What's D-Man reading?

D-Man loves to read.  Now that he's had such a big jump in reading level over the last few months, it's widened his book selection.

For school we're going through Sonlight's Readers 2.  These books are pretty easy for him, but I can't think of any reason for him to read harder books at his age as long as he's enjoying them.  His current book is The Beginner's Bible.  He loves having his own Bible to read.



D-Man reads a lot of books for fun.  He gets to pick these books himself, but I do steer him towards appropriate selections at the library.  We also have a pretty nice collection of books here at home for him to choose from as well.  He'll often take 5 or so Dr. Suess books from our shelf to bed with him.  Last night, he decided to start reading The Christian Liberty Nature Reader Book 1.  These are great readers for kids who like science.  I asked him how much he'd read and he informed me that he's reading one chapter each night.  Last night's chapter was about a wasp that digs.  He told me all about this wasp and how it isn't a wasp when it is first born.  I was surprised he remembered so much information. 

Shelfari Bookshelf and other blog improvements

Look at the bottom of my blog to see the boys' Shelfari Bookshelf.

I got this widget-idea from a fellow Sonlighter and blogger, Jana. Thanks, Jana! I've seen some bookshelf widgets, but this was the first one that impressed me. Now, you can browse through and see exactly what's on our shelf at the moment. Eventually, I'll split up the boys' shelves, but they all sit for everyone else's stories right now. FYI, mine's in the left column if you're interested in what I'm reading. Michael Crichton's last novel is a must read.

I also was finally able to set up my blog on my own domain: www.whatarewelearning.com I've been trying to do this for awhile, but finally got it. Yes, I feel like a blog master. I'm not, but I do feel like it.

Our Current SL Reading List

Part of school for us is reading great books. For D-Man's Kindergarten year, I chose to use Sonlight's P4/5 curriculum. Yes, technically it is for preschoolers...sort of. The recommended ages are 4-5 so, even though Daniel is in Kindergarten, he falls into the intended age range. After using this program for the 8 weeks (and making it through 10 weeks of reading), I know I made the right choice. We love the book selections and Daniel is getting a lot out of them. P4/5 is titled Explore God's World. It includes books that discuss different cultures and stories from many countries as well as some great storybooks. It is a gentle intro to reading aloud, geography, science, and social studies. It is the fun part of our schoolday. So here's what we're reading right now:

This is our Bible. It is a children's Bible that includes many of the stories that other children's Bibles omit such as Balaaam's Donkey or the Bronze Snake.

This is our science book for about 15 weeks. So far we covered the year including months, seasons, and holidays and nature. Next up, the science fair section. Dad-this section includes some physics.

Our Mother Goose collection for the year. Considering the ages of the boys, I'll probably be reading from a Mother Goose book for the next 10 years. At least I have a few of them to keep it interesting.

This book is a good example of why I chose to use Sonlight. I would not have picked this book to read to the boys. I'm just not a fan of poetry so it's a good thing that Sonlight thinks poetry is important. The boys love this book. We read some of the poems over and over. I know that they don't understand them all yet, but that'll come with age. The poems are accompanied by beautiful Eric Carle illustrations. I will admit that while poetry isn't my favorite genre, these poems are good and the artwork is breathtaking.

This is the little people's version of The Book of Virtues by William Bennett. It takes exerpts of different stories (mostly classic literature) and uses them to illustrate virtues. We haven't read much from it yet, but I think that I'd like to create a mini-study of virtues from this book when we're finished with this core.

This is by far my favorite book in the core. It is a storybook filled with stories of a helpful bunny gentleman. Even though these stories were written 75 years ago, the boys can't get enough Uncle Wiggily stories. They are written in a completely different style than today's children's literature and stretch the boys' listening ability and vocabulary.

We haven't actually started this book yet, we'll start it tomorrow. I'm pretty excited about it, though. I don't really know anything about art so I'll be learning about it along with the boys. D-Man, however, really enjoys art, so I think this book will inspire him. I plan to start an age-appropriate art program with him later this year as well.

This book ranks among D-Man's favorites. He loves the Rabbit and Tiger stories. Unfortuately, outside of few in this book, I haven't been able to find anymore. This book compiles several stories and myths from countries around the world. We'll be rereading many of them when we start our geography curriculum soon.




This book introduced us to the Island of Banilla and all of the people who live there. Everyone on Banilla has a different job and each week we explore one. This week we are covering the pilot which D-Man should like.

Some of these books we'll read throughout the year; others we'll finish and then go on to the next topic. D-Man really enjoys our reading time. I don't require C-Monster to sit with us during our reading-time but he usually does. It is a nice, quiet time for us each day.

Our New Shelves!!

Bunking the boys' beds left a large void in their room where Caleb's bed used to be. I had planned on buying a bookshelf for the spot, but it would have taken me several months to save up enough money for it. That's okay, I can be patient. Then, I read about gutter shelves. That's right, gutters. They are really made out of plastic gutters from Lowe's. I saw them on Sonlight's message board and thought it looked like a great idea. Once I found out that it would cost me less than $60 to do the whole room...I was sold! I called my dad and he was supportive, but Shawn thought I was crazy. Oh well, that's his usual reaction to most of my ideas. Last week, I finally got the $$ and time to do it. Well, I didn't actually have the time, but I fit it in anyway. Once I got the materials from Lowe's, the project only took me about 2 hours to complete including having 3-yo and 5-yo helpers.

And here's the finished product:
Pretty cool looking, huh? Both my dad and Shawn agreed that they look great. They hold a lot more books than I thought and are very sturdy. After I had installed them, I found them described in a book that I'm reading called The Read-Aloud Handbook. The author claims that these shelves increase reading as the children are more likely to read a book when they can see the cover instead of the spine. I'll post more about this book later, but it was nice to get some validation from a real book. We don't really have a problem with our boys "reading" books, but at least now they are much more likely to put them away when they are done.

I also used the gutter shelves at the end of the boys' beds.

The boys read a lot of books at night so there were always books littered at the bottom of their beds. This created three problems for me: 1. It is hard to make their beds in the morning. 2. The books often slide off the bed. I have to remove the drawers underneath C-Monster's bed to get them and they can get damaged if they fall off of the top bunk. 3. It drives me CRAZY!

I do want to encourage them to read at night so I don't want to get rid of the books; I just needed a safe way to store them next to their beds. The gutter shelves work perfectly! They are plastic so I don't need to worry about the boys hurting themselves and they don't take up much room.

Overall, I'm very happy with the environment that this creates in the boys' room.

I'm trying to figure out this blogging thing...

Man this stuff is confusing!! Okay, I just got the tag cloud to work...I'm a genius! Hmmm, I wonder why D-Man thinks that he can read fluently just because he has mastered CVC words?

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.