A glimpse for you

Okay family and friends...

I'm going to try this out. Please don't expect a new post everyday or even every week. It just isn't going to happen. I will be primarily blogging about our school. I want to give all of you an opportunity to share this experience with us. However, there will be plenty of pics and news of the baby too. I'm sure I won't be able to resist. So here goes:

We got our first order of Kindergarten materials today! Wahooo!! You all probably know how excited I am. I unpacked the box, did a quick look-thru of each book, pried D-Man's hands off of the 6 books he stole (yes, Grandpa D, they were all science books), and organized them on the bookshelf. My prep-work is far from over. I need to order covering supplies and cover all of the paperback books, read some (more) resource books, and study my instructor's guide.

We will officially start Kindergarten on June 1st as D-Man doesn't finish Pre-K at our church until the end of May. We are using Sonlight P4/5 for the core of our school adding in Horizons K math and the Writing Road to Reading (maybe Spell to Write and Read) for Language Arts. I'll be posting more on all of these at some point. We will be working on his reading in the meantime. For those of you who don't know, D-Man is starting to read. A couple of months ago, blending sounds into words just clicked in his brain. Since then, he's trying to read just about everything. Of course, he doesn't have the skills for that yet, so I try to reign him into Bob books and other easy readers. Bob books are great because they increase in difficulty slowly and he doesn't really need my help. Level one readers are a nice push for him. He needs my help with longer words and multi-letter sounds, but he can do most of those books by himself. For the next two months, we are going to focus on learning more phonograms (he knows about 35 of 70) and practicing his reading. He reads either a couple of Bob books or one easy reader to me everyday. I found out that he does better when he reads a little bit everyday. I don't want to push him too much, but if he takes a couple of days off, he gets frustrated when we get back into it. We don't always need to be upping our level of difficulty everyday, just exercizing the brain a bit.