All About Reading 1 has finally been released

I know many have been interested in when All About Learning Press releases new items.

All About Reading 1 has officially been released.

Just click on the link above or here and you'll be taken to the All About Reading 1 webpage.

We have loved using All About Reading level Pre 1 and can't wait to dig into level 1

Weekly Review -- October 31-November 4

This week we kept it easy and light so we could do lots around the house to prepare for Matt's visit.  We're all very excited and can't wait to see him.  He comes in tomorrow (the 5th) and it will have been 70 days since we last saw him.

Everett...

Completed pages 11-13 in his Key to Fractions book and 3 lessons and a quiz in Teaching Textbooks 7. He finished step 8 in All About Spelling level 3, and completed 4 pages in his penmanship book.  He spent quite a bit of time reading to his little brother and played board games with both his brother and sister.

Annika...

Had her first progress evaluation in vision therapy and the Dr. was so happy with the progress she's made.  She's such a happy kid since starting this therapy.  She finally realizes that with the right tools she can learn to be a great reader.   She also completed 5 lessons Teaching Textbooks 4 and was so excited to be getting into multiplication more.  She did 8 pages in Explode the Code book 4, finished step 3 in All About Spelling Level 2, and completed 4 pages in her penmanship book.  

Lucas...

completed 4 lessons in McRuffy math, 8 pages in his penmanship book and 2 lessons in All About Reading Pre-1.  His fine motor skills are really coming along.  He loves having school time each day and looks forward to it each day. 



Next week Matt requested that we plug along with school work while he's here, so he can join in on the teaching and it sounded like a great time to finally bring history and science into the mix.  The kids can't wait to start those subjects.  So I'm going to plug away tonight and get all the prep work done for next week so we can just open our folders and go!

Weekly Review -- October 23-28, 2011

This 'week' worth of school took us two calendar weeks to get through because we had a run of head colds come through and then lots of appointments mixed in there. We're all getting very excited because Matt will be home for a visit in 8 more days.  It will be great to have him home even if it's only for a short while.  Here's what we did this past two weeks.

Everett...

Working on his Peter the Great paragraph

Completed pages 6-10 in his Key to Fractions book and took his first spot check on the Key to Tracker and scored 90%.  He also completed 3 lessons in Teaching Textbooks 7, and half of step 8 in All About Spelling Level 3.  He did 3 penmanship pages and I must say his cursive is really coming along nicely, he starting to use it more often then print in his assignments.  He also worked through week 1 days 2 and 3 in Writing With Skill.  They were tough lessons for him because he's moving from summarizing short paragraphs to larger stories.  He had a rough time with the day two assignment on the excerpt from Wolves of Willoboughby Chase but was super excited when the next days excerpt was from The Story of the World: Volume 3 and was about Peter the Great.  I was happy with the paragraph about Peter he turned in. Lastly he got braces this week and is very excited to have them.  He had pretty sore teeth for about 3 days, but says it's getting better everyday. 

Annika...

I finally got a picture of her. 

Has been doing really well is vision therapy and has begun reading me a picture book each day.  She's really enjoying the books and doing an amazing job in working on her fluency and decoding.  It so nice to see her being able to enjoy reading instead of dreading it.  The books she's read are listed on the sidebar.  Her book work this week included 4 lessons and a quiz in Teaching Textbooks 4, 6 pages in Explode the Code book 4,finishing step 2 and half of step 3 in All About Spelling Level 2, and 5 pages in her penmanship book.  

Lucas...

completed 8 lessons in McRuffy math, 6 pages in his penmanship book and 3 lessons in All About Reading Pre-1.  He's having so much fun playing the games again and doing the letter pages this time through. 

Art

I bought a huge bucket of air dry clay and let the kids go to town with it, they make a few dragon figures and then painted the.  They also helped me make our Angry Bird costumes for Halloween.

