weekly Report

Although it is technically still Friday, I always feel so late posting. Especially when you see other posting  weekly reports Thursday, friday morning etc, all way before I even think about it. This was our week back after a nice break to visit my parents last week. I think she was on over stimulation mode this week though, because it was hard to get her back into the groove. I'm tired and it is really stuffy hot in here so I'm sure this will be short and to the point. Roo lost her second tooth last week with a little help from her Nanny;)

Here she is displaying her two missing teeth while wearing headphones to ignore me.

We are on lesson #128 in the OPGTR Phonics and we have really slowed down in order to try to get these rules to stick. I honestly don't think I even realized how many rules there really were until I opened this book. She has been reading a few pages of Green Eggs and Ham by herself everyday and the sounding out is getting less and less. With Spelling Workout A we finished lesson 16 which still has easy enough words to spell that she hasn't had any wrong on her spelling test/review yet. I get immense satisfaction from seeing the growth like the words she struggled with last month are now offering no issues.

In an earlier post I decided that we were going to stop with the Saxon Math. I picked up workbooks last week and decided we will use those over the summer until the next year begins and we stat Singapore. It wasn't worth the fight or tears anymore and it was frustrating for both of us.

This was week two for L'art de Dire for us and it is enjoyable and short. At the beginning of the week we go over a new concept and then we repeat and practice is everyday. It usually takes about 5 minutes and there is a review of last weeks stuff as well. This week were learned introductions and the use of he and she. Il s'appelle, Elle s'appelle, Comment s'appelle-t-il and Comment s'appelle-t-elle. The book comes with flash cards to use and as I held each one up, she then had to tell me if it was Il s'appelle or Elle s'appelle and then say the name of the person on the card. It was fun.

In front of the library posing with the first fully bloomed flowers I have seen this season.

In art class this week she made a wooden spoon person that had a bottle body and various things for decoration. She chose to give it clown features (cut from a magazine), feather wings and a halo (which she lost). I think she called it a fairy clown. I call it a little bit creepy:)




I just got a call to say my book I ordered from inter library loans came in and I am excited to read it to Roo. It is book one of a three books series on evolution. This one is called Born with a Bang by Jennifer Morgan.



Book two is on order because who knows how long it will take for it to arrive.

Weekly Report 4/12/10-4/16/10

Have you ever had one of those weeks where you feel like you have accomplished nothing? School was completed, but as the week progressed, there was some fight in getting her to do some things. Next week is going to be lighter, with a little bit of a break. I did accomplish things, but when I gaze around the house I am overwhelmed with what needs to be done. So any things that I did, seem so small in comparison to what actually needs to be done. Sorry I'm rambling, I think I am just trying to motivate myself.

Out enjoying the cool, wet weather.

Phonics this week had us up to lesson #123 in  The Ordinary Parents Guide to Teaching Reading. We worked on ou, oy and oi sounds. After each phonics lesson we read a lesson from McGuffey's First Eclectic Reader. These are nice and short, but tie in a variety of sounds we have been working on. I noticed this week that she was able to sound out a few words that were 2 syllables like sunset, supper, after and carrot. This is a big step for her since only a few weeks ago she sounded out pretty much every cvc word she read. In spelling she passed her test with her only mistake being she wrote her d's as b's in the word did. After she passed the test we finished lesson 16 this week (actually one page left for tomorrow because she was being crabby today).

This was 2 seconds before she moved a rock from the corner that had a family of ugly bugs under it. She screamed and ran into the house quickly.

In math we are still working on double facts plus one, and counting and regrouping money in lesson 86 in Saxon Math 1. She was sitting quietly the other day so I asked her what was wrong. She said that she was trying to figure out how many more days until we visited Nana and Grandpa. She got the answer right and I was impressed that she was able to figure out the names of days in proper order while counting them at the same time.

Art class began again this week, which she was looking forward to. Class was smaller this time around, but most of the kids that are in it were the same as last time which was nice to see.  They made a painting of a pond and added animals they made from a variety of supplies. I would have posted a picture but the painting was left to dry at the class.

We started our Nallenart French L'art de Dire this week. She wanted to start as soon as we got it even though technically it is for next year. I like it, it is short and easy. We repeated the same lesson everyday this week and it literally only took 5 minutes at a time. I read the lesson, go over the words/phrases and explain them. We listen to the audio pronunciation and then we practice. We did the greetings Bonjour, Je m'appelle, Comment t'appelles-tu?, Comment vous appelez-vous?, and Au Revoir. I am excited to see how this program works long term.

