Four!

2 weeks old

The twins turned FOUR yesterday.

It is hard to believe we were ever a family without them.  They are so much a part of who we are and who we will always be.

Four is very big.  Four is little boy. Four is preschool, and ABCs and learning to do up buttons and jackets.  

I love four. It's running to mommy to get a kiss and a bandaid... sitting on her lap with a story (or five)...  laughing at jokes on Veggie Tales... racing to see who is the fastest... 

Four is still falling asleep in the car, but staying awake for family movie night.  

Four is old enough to ride bikes!!

The boys were very excited to get their own big boy bikes.... we all pooled our money to buy them some new run-bikes.  (basically little bikes without pedals, so they run with their feet and then glide on two wheels if they can go fast enough).  

They spent all day riding on them. In fact, they were outside with their helmets and shoes on before I even got out of bed. (the big kids were helping them).  They are so proud and having such a fun time being big boys.

Week ONE!!

Wow, we officially started school this past monday and have already made it to the end of our first week of school.

It's hard to believe I will have three to teach this year: Grade 5, Grade 2 (and preparing for his First Holy Communion) and Kindergarten.  I also have two very interesting preschoolers and a little monkey crawling around to keep it all in perspective.

The week went surprisingly well, considering I started it with a cold and my homeschooling room in complete disorder (we are painting).  Here is a bit of what we accomplished:

math: easy peasy.... there is always lots of review the first few weeks in math

grammar: nouns (review... so it was super easy)

phonics:  Even though Z didn't do much reading over the summer, he has really grown in his reading skills!! I'm so happy to see him reading much more quickly, with confidence.  There is hope yet!! ... and little H is progressing very fast in reading!! I think she just wants to keep up with the big kids.  She is a delightful student so far.

handwriting: The twins LOVE doing school stuff. They ask to do their 'letters' all day long and get so excited when I bring out their 'official' papers each day.  THey learned the letter E and F with H this week.  It's fun to watch all three of them working together.  I can't believe they are all getting so big!

Z is learning cursive this year, and we started with one of the easiest letters: c.  He did great! I told him, since his dad never learned cursive, that he is already smarter than him, now that he knows 'c'. LOL. (sorry sean!)

Z also did some dictation (where I read him a sentence and he has to memorize it and then write it down... this helps with expanding their temporary memory, and helps them to hold their own thoughts in their head long enough to write them down as they get older).  He did surprisingly well.  We are using Writing With Ease level 2... a great slow, incremental program.  Thanks to my filing system, we hope to get through most of the book in a reasonable pace.

Latin:  we reviewed the present tense conjugation of the verb to love, and learned a handful of vocab words.  Z is having a much harder time memorizing things than E.  She seems to magically just soak it in and retain it.  He needs a lot more repetition.  I have started using an online flash card program called Anki which I really love, so I'm hoping the kids will see some improvement in their memory work this year.

History:  History  Odyssey is going to be a real success this year. I love that the sheets are written straight to E and she has little check boxes to tick off when she completes each task. This frees me up to help with the littles and with Zs history.  We learned about the fertile crescent, entered dates in a timeline book and organized the kids binders for the year.

Science:  We started reading the apologia Zoo 2 book on Swimming Creatures.  The kids love the chatty visually rich style that the author has.  I hope we are more consistent in getting to science this year.  I have all of it filed in our weekly files, so it should go much more smoothly than last year.

Read Aloud:  Madeline Takes Command.  The kids loved this book and insisted I read it every day. They were enthralled by the story of the young siblings (14, 12 and 10) who defended their little fort in New France against the Mohawks.

Now to plan out next week...