Weekly Report-- October 10-14, 2011

Well we finally made it through week 3. The schedule got a little off track, but we're still making progress and have a good plan in place for the next few weeks that works around some appointments we have coming up. Here's what we did this week.

We started the week by going to our first play, it was a children's theater show called Maximus Mars. The kids loved it and can't wait to go back next month for the next play in the series. 

Everett...

completed a lesson in First Language Lessons 4, which he apparently requires the use of his homemade Emu Quill ballpoint pen.

He also completed two penmanship pages, 2 lessons in Teaching Textbooks 7, Step 7 in All About Spelling Level 3, pages 3-5 in Key to Fractions book 2, and wrote a paragraph about Whooping Cranes.


Annika...

refused to let me take any pictures of her working, so all I have is a short write up. She did an excellent job at Vision Therapy which means she got to drop two of her least favorite therapy homework assignments.  She completed 2 lessons in First Language Lessons 3, 4 pages in her penmanship book, 4 pages of Explode the Code book 4, 3 lessons in Teaching Textbooks, and half of Step 2 in All About Spelling level 2.  I also wanted to get her reading again, she's been a bit reluctant to read because of her difficulties and vision issues.  I remembered a post on a homeschool forum by a mom that mentioned she got her daughter to enjoy reading practice more by using picture books instead of leveled readers.  So we stopped at the library after therapy and picked up 8 books, she's read two this week and was so proud of herself. 





Lucas...
completed 5 math lessons in McRuffy math K and 2 penmanship pages. He was super happy to see Ziggy the Zebra from All About Reading make a return.  I dug out our AAR level Pre-1 stuff while we wait for level 1 to be released.  We went through this level before but he wasn't interested in the worksheets, so we picked those up where we'd left off.  He did the pages for Captial letter K and L and had fun playing games with Ziggy.  Here he is with his completed Letter "L" page.

All in all a decent week, now that we're back on track things should go much more smoothly. 

Weekly Report -- September 26-30, 2011

Week 2 is done.  It was an ok week, not as much was done as I would have liked, but we had some days of "life happens" in there. 

Everett...

completed 3 lessons in Teaching Textbooks math 7, and took the pretest for Key to Fractions books 1 and 2 on the Key to Tracker online program.  He tested out of book one, but thinks book 2 will be fun. He also did 4 pages in his penmanship book, 1 lesson of First Languages Lessons Level 4, another part of Step 7 in All About Spelling level 3, and finally finished the first day of Writing with Skill.  Yes this was supposed to all be done in one day, but I stretched it out so he would really understand what was expected of him.  He did great and I really think he'll enjoy this program.

Annika...

had fun again at  Vision Therapy, and has been diligently doing her therapy homework.   She completed 4 lessons and a quiz in Teaching Textbooks math 4, 1 lesson in First Language Lessons Level 3, we pulled out Explode the Code book 4 and she did 4 pages. She also completed 2 pages in her penmanship book.  
Lucas...
did 3 lessons in McRuffy math K and 4 pages in his penmanship book.  I also decided to not use McRuffy for his Phonics work, he preferred All About Reading Pre-1 level, but for now we'll work through Get Ready for the Code and Go for the Code until All About Reading level 1 is released.  I'm also thinking of starting him on All About Spelling pretty soon as well.


Another pretty easy week, but we're getting back into the groove of things.  Hopefully after one more basic week we'll start adding history, science, art and music back in.

Weekly Report--Sept 19-23, 2011

The new school year has begun.  It's exciting to begin the year, but we started later than usual because we were able to take a 6 week trip to the Midwest starting the end of July.  We got to visit with lots of family.  If you'd like to know what we were up to those 6 weeks you can see that at my other blog The Cackling Stump.
Here's what we did this week. I kept it nice and light, because I think it would be best to gradually get into the swing of things. 

