Catching Up

I have been a homeschooling failure since that last entry. I just can't get back into the swing of things. I've lost all motivation. I'm sure Lucy is prepared enough to get into Kindergarten, so we've just been kind of maintaining. My middle name should've been "Lazy."

Anyway, here's a little bit of what we have done. I mostly want to record this so I'll have some ideas to look back on if/when I do preschool with Lena.

February
The first week of February, we reviewed CVC words and digraphs. I've especially been focusing on sh, ch, and th.

"Sh" is pretty obvious. "Ch" is like karate CHop. You make the "th" sound by sticking out your tongue.

We've been doing the same three sight words for two months: this, that, the. I'll point to one of them and Lucy will guess either "this, that, or the" without even attempting to read the word. Haha. That hasn't worked out very well.

Later on in February, we started long vowel sounds. We put up a poster about long vowels and learned what each vowel says. Then I taught Lucy about the silent "e." I told her that when she sees a word with a vowel in the middle and an "e" on the end, the middle vowel will be long. We started with the letter a and did a few worksheets to reiterate the CVCE model.

The following week, we did a "magic e" project. I had Lucy put "e" stickers on a bunch of clothespins and typed up as many CVC words I could think of that made a new word when an "e" was attached.

I only did "a" words because I didn't want to confuse her. She did amazingly well with this project. She pronounced the CVC word correctly, attached the e and then could transition to making the vowel long to pronounce the CVCE words.

We also spent a day baking a cake and making our own word family cake:

She has a cousin named Blake. And that one by "make" is supposed to be "fake."

We've briefly dabbled in telling time. I bought a book at the dollar store with punch out clocks. We've only practiced the hours (1:00, 2:00, etc.) and the half hours (1:30, 2:30).

For Valentine's Day, we did a "love unit" with this free packet. We also read Have You Filled a Bucket Today and did some activities based on that. I pretended to care about math for a hot minute, so we could play with candy:

Lucy estimated that it would take 49 candies to fill the heart, then counted out 38 for the actual amount.

March
This week, we did a pathetic "unit" on Dr Seuss. I searched through our millions of books for all the Dr Seuss books we own:

I tried to get Lucy to read them all with me, but she was bored after the first few, so we moved on to our project. I told Lucy that Dr Seuss loved to make up creatures and give them funny names (we flipped through the books to find a few examples), then I gave her a blank sheet of paper and a bunch of random craft supplies so she could make and name her own silly creature:

We also started on "long e" this week and made a word family "ee" hat inspired by the Cat in the Hat.

She loved that I let her write the word "pee" and thought it was hilarious. Haha.

That's about it for any structured schooling we've been doing! That said, we have been doing a ton of reading. I found a few chapter book series that we both enjoy and have been ordering installments from the library. I also dug out my American Girl books, which we will start soon. And I've been trying to get Lucy to read to me. She's impatient and gets frustrated with herself, but is very much capable of doing it, if she gives it a chance. We'll keep plugging along . . .