Bigger Hearts 1/2 pace Unit 18
This week we had to get back in the swing of things after our week away on vacation.
We had been struggling with handwriting and I have been doing some activities with Elijah and he is doing so much better. One of the things I implemented was doing the model writing like Julie suggested and putting highlighter lines in between the words. Combined with some other activities we are making strides toward beautiful penmanship. We also took a break from cursive at the moment since his manuscript was suffering greatly. I intend to wait till next year to start over with cheerful cursive, and just focus on manuscript at the moment. I have a mostly gross motor ds here
I think I said it before, but I have to say it again: " I love R&S 2 and the way it teaches! I am amazed at the retention that Elijah has and I am learning so much myself being a foreigner. We are learning about using adjectives, which is much needed in our family since we are not the greatest detailed story tellers. Now all I have to do is remind Elijah to use more adjectives when he comes to tell me stories. Even the little ones remember the lesson that we had a few weeks back on placing others before you and doing so when you tell a story. It's so great how it sticks the R&S way, because it is done from a Biblical point of view. God's WORD has such power!!!
What a blessed program. Thank you Carrie for recommending this great and godly program and introducing us to it:D
Dictation is going super! We are on lesson 69 and loving it still. With the handwriting issue I had taken a break, but did not want him to forget the valuable spelling lessons and started back up. (The handwriting was getting so mixed up, sometimes that he was doing letter reversals and/or just leaving letters or words out and even saying out loud how to spell the word and writing it completely wrong). Now we are back on track. Yeah! He catches his mistakes again and catches the letter reversals. With all this I must say he did have a bad asthma attack and had to get back on his inhalers and nebulizers and that usually really takes a toll on how he focuses and writes.
We finished 2A and he was delighted! I do think the celebrations we have for finishing our books helps a great deal. We went out and had ice cream at the Amish place. He did great with the reviews, I am glad I returned to singapore after a slight detour a few years ago, caused by fear and anxiety of not being able to teach math. Elijah's comment after doing the first couple of pages this week in 2B was. :"The math is easy again, but I know when I get to the middle of this book it will be hard. They always make it easy for us in the beginning". I had to laugh and enjoyed the fact that he discovered it after doing a couple of books with Singapore, that the intensity of the subjects changes. It must be different for the different kiddo's as well. We had quiet a time with computation in the beginning. I think that partly it requires more precision that he could handle at first, but as the reviews showed he got it
The other jump in progress I noticed is in doing our vocabulary words. It takes less time to find his words and he is needing less help finding the longer words in his dictionary. When we look up words in the 1828 Webster, it is more difficult. Elijah uses a Bob Jones dictionary for most words.
History is still the favorite subject of this guide for Elijah. He loves it and enjoys all the stories that he totally places himself in as I read them. His narration has improved as he is being encouraged with much positive feedback. I sometimes take a turn and have him comment on what I might have missed. I love how Elijah has gained some independence with his activities. He now does his time line with minimal assistance.
We had a ton of fun with the science this week measuring out the wingspans of the different owl's and than measuring Elijah's arm span to compare. He is in the 90th percentile and so his arm span turned out to be 50 inches, only 10 less than a horned owl. This gave us a good idea of huge this owl's wingspan is.
We finished our two adventure books for DITHOR:
Stone Fox and
Dolphin Adventure and Elijah was filled with joy to get to the end of the books so he could re-read them from beginning to end.
For our project we picked the activity to write a thank you card to Wayne Grover for inviting us on this great adventure. Here is the result.
We are taking off the month of October doing only a little bit of handwriting, math and of course since Elijah is a book worm, I will not have to even tell him to keep on reading
Thank you Carrie for all your hard work and dedication in writing these guides for us Mom's to enjoy
I am going to post some pics in just a sec. I am excited because we are actually finished with a unit this time and I can post finished pictures and not just parts of things! LOL
My favorite part of storytime is the last day of the unit when we skim Proverbs to find a connection to what we just read. LOVE the way that it's leading us to see how God's Word speaks to every kind of attitude & action!!
