Our Week - with a trip to Chuck E Cheese

Another week has whizzed by!  Here we are rapidly approaching Thanksgiving already.  The neighborhood decorations vary from pumpkins and scarecrows to icicles and twinkle lights.

The girls were playing nicely with the Duplos for quite a while.  Forgive the Saturday hair.

Big milestone this week!  Jack finished his handwriting book, New American Cursive!  This was something he started for a review shortly before the end of last school year, took off for the summer, and started back up again in August.

If anybody is curious, I ordered him A Reason For Handwriting as his "maintenance" handwriting book.  NAC was a great beginner book for him, but now we're ready to keep those new skills fresh, and what better way to do that than with Bible verses, right?  Hannah is currently working in ARFH as her maintenance book, too, having finished CursiveLogic recently.

High school is exhausting.  Sam is so ready to be done.  Less than 7 months now.

I found this Hungry Caterpillar book in the $1 spot at Target.  At the beginning of the school year, I was overwhelmed with the toddlers, and Katie was much less ready for formal schoolwork, so I got frustrated and gave up working with her for a while.

She's come a long way since then, and in the last month, I've been including her more and more in our school day.  We still haven't started her math book yet, but she's working in handwriting and spelling most days.  She still struggles with writing, and she's fearful about getting things wrong, but she's making progress.

I see this face when I ask Hannah a question.  Questions are very hard for her, for some reason.

I seem to have a NON-auditory learner here.  Which kind of sucks because My Father's World involves a lot of me reading out loud to the kids.  Brianna and Eli and Jack all did well with this.  It's actually perfect for Jack, because he struggles with reading, so he gets tons more through his ears than he would through his eyes.

But one day this week, I read a brief passage and asked the first of 3 questions about it.  Neither student could answer the question, so I asked them to sit up, look at my face, and I read the passage to them again.  I re-asked the question, and they both got it right.  Then I asked the second question, which had 2 answers.  Jack gave one of them.  I asked Hannah to give the other and she could not.  So I read the passage aloud for a third time.  She still couldn't come up with the answer.

Now, lest you think my expectations are too high, I was reading the 1st and 2nd grade section of the multi-level book and asking the 1st and 2nd grade questions.  Hannah is in 3rd grade.  I was frustrated, and wanted to move on, so I told her to copy the passage out of the book while I worked with Jack on something else.  Once she was done, I asked her to read it back to me, which she did.

She still could not answer all 3 questions.  If hearing it, seeing it, writing it, and reading it out loud didn't get it in there, I'm kind of stumped.

I'm not sure what to do here.  What we're doing is not working.  Do I lower my expectations and just assume she'll pick up what she can and not worry about the rest?  Do I change curriculum to something where she's reading and answering questions on her own?  Should I send her back to classroom school next year?

I'm frustrated because I've done workbook homeschool before, and I'm enjoying MFW so much more because it's more interactive and I'm more involved in what the kids are learning.  But obviously, what worked for the older kids may not work for the younger ones.

Continuing to work on fine motor skills, both with coloring and cutting.  Even uncapping the glue stick presents a challenge.

It's hard to see, but she glued the sun onto cloud print paper.

She's also still working on the Reading Kingdom program we reviewed.

We got a fabulous package from 4 Knowledge-4 Fun this week!  All sorts of goodies to try out and share about.

The first thing we dove into was the Color 'n Seek Alphabet Hidden Pictures book, which comes with markers.  This is great for Katie.  It helps reinforce beginning sounds.

Our art project looked really cool, but we ran out of shaving creme, so the kids ended up just painting (instead of marbling) this week.

Brianna told the kids to pose, and Eli was in the background, being a goofball.

I knew this was going to be a messy project, so I asked Bri if she would be in charge of it.  Once we get more shaving creme, I'll have to get her to try again.

We had a good week this week, and we finished all of our work for the week by Thursday, so Friday after spelling and getting a jump on next week (since we'll be taking Thanksgiving Day off, of course), we met up with friends at Chuck E. Cheese for some play time.

This was a win win because the kids had a wonderful time climbing around and playing games, and I got to talk to grown ups and see cute babies.

Hannah was not too sure about standing next to Chuck E.

If you missed it, I shared a funny story yesterday about my China trip.  If you're new here, I was in China recently on an advocacy trip, and I'd love to have you read and share my post about Aury, who needs a family!

Just a little reminder, as you start your Christmas shopping, when you use our Amazon links, we earn a tiny commission.  I used last month's commission to get a new art supply to try out.  Thank you so much!


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