Progress Report

I realize that I share a lot of the fun activities that we do, but I do not often describe our day-to-day schedule. Some may think that we do little that resembles actual school work, so today I want to give a little update on the progress we have made so far.

Hannah is about 1/4 to 1/3 of the way through the Sing, Spell, Read and Write first grade curriculum. She has regular spelling and reading tests and does very well on them. I did a basic online reading assessment with her the other day and discovered that her reading level is 4.7. This means that she is reading as if she were in her seventh month of fourth grade! I am not sure about the accuracy of the online test, but I do know that she reads very well. Last night, for example, she read about half of our Bible story, easily handling many multi-syllable words and recognizing letter patterns that I have not even taught her yet.

In math, we have not done as much, but Hannah has learned to add numbers where the sum equals 1-9, and she can theoretically count up to 999, recognizing the units, tens, and hundreds places. Though she still struggles a bit with handwriting, especially with writing letters backwards, she has improved quite a bit, and all of her writing is legible and good for her age. Additionally, we have done units and activities based on books and interests that she has expressed.

Ben has also been blossoming in his work. He loves to do Sing, Spell, Read and Write, and he has finished through letter K. He actually knows almost all of his letter sounds and is beginning to understand the concept of rhyming. Ben's teacher gushes over his ability to cut with scissors and trace very neatly, and although he has trouble with the lower case e, he can just about write his name independently.

I enjoy homeschooling more each day and love pouring my energy into my kids' education. I do not often detail our daily schedule, because workbook exercises do not make for very good blog posts. But all of us learn and grow a little more every day, through all of the tasks we accomplish, and I like to think that we are closer as a family as well.