Ten on Tuesday

I have so many thoughts running through my head today, so I wanted to write about them.

1. I love Christian's new vocabulary lately- I think "roar" is his favorite word! If you say, "What does a dinosaur say?" He'll say "roar!!" It's so cute!

2. He is also having flashbacks of our water slides from two weeks ago. He walks around the house going, "dada whee!" We say "whee" whenever he goes down a slide and dad would always take him down the water slides. If you ask him, "Do you want to go down the water slides again?" he will respond with "Uh-huh!"

3. I had a little flashback of teaching 8th grade German today. I have been working with Courtney on her reading. We've been learning out of the book "Teach your child to read in 100 easy lessons." Well, it is working, but yet it isn't. We are on lesson 26 and Courtney dreads reading lessons every day! I can kind of see why. Every day they do the same thing. 1. You learn or review sounds. 2. You sound words out (and these aren't necessarily the same words from the previous lessons). 3. You read a short two-sentence story with a picture.

I will say that she has learned all her sounds, including the short and long vowels and hard and soft C sound. She has a problem putting them all together though. She loves the story, but they often take words from two or three lessons earlier (that they didn't review in the lesson) and put them into the story. This is the same pattern for 100 easy lessons!

I know Courtney has a huge desire to learn, but this just isn't working too well. She wasn't retaining the words because she just wasn't using them enough. I started to think back to my teaching days. I knew I had to pull in more hands on activities and get her out of the book.

My first thought was a word wall. I went to walmart and bought a poster board and took all the words that she knew by sight and put them on the poster board. We then went over a new lesson and put those words on too. Now, I can go back and review these words plus add more with the next lesson.

Today we did something different too. I took every word, there were 20 of them now, and put them on sheets of paper. I then spread these sheets of paper all over the living room floor. I said a word and she had to stand on it. She thought this was pretty fun. The next thing she had to do was build sentences. Megan and I got involved in this too. For instance, she found the words, "Mom is a Ruwe" or "Dad is on the sock." She did great and I really hope this gave her some extra practice with the words. We were sure laughing as we were doing this, we were making some crazy sentences.
Now, what do we do tomorrow? Continue to drill these words or add some more?

4. School took from 9 to 4 today. Yikes. But this included everything for Megan PLUS our time with Courtney. We also had lunch about 11:15 and dance rehearsal from 12:15-12:45, so we had some time off.

5. Homework is going better with Megan, we are starting about 5 now, so in case we have a fit, we still have plenty of time to get homework done before bed.

6. I am super impressed with our read-alouds that we have with our Sonlight Curriculum. We just finished "The Stallion of Lippizza" and we are now reading "The Apprentice." I love it when Megan says, "Just one more chapter, please??" I usually don't read more than we have to, we won't get anything else done.

I plan on using Sonlight for both kids next year, but only language arts for Courtney. I also plan on getting Sonlight Science and Horizons math again. I am open for other curriculum, but I can't seem to find other ones that I like.

7. With my hour I had free after school today, I managed to get the toilet paper put away that I bought about three weeks ago. I am so glad that is out of the laundry room doorway now!

8. Speaking of laundry, I finally have that going. Again.

9. I am sure glad it's raining today and is a bit cooler. We had a lot of trouble last week trying to find summer clothes and I didn't feel like dealing with it again this week. I spent two mornings last week trying to find summer clothes and that took time away from school, so we were finishing school Friday at 5! I would rather finish by noon!

10. Why can't my three children play and get along? I love my three children, but three means odd man out, I can't stand it some days! Why do they fight OVER their brother??