Everett...

was happy that school was starting again, but was a little worried because he's now a 7th grader and knew the work would get tougher.  He completed 2 lessons in Teaching Textbooks math 7, 2 pages in his penmanship book, 2 lessons of First Languages Lessons Level 4, part of Step 7 in All About Spelling level 3, and lastly dived in to the first lesson of the soon to be released Writing With Skill (the author, Susan Wise Bauer was gracious enough to send us the first 20 weeks as part of a Beta Testing of the program).  He really enjoyed the first lesson even though we had tested the program about a year ago.  I wanted to start at the beginning again, because there had been some updates and it's been quite a while since we had done the original Beta Testing. 

Annika...

also was happy that school was starting again and began our first day with a trip to the Vision Therapy doctor for her first appointment.  It went well and she's done her vision therapy homework without complaint this whole week.  She completed 2 lessons in Teaching Textbooks math 4, 2 lessons in First Language Lessons Level 3 (which she was excited to start), Step 1 of All About Spelling Level 2, and 4 pages in her penmanship book.  Next week we'll add her Explode the Code workbooks back in, she's still not done with phonics due to her vision issues, but she's looking forward to getting that resolved through therapy this year. 


Lucas...
couldn't have been more excited to start 1st grade.  He eagerly did 2 lessons in McRuffy Phonics and Reading K, 2 lessons in McRuffy math K and 2 pages in his penmanship book.  Yes he's using programs that say "Kindergarten" as the level, but they seem a bit advanced compared to some other programs to me. 


As you can see, it was a pretty easy week, but I didn't want to bite off more than we could chew right away.  The kids had fun and are anxious to continue our lessons next week.  We'll keep adding things in until we're at a full course load.  

The new school tables finally arrived on Tuesday night, so I spent part of the afternoon on Wednesday finally digging through all the shelves weeding out things we don't need anymore and packing up things that won't be used for some time.  I got everything organized and now the school room is ready for our 2011-2012 school year.  I've updated the pictures of the room which will be on the sidebar, but thought they also deserved a post of their own. 

I hope you enjoy the pictures.

Our Curriculum the 2011-2012 school year.

I've made the final choices for curriculum for the 2011-2012 school year. I'm still amazed that it will be the beginning of our 6th year of homeschooling and that I'll now have a 7th grader, 4th grader and a 1st grader.   I'm sure it will be a tough year, but a fun year all the same. 

So now without further ado...

The 2011-2012 Curriculum Line Up

For Everett

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For Annika Clare

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For Lucas 

Focus on Lucas John

I had mentioned a while back that I was going to from time to time do a post that would focus on one of my children and a special interest or talent they have.  My youngest is a wildly energetic boy who absolutely without a doubt loves Pigs.  He has yet to meet a pig he doesn't like, and yes that includes liking to eat them.  He collects stuffed pigs and wanted me to show off his collection.  I hope you enjoy Lucas John's 


Parade of Pigs

A new addition to the School Room

Before he left for a week at sea, Matt helped me with my latest project.
I always hang "counting our way to 100 days" chart for our school year. Unfortunately the one I picked for this coming year was a poster that was 38" wide and needed to be on a magnetic surface because the pictures you add to it are actually magnets. My magnetic whiteboards (for extras) are only 36" wide. I didn't want to put it on my large white board because I use that for teaching grammar, math and other lessons on. So I went on a quest at home depot for some magnetic metal sheets. I found 16" x 36" panning in the duct work section. Dh and I bought 3 of them, some finishing washers and some screws, came home and screwed them to the wall. It was so easy and now I have a 36" X 50" magnetic surface on my school room wall. It took us about 10 minutes to put it up. I used a nail set to punch holes in the panning (it's very thin so one good whack made a small hole) and used the finishing washers to give it a nicer look. It has a bent up edge on one short side of the panning, but you can either cut it off or leave it. I decided to just leave it on and just made sure that edge was always on the top of the boards when putting them up.

Here's some pictures. 

The 100 day poster I needed to come up with a solution for is on the bottom and I hung another poster on the top for safe keeping until I figure out if I want it there or somewhere else.

