The ‘workbooks’ which we call puzzle books that my neighbor gave us are fascinating to the girls. Faith did about 10 pages in the phonics one this morning before she started to disintegrate into simply wantinmg to color the pictures randomly. At that point, I told her the puzzle book was to do puzzles and the color book was for coloring… I feel odd about that (she got kinda upset and wanted to keep coloring in rthe puzzle book and doing the puzzles) but at the same time, she had been doing worksheets for nearly an hour by her own choice, and I know she’d later regret it because they wouldn’t be do-able anymore once she’d colored in the ‘wrong’ (according to the instructions) pictures. She claimed she wanted to ‘keep doing more puzzles’ but the two more chances I gave her she just started coloring randomly, so I put the book up. Like I said, she was not pleased but also not too mad. Had she been really peeved I would have figured something else out. I offered another coloring book but that of course was not what she wanted.

I guess it’s like playing at the park, or any other wholesome activity that a child has continued beyond a coherent point… sometimes you have to guide them to quit even when they don’t really want to. Still I feel like I could have done differently. Hmm.

On another note, Abby is really wanting to get into this too because she sees Faith having fun with it. She doesn’t seem to have the fine muscle control to make small precise strokes but she knows all the uppercase letters by sight (!) How did they get all this? Sponges, they are little sponges…

A neighbor gave us some kindergarten phonics and penmanship workbooks today and Faith and Abby both looked through them. Faith did all of one phonics worksheet according to the book’s directions, part of another and then wanted to color the pictures differently than the book suggested. She was OK with that for a few minutes but as coloring books go, we’ve seen better so we switched to a standard coloring book and put the phonics book away, per Faith’s request.

One of the workbooks is the D’Nealian Handwriting Book One. I had D’Nealian as a child and it was very hard for me to judge it objectively and not with the intense resentment I had as a child towards school. I was doing OK with that and then Sean came up and proclaimed, from his arteest standpoint that that was very ugly handwriting and he really didn’t want the kids to learn it. Whew! Not just me!

I don’t like the idea of learning to write and read separately… a little bit is fine but they didn’t learn how to understand spoken language and then how to produce it,or vice versa; they learned it as a fairly seamless whole. And since writing is so much easier than speaking…

Faith can write, with varying accuracy, all the capital letters.

I think we’re gonna get The Reading Lesson: Teach Your Child to Read in 20 Easy Lessons for our basic phonics… it looks a lot more interesting than the Teach Your Child To Read In 100 Easy Lessons. I’m told the lessons are broken up into 4 or 5 distinct bits in Reading Lesson so I figure we’re gonna be getting our 100 or so ‘lessons’ anyway… sigh. It’s hard to decide what to get and this stuff gets *expensive*! I think there’s a homeschool lending library for members of the OK state HSing group… perhaps I could look at several at once there and not have to go out on a limb by ordering {gulp} a $25 to $30 book sight unseen.

Go to http://www.readinglesson.com to see more about that book. I picked it over 100 Lessons and another one called Phonics Pathways because it looked the most interesting to me… who, let us not forget, also has to do a LOT of the reading here!

Of course if anyone has any awful experience with that book or really great experiences with the other two, by all means let me know!

Went to the library and got, on request, a book about mountains (Faith), a book about bears (Abby) and a book about mountains and bears (both girls).

Found some local to OKC HSing groups, look like we will be in good company when we get there. I hope to find some unschoolers and relaxed schoolers down there as we will definitely be going that route for the foreseeable future.

Abby wanted to watch Toy Story. About moving. Astute little thing, my daughter… she doesn’t talk about moving at all but she hears us and sees us.

We are getting ready to move back to OKC so this has elicited a lot of interest from Faith for the ideas of moving and houses and the like. We will be moving from a house to an apartment, a new thing for her. SHe notices all mention of moving in books and television. Abby is interested but not quite as much as Faith… but her favorite book ATM is “Is This A House For Hermit Crab?” about a hermit crab trying to find a new shell to live in. It’s only just now occurred to me that she might be into it because of the move…. hmmm.

Faith is really making progress towards reading! She and Sean sat for an hour last night (he had to tell her *he* needed a break, she was good for more time, LOL!) and she sounded out LOTS of words and also wrote some on her Magna Doodle. I am convinced that the Magna Doodle is the modern-day answer to the slate and chalk of schools of old.

She gets many three-letter words by sight, more or less: cat, dog, egg and so on but managed to sound out and get woodpecker, river, bridge, stag beetle and a few others. She knows all the letters and knows their sounds, more or less… it’s all a matter of decoding now and learning through habit and practice that fear is pronounced feer but bear is pronounceed bare and that sort of thing. She’s learning that some letter pairs together make a different sound than the letters alone… ah, she’s getting it! It’s very exciting to watch.