Life is Good at 6

It's been quite the week for Isaac. He finished Level 1 of All About Reading on Saturday, April 20. For those of you not keeping track... that means he finished his first 49 reading lessons in under 2 months. That's INSANE. I expect Level 2 to take significantly longer as it covers meatier concepts and there are more lessons. I *think* we can expect to finish a lesson every other day. But who knows? He certainly doesn't lack for determination. On a fun note, his friend Anderson finished a day earlier, so we're getting together Friday to celebrate the boys' accomplishment. But wait... there's more!!! The best part? The boys want to celebrate by starting their work on Level 2 together!!! Ha ha ha! Every once in a while, things go REALLY WELL. This is one of those times. I'm writing about it so I can remember it on the Internet for all the rest of my days. He wanted me to take a video. Please forgive the terrible audio quality.

Here are a couple of pics of him not holding still long enough for me to photograph his excitement last Saturday.

We celebrated the completion of AAR1 on Sunday (Father's Day) by getting breakfast from Rudy's. It was a sacrifice Todd and I were willing to make for all of Isaac's hard work.

This week he continued on his incredible growth streak in a completely new way. Isaac is suddenly mastering his swim classes! He's always been worried about swimming and being away from the pool for months was enough to worry him all over again. Last year he had an instructor he really liked, so that was a massive help. This year, he didn't want to take swim lessons again. I informed him that it's a life skill and, thus, not optional. Them's the breaks. Anyway, after a mere 3 hours in the water, he got bumped from Level 1 (Blue) to Level 2 (Orange). I am BLOWN AWAY watching him in the water. He's so much more confident, he's a great deal stronger, and he's genuinely pushing himself to get stronger and learn more. 

I'm trying to fasten my seat belt and hang on for the ride. I'm excited for this latest "growth" spurt in his ability to work on new skills. It's been so exciting from my seat on the sidelines and I'm happy that Isaac is remarkably proud of himself and he recognizes that it's his own efforts that are paying off.

Meanwhile, little sister is also taking swim class. She's also doing well, but we don't have the opportunity to practice for an hour after every class like we did last summer. There was a baby pool available to us last year that was right next to the pool where their lessons were conducted. I think they'd both be up a level if we were spending more time at the pool and she had a chance to practice her skills. I'm not going to push her - she is usually the one who wants to work on the skills over and over again until she masters them. This was her today:

Acid Tastes Sour

In today's fun science news, acid tastes sour. The kids and I did a taste test on different foods. Then, we boiled water and, in a separate pot, shredded cabbage. Mom warned me that boiling cabbage might leave an odor behind, so I set everything up on the picnic table after the water came to a boil. I poured the boiling hot water over cabbage leaves and we let that combo cool for 30 minutes. Then I poured the strained cabbage water (which was now purple) into separate jars. Here's our initial set-up:

After we'd completed our taste tests and decided which ones we thought were sour, we added bits of each food to our cabbage water to see whether it changed colors.

The most dramatic color changes were from lemon juice and vinegar, which meant they were the strongest acids. The least changes were made from tea and whipped cream. It was a fun excuse to get everyone outside on a sunny, breezy, cool day.

Laine's First Recital

Laine's very first ballet recital is tomorrow. She had a dress rehearsal today. We did her makeup and put her hair in a bun. She wore the fluffiest tutu I've ever seen. I know the quality of the video isn't great and I couldn't figure out how to zoom in well, but you'll get the idea. Our little ballerina is the first one to cross the stage. I think she did incredibly well!

Her performance is here.

Enjoy!

All About Reading

Hello Dear Readers,

Isaac informed me about 2 months ago that he didn't WANT to learn to read. He has better things to do with his time. OK. I'm still breathing. Laine is incredibly eager to learn to read, so I'll just teach her.

Anyway, I had been researching curricula for teaching reading. The curriculum we use for most of our homeschooling just hasn't wowed me with the way it teaches reading. There's a lot of emphasis on letter sounds and helping the kids learn to write letters properly. I think both of those are important. However, I don't think that's going to a) excite Isaac to want to read or b) allow me to feel like we're covering all of the bases. In my research, I've come across the name All About Reading a few times. Then a fellow homeschooler I'd never met told me this was THE program as we were discussing kids and reading. I came home and went to work on Google. I gave both kids the assessments to figure out where their skill levels were. Both qualified for Level 1. After giving this a long hard think, I decided to call the company. The incredibly helpful woman at All About Learning could have been in my head. First, she said 2 different things that really captured my newly-6-year-old in a way that I myself couldn't quite put into words. It's honestly like she'd had a few chats with him and then called me up to talk it over. It was uncanny. Then she said something about how *I* was feeling about what we'd been doing and it was all I could do to keep myself from sobbing on the phone. She touched directly on my biggest fears. These people KNOW what they are talking about. She both understood the boy in my house AND the mom who wants to do this thing right. I am in awe.

At her suggestion, I purchased the Level 1 program for Isaac and the Pre-Reading course for Laine. This has been a great choice for us. Laine's already up to letter I in her class and is motoring right along. (For reference, she turned 4 in late March, but will pour over books for an hour at a time while she looks at pictures and tries to read the words). She'll work through all of the capital letters and then we'll go through all of the lowercase letters via this program. There's an adorable little Zebra puppet (Ziggy) who works alongside Laine and she is having a great time helping him learn. She gives him a lot of encouragement and hugs. It's utterly adorable. I feel great because I'm working at her pace and we're mostly doing crafts and playing games. She is picking this up VERY quickly and I don't feel like she's getting the short end of the stick because I don't know how to teach this. I'm no longer reluctant to try teaching reading.

Meanwhile, there's Isaac. Level 1 teaches with a combination of phonics/phonemics (the sounds letters make) and sight words (words like "the" that you just have to recognize). He's also playing a lot of games - some of them are even games that have him sounding out words on flash cards - and he's really having fun with it! He's knocking my socks off every single day because he's not only asking me if we can do schoolwork, I'm finally watching this click for him. The focus is on getting him to read, but it's not done in an obnoxious way and it's done so well that we are both genuinely enjoying the time together. There are letter tiles on magnets we've put on a baking sheet (so we can use it at the dining room table) and we put together lots of words there and he sounds them out or spells them to ask me to sound them out. That's also been unexpectedly fun for him.

This program is everything I'd hoped to find in a reading program. I'm thrilled with the teacher's portion of it because it is remarkably well-organized and I am able to follow a plan. It took me about 20 minutes to set up Laine's Pre-Reading stuff. It took about an hour to set up Level 1 for Isaac. Then I went back a week later and ordered the Reading Games with Ziggy book for Isaac and he asks for these games with the zebra puppet all day long (I know Grandma will be surprised that he wants to play a game over and over and over again!) There won't be gaps in the kids' learning. They're both moving forward and having a fantastic time without me feeling like I'll have to force them to work on their reading skills (#1 on the list of things I'm not about to do...) It's self-paced, so Isaac has been on Level 3 for 5 days (because I'm really and truly not going to rush this). Here's where we were today:

Tap the pan (Sentence)

and

Sam can nap (Sentence)

I can't figure out how to post a video within the blog any more, so you'll have to click on the links to watch them. 

I also didn't video me hugging him and then jumping up and down in my excitement. You'll just have to imagine what that part looked like.