Each panning sheet cost $5.44, the screws were $1.06 and the finishing washers were $2.56, so it the whole thing was under $20.

Last Day of School 2010-2011

Yesterday was the official last day of school for this year.  We were very happy to be able to go on our traditional last day field trip to the Children's Museum of Virginia in Portsmouth.  We were unable to do this last year because they were closed for a huge remodel.  It was well worth the wait, the kids had a blast!


Enjoy the slideshow and see you in the fall.  I have made our curriculum picks for next year but will post about that closer to the start date of our 2011-2012 school year. 

Weekly Review -- May 16-20, 2011

This will be my last weekly review until we start school in full force again next Sept.  For the remainder of this month we'll be doing math only on a 7 day a week schedule.  Other than that we're done for the year.  

Everett...

Tried out Life of Fred and didn't care for it, so he'll just continue with Teaching Textbooks as his only math program. I'm fine with this, he loves it and learns well from it.  He also worked on some writing of the story from his "Brain" that he wrote a story sequence outline for a few weeks ago. 

Annika...

completed lesson 28 and Quiz 4  in Teaching Textbooks Math 4, we covered 5 lessons in AAS   1, which were doing as a phonics remediation. She also did a good amount of reading out loud to me and took a DORA test, which told me just what I thought.  Her reading level is high 2nd grade, but her comprehension of something read to her is mid 11th grade. 


Lucas...
did a little bit of Math and Get ready for the code, but was very excited to get Singapore Earlybird math from the UPS man on Friday and insisted on doing the whole first unit in book A right that moment.

Art
Since Friday was Everett's 12th birthday he requested a special art lesson of a trip to the local paint your own pottery shop.  The kids had such a blast and talked to the owner about what art camp days they'll be attending.  She's so nice to them (as is her husband) and does really wonderful camp days during the summer where the kids can make some great things.


Here's a few pictures of them at the studio and  Everett's cake (not my best work but it was hot so the icing was really melty). I'll try to remember to post more after we pick up our fired pieces.

Weekly Review -- May 9-13, 2011

We had a few appointments this week, but managed to get some school work done. 

Everett...

completed lessons 25-27 and Quiz 3 in Teaching Textbooks 7. He also completed a grammar lesson and Step 6 in All About Spelling Level 3

Annika...

completed quiz 3 and lessons 24-27 in Teaching Textbooks Math 4, pages 5-6 in Explode the Code, and Step 1 in All About spelling Level 2.


Lucas...
completed lessons 23-29 in McRuffy Color Math K and a few pages in Get Ready for the Code. 

Science

We've wrapped up science for the week by finishing the element books the kids have been working on.  Group 18 was completed with experiment that involved a helium filled balloon that took a trip in the freezer.

Annika also went for her appointment at the Developmental Optometrist which showed she will need some Vision Therapy.  Hopefully we'll be able to start that in the fall.  

Friday we took another trip to the Strawberry farm and picked another 10lbs of berries.  They are so yummy!

Weekly Review -- May 2-6, 2011

Due to lots of appointments and other things going on it was another like week of Math only. 

Everett...

completed lessons 22-24 in Teaching Textbooks 7. 

Annika...

completed quiz 3 and lessons 22-23 in Teaching Textbooks Math 4. 


Lucas...
completed lessons 19-22 in McRuffy Color Math K.  


We also spent Monday on current events and I talked to the kids a bit about the tragedy of September 11, 2001 and the significance of what was on the news.  


Friday was a fun field trip to the Strawberry picking farm.  The kids had a blast talking to the workers about the berry plants and managed to pick 12 pounds of berries.  They are graciously giving me 3 whole pounds to use for jam making and are determined to eat the rest all by themselves.  Knowing my kids this really isn't much of a challenge. 

Hope you all have a wonderful weekend and to all of my fellow Moms, Happy Mother's Day!