My little cursive writer

This morning we finished most of our school work before 10am, so the kids are having fun playing with playdough again. It's amazing how long a few cups of flour and salt can amuse 2 children :-)

You can see Zs new haircut below, btw... we had to shave it pretty short, but he just looks more like his dad now, so he's happy.For school this morning, we did chores first (make beds, clean rooms, get dressed), and then after breakfast E practiced her cursive writing and learning the phonograms from our new book Spell to Write and Read. I am loving this program and we haven't even started the spelling lists yet LOL.

She really enjoys learning cursive (and she's not even 6 yet!!)... so I wanted to teach it to her while she was still motivated to learn it. What's different about this approach (SWR) is that she is learning all of the sounds that a phonogram (letter) can make at the same time. So, instead of just learning short 'a' first (like cat), she is learning that 'a' can say 'a' (cat), 'A' (Kate), or 'ah' (wasp). I was worried this might be hard for her, or confusing, but she is just soaking it up... even faster than I am (she corrects me often as to what sounds some of the vowels can make!!)

These are the sounds and letters we learned today:

After our writing/reading lesson, (the theory of this book is that by learning how to spell and write, then you learn to read as a side-effect... it's been proven to be a very good program, and it's such a nice change for us, because the other stuff was painful to work through) we did some more math pages where she is learning how to write and read tally marks. She says this is her second favorite thing to do in math. (her first is being a math detective.. which is really a fancy way to say algebra LOL).

After they finish playdough, we're going to plant some potatoes and some flower seeds (our science for the day)

We are on the way to finishing up K pretty soon. I just want to get through her math book basically, and then we'll take a month off. I'd like to start grade one early this year (maybe halfway through July, or the begining of August so that i can take off November and December when the new baby comes.