Our Homeschool Reading

I feel so blessed to be able to homeschool! I believe that we are all spirit children of God, our Heavenly Father. Keeping this in mind, I want to raise them the way He wants me to. For now, I feel that He wants us to homeschool so we are. We have been reading some great books that I wanted to share. Carry On Mr. Bowditch, is fantastic! (By Jean Lee Latham). It is about a young man in the late 1790's and early 1800's who loves to do math. His dream is to go to Harvard, but unfortunately he stops attending school to help his struggling family and eventually becomes an indentured servant. We are reading this as our living math book. (The kids still do regular math, we do Singapore Math texts and workbooks, plus Math Baseball for timed math at funbrain.com.) It is a must read on my list, the children love it too!

Hannah is reading Betsy, Tacy, and Tib and I am reading Betsy-Tacy to Hannah, (both by Maud Hart Lovelace). Hannah is seven. Hannah and I take turns reading to each other, I am still trying to get her to take off reading on her own. She really struggled with reading in public school. Whenever I would bring up my concerns with her teacher, her teacher would say that she was on grade level. We tried lots of things at home to help, but I think that she just needed a lot of one on one time, more than time allowed in our schedule at the time with her in school. (I took the kids out of school last April when she was in first and Emily was in second grade.) We have had to work through some guessing strategies and chunking problems and review a lot of phonics, but Hannah finished her first chapter book on her own this last month, Dolphins at Daybreak in the Magic Tree House series! I am so happy for her! She has read lots of picture books and read parts of tons of chapter books, but didn't complete one until Dolphins at Daybreak. We have started a chart on the wall to help her with vowel combinations that she struggles with. For example, 'oa' is on it with boat, goat, float in parentheses. When we read together and come across a word that she can't navigate it goes on the wall chart. Another thing that I believe has helped her tremendously is reading the Book of Mormon aloud. When the kids wake up they are expected to be "PBS kids", not watch TV, but Pray, make Beds, and read Scriptures.

Amanda (5) just finished the first set of Sam Books (iseesam.com), I am so proud of her. Together, we just finished Abel's Island, by William Stieg for her read-aloud, but she enjoys listening to Hannah's books too. In the mornings, when Emily and Hannah are working on spelling, math, copywork, poetry, etc, I have a circle time with Amanda and Miles (2) and then Amanda reads to me and we do phonics, etc. In our circle time this week we have been reading lots of fun books about cooking. We also do rhymes, finger plays, alphabet and number charts, etc. Later in the day, we include everyone with activites from the unit were are working on. This week we made gingerbread people and a gingerbread doorhanger craft.

Emily (9) reads more books than I can list, but one of her assigned reading books is Li Lun, Lad of Courage, by Carolyn Treffinger. However, she has been waiting for a new prescription for her glasses and hasn't read as much lately because of headaches. She is also reading Pollyanna, Girls of the Lighthouse Lane series, Secrets of Droon, etc. She reads about 15 chapter books a week. I have to tell her to stop reading to play. Most of her reading is before bed, but part of her day is devoted to assigned reading from me.

I am reading Mathematicians are People Too, by Reimer to Emily and Hannah. It is another living math book that we got on interlibrary loan or else I would have waited to read it when we finished Carry On Mr. Bowditch. I highly recommend it. We finished Otto of the Silver Hand last week as a family read aloud, it was a little violent for my taste (I guess that's just the middle ages), but had a good message.