19 January 2009

Where have you been?

I know that's what you're thinking. Seems like we just disappear every now and then.

In the last month. . .

. . .Caedis has gotten two teeth! She got her first on Dec. 30 and didn't get her second tooth until two weeks later. I had never seen a baby with just one tooth before. To be honest, I was kinda hopin' that second one wouldn't grow for a while longer, just because it was cute to see her with just one. I know this is silly.

. . . Karis has lost another tooth. Other than that, she's discovered she likes the color yellow. I don't think she likes it enough to give up pink just yet, but she did resemble a banana yesterday at church. No joke. Yellow shoes, yellow footless tights, yellow shirt. . . She looked so cute!

. . . Silas is still, um, Silas. He still walks around the house singing 'boomer sooner' almost every waking moment. You know, if he were to wear a different OU shirt every day, he'd have enough to last more than a week? Granted that he doesn't dirty his shirt and can wear it all day long. Which never happens, BTW. I've just gotten used to either cutting a hole in a trash bag for his head to go through, covering him, blending his food up and putting it in his sippy cup to drink or letting him wear a dirty shirt for the rest of the day after breakfast.

Those are our kid updates for the month and now to where we (I've?) been.

For those of you who don't know, we home school. Ah, yes. And we love it!

The only thing is we've had a few roadblocks with Karis. She is so good at math, science, grammar, history, and the list goes on, until you get to writing and reading and sometimes art. We follow The Well-Trained Mind pretty closely and I highly recommend it to anyone looking to home school. She recommends two books to begin with your child in reading. The first one I'm going to talk about is Phonics Pathways. The first thing I did was check and see if my library had it. You know what? They did! I figured if I liked it, if it worked for Karis I'd buy it after our three weeks was up from borrowing it from them. We began our reading lessons and holy cow it took 45 minutes to struggle through one of their simple lessons. I continued. I praised her small efforts and kept pushing through to no avail. It wasn't getting better, it wasn't getting easier and she was starting to hate her reading lessons.

Back to TWTM for me to see about plan B. The next book recommended was The Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading. Library didn't have it. Shucks! So I shell out the money and buy it convinced it will solve all our reading problems. Are you laughing yet? Let's just say I actually pushed Karis to finish this one and again, it was a struggle.

Problem is that she doesn't recognize words that she's just read. She sounds every word out every time. Most of the time she puts the sounds together and gets the word right, but do you have any idea what that's like? I'm sure some of you do know and it's so frustrating!

Off to do some research and find out what's going on. . . and that's where I've been.

Here. Only looking up answers to what's going on and what we can do to help her succeed in reading.

Both Phonics Pathways and The Ordinary Parent's Guide use the same methods to teach, just do it a bit differently. I wanted to try a different method.

I came across a few articles and a few recommendations, but couldn't find anything that amounted to much. What I did find was a website that offered more reading curriculum with a different method.

The book is called The Writing Road to Reading. The site suggests using the fourth edition, but the library had the fifth edition so I got it. It is what it says. It teaches the child to read as they are writing which includes spelling in that. It's different. Karis dreads it.

The day I told her we were starting a new reading book you might as well have told her you were taking all her Barbies away. And that's serious talk around this house.

We've just finished our first week of this book, will start our second week tomorrow (we didn't have school today for MLK), and on Friday she turned to me and said 'This reading and writing stuff is fun, mom!' She's getting it. The lessons don't take a struggling 45 minutes to do. She's not dreading it. And she's advancing. So far.

I only hope it continues and although I don't think it's solved/solving all our problems, at least she's enjoying learning to read and write for now.

P.S. Any thoughts, suggestions, recommendations you may have I'd be happy to hear! What method of teaching yours to read has and hasn't worked?

3 comments:

Lisa said...

okay i just thought i'd share what my sister's mother-in-law did when her youngest was learning to read. she labeled everything in the house, and i mean everything. that way emma would see the word associated with each object. that helped her to start recognizing those words. sounds like lots of work but maybe that would help...

Granny said...

Just a caveat...in my 25 years of being a homeschooling mom and advising homeschoolers, I've never met one person, not one, who could stick with Writing Road to Reading. I lasted six weeks. It's very confusing, and I recommend that if you go with this method, you take a class first to help you make sense of how it's set up.

Otherwise, I think you're doing all the right things and some kids just take longer for the light to come on. Doesn't mean you're doing anything wrong--it means that she has one of the brains that's probably more focused on numbers or something else in her world than letters. It'll come!

Rebekah said...

Alright, some stuff for me to start thinking over. . .

THANK YOU for your input!!!

I'll keep you updated on how things are going!