Reading, reading, reading….

Goodness, this week flew! Do you ever have those weeks that just kinda get out of control and you are always one step behind? Yeah…that was me this week! I missed one of Middle's OT appointments because I slept in past my alarm, I TOTALLY forgot about Scouts on Tuesday…

You can tell I haven't been using my planner again. It's terrible…I know I function better if I write things down and yet…weeks go by where I don't touch my planner. It's a problem…

School prep was on the slow side this week. Just a bit of printing and laminating while I twiddle my thumbs waiting for the room to be finished. T-minus ONE WEEK people! Woot woot!

I've become obsessed with the site Teachers Pay Teachers. There are a lot of really cool things on there! It's true, the bulk of it is geared towards public school teachers, but you can find some homeschooling gems on there as well. They also had a Back To School Sale this week, and you can bet I took advantage of that! So here's what I got:

I got both of these for Middle to help with our reading programs. My heart would call for a strict phonics program with all of my children, but Heavenly Father keeps whispering to me that I need to be creative with Middle. Lots of repetition and not so many rules right now. So we're going to tackle reading with sight words and word 'chunks'. I hope that these will brighten our classroom and help Middle be enthusiastic about reading. Click on the pictures to pick them up yourself!

I also got this for Oldest:

It's slightly above grade level for her, but there were several parts of the packet I thought were valuable, so we'll do what we can and save the rest for when we cover the American Revolution in middle school again.

So that was me for school this week. I have to admit that I am getting *slightly* nervous about school starting. I actually think I'm feeling the pressure of public school starting and my children not going! I scheduled us to officially start school almost two weeks later than public school does…I want to spend the next three weeks getting into a routine of sorts. Start turning off the TV earlier, start expecting more consistency with chores, and start trying to do some structured activities with Baby running around like a crazy person.

We've had reading time instituted all summer, but some days are definitely better than others. Oldest has a love/hate relationship with reading right now. She wants to read big chapter books, I think to prove that she can read and so she doesn't need to practice, but she just really can't handle the text at this point. She barely has enough fluency to read those beginning readers. So I've started to structure our reading time differently over the last week or so. Twice a day ( mid-day and bed time) we sit down in my chair together and she reads a chapter out of a book I choose for her, and then I read a chapter to her out of a book we are reading together ( This week we're reading Amelia Bedelia and Mrs. Piggle Wiggle, and she pretends not to like them, but then she can't help giggling at the crazy shenanigans of these great characters!).

Like I said before…her fluency is terrible, and she gets stuck on very easy words that she should know by heart like "she" and "there", which makes me really worried. BUT, I have noticed that her comprehension is already improving a TON! Which is another thing I was getting concerned about. She would read something and I would ask her questions and she would not know a single thing about what she just read. But I think that reading aloud more frequently to her is helping her to retain the stories. On top of all the reading together, we also try to have quiet reading time once a day where she can pick the book and she has to read for 15 minutes to herself. Even Middle and Baby are starting to get in on the joy of reading! Middle and I are tackling The Complete Tales of Winnie The Pooh, which he amazingly sits for, and Baby and I read a few of her favorites several times a day, but we are also working through Michael Hague's Read-to-Me Book of Fairy Tales, which I am totally loving! I spent more hours reading aloud to children in my lap this week then I thought possible! The truth is, house work keeps. But my chance to make joyful lifetime readers out of my children is fleeting, and I need to make the best of my time now while I have it!

Alright…I've rambled enough for today! I hope you have a productive week!

happy homeschooling!