We finished our Mary Poppins read aloud this week and it was funny to have her question the differences between the movie (which is one of her favorites) and the books. The differences are vast, so there were a lot of interruptions during reading time. Tonight we are starting Pinocchio which I am a little apprehensive about because of the mixed reviews.





After being put away for awhile because she wasn't treating it properly, I finally let Roo have her Fisher Price Smart Cycle back. She was on it so long that when I came back in to the room she added some padding to the seat 'because her butt hurt'.

A pillow for the butt!

On another note, I am on lesson 28 in Getting Started with Latin. I am really liking Latin, this book was a great way to introduce myself to it. Thank you for the recommendations on the WTM Forums. I am determined to become fluent in another language (French possibly) and I can really see how Latin will help that. If it wasn't so expensive I would take a night course at the college (or online through the College) for French I, as an additional learning tool. Maybe I will save up for the end of summer time because they have courses starting every 2 months or so which makes it a lot more convenient.

I intend to post my Year at a Glance Spreadsheet this week (maybe;), all I need is to reconfigure it to fit the columns better. I might not have a Weekly Report next week, but I will definitely be reading them.

Nallenart Arrived! Weekly Reports 4/9/10

What started off as a glorious easter weekend became a cold, dark and drizzly week. I actually love rain, but not when the temperature drops to the point of almost freezing rain/snow warnings. We got to bust out our rain boots though, which Roo interprets as a free pass to jump in puddles and mud.


A beautiful, warm day at the zoo on Easter weekend.

The rain begins!

This week I finished my Composer Study Guide that I have been working on. I posted it to my blog this week. It can be found here. It's all ready to go for next year, and we are getting excited to put it into use.

We plowed through this week and managed to get to lesson 120 in The Ordinary Parents Guide to Teaching Reading. Some concepts she grasps quickly and others she seems to forget 20 seconds after explaining it. I guess that is the joys of a 5 year old that feels the need to constantly be moving, playing, singing, or dancing.....you get the picture:)  In Spelling Workout A we have reached lesson 16. This is good reinforcement for her phonics because these lessons are a nice review of what we have learned over the last couple of months. It is helping to improve her handwriting as well, because it is hard to get her to do her Handwriting Without Tears pages. Sometimes there are tears, so we don't do them as much as I would like.




Oh Saxon. I wish I could love you, but there just seems to be no future for us. At least I can look at it as a lesson learned though. Not the right program for us be we are getting through. We finished lesson 83 today and played around on the Geo boards to make congruent shapes. She enjoyed that the best and wrote her name with elastics on the Geo board just to put off doing her fact sheet a little longer. Her ability to count by 2's, 5's and list odd numbers to 19 has gotten really good. She even counted by 5's to 130 by herself before she got stuck, which is neat because she hasn't even count by 1's to 130 yet.

Our cat Iza. I think that she enticed the c at to sit on her math book to get out of doing the work:)

Geography was skipped this week in favour of watching Mary Poppins. She got it for Easter and was absolutely thrilled. I received the book Children Just Like Me in the mail this week. I plan on using it as a geography supplement over the next few years, just to show her how children in different areas of the world live. It is a really well put together book and I have noticed her flipping through it frequently over the last couple of days.




The last of the main books I will need for next years plans showed up this week including to my surprise, the Nallenart French.



More books arrived! We love getting new books in the mail.

Our Nallenart French books. She was so excited, that we decided to start them on Monday. 

I have been waiting for its arrival for awhile now (slow shipping), and now I have everything I need to finish my Year at a Glance spreadsheet. I will post it as soon as it is finished. I ordered both the L'art de Dire (K and up) and L'art de Lire 1 from Nallenart because I didn't know how fast she would go through the lessons. I am glad I did though because when we were looking at the books, she said she wanted to start her french lessons on Monday. So what I may do is go through L'art de Dire from now through summer and then redo it again as a review and to solidify the information. I plan on learning along with her because I did terrible in French when I was in school. I am still trying to figure out if it was because I was actually bad at it or because I didn't care to learn. I still kick myself over that wasted opportunity.