And then there are days...

...when you feel like you are talking to a wall.

Just when you've finished patting yourself on the back on how well Divagirl has been progressing, you take a day to review some concepts she'd mastered months ago. Sounds easy, right? Evidently not. She's had her numbers to one hundred since January. Every once in a while she'd forget some of the bigger middle numbers so we'd been working on numerical order NOT starting with 1. Things had been fine. Until today. I challenged her today by having her start at 33 and end at 51 and all went well until 39. So I reviewed tens place and ones place and asked her what comes after 3...(4) and what comes after 9...(10) and showed her the pattern of the other numbers such as 30 is 3 tens, 20 is 2 tens, 60 is 6 tens, you need 4 tens, what would that look like? Um, 5? (insert head slap) No. Repeat previous lesson, she says she gets the concept, there should be a 4 and a 0, do you know of a number that has a 4 and a 0? Yes, 90! (hitting head on table) No. I finally guided the process more by putting the number in front of her and asked her to find the number 40. Yes, I totally cheated and she totally needs more work in this area, but not today.

Lessons al Fresco

 

It was so gloriously wonderful outside today we just HAD to do our lessons on the patio. We reviewed our presidents 1-15 and learned 16-20. Is it weird that I have a crush on Franklin Pierce??

 

Then we moved on to our Spelling lesson and worked on spelling with the short 'a' and short 'i' sounds. She's getting really good at segmenting words into sounds.

 

Next came handwriting. She wrote 4 new letters for the first time today: h, k, f and qu. We learn them as phonograms so 'qu' is the team we learn instead of 'q' since its very rarely used on it's own in English.

 

Finally, we finished lesson 11 in her Reading Lesson. I can't say enough praise about this book. It breaks new concepts down into manageable increments and uses temporary hints to help decipher different sounds. After you've had enough exposure to the new concepts the hints slowly disappear.

 

Time to read aloud together. Snack time is over and my computer time has expired, lol.

I hope you are having blissful weather wherever you may be.

Reading Update

Divagirl is a Daisy Girl Scout and yesterday she had a troop meeting. They worked on Sunny's petal, friendly and helpful, and the girls who wanted to participate could take turns reading Sunny's story out loud to the group. Divagirl took turns reading! I was so proud of her progress I could've burst :) She did so well reading fluently for the most part, sounding out the bigger words when necessary and getting a little help now and then. And to think in January she couldn't retain a handful of sight words! I really had my doubts whether or not she'd be reading anything at all until next Fall. It just validates that I made the right decision to homeschool her.