Weekly Report #2

This week Joshua worked really hard on his penmanship letters and words for each day. I have started giving him a short sentence to read that includes the new word, familiar words and some common words that I haven't yet taught him how to decode, which I help him with as he goes through the sentence. He decoded a newe word, traced the new word, then read the sentence below. This worked well to inspire him to keep going. I don't think he even realised how much more he was reading than last week. His last sentence for the week had nine words! Rat ran from cat and hid in big bin.

This is such an achievement for him and for me, because at the beginning of this year he could only recognise J, o, s, h, M and sometimes D, and he couldn't read anything at all.

I am still reading The House on Pooh Corner to them all, although I have been a bit slack this week. This morning Abigail fell asleep half way through a chapter, but the other two could answer my basic comprehension questions at the end, so they must have been listening, or at least looking carefully at the pictures. They did sit very still on the arms of my reading chair, while Samuel played next to us in his playpen. Special thanks to "Cousin Jennifer" who read a chapter to them all on Monday evening when she came to visit with "Cousin Kevin". It was a real pleasure to see them both at the wedding of our mutual cousin Alison on Sunday.

Also on Sunday our second guinea pig died. He was missing when we got up in the morning, presumed escaped to freedom, but had come back sometime in the morning and was most unfortunately eaten by (we assume) a cat while we were out. Jeff found the dismembered remains on our lawn and kindly buried them without the rest of us having to see them. It was a sad end to Skittery-Scamper. I think I was saddest. I feel like such a pathetic pet owner. We started with two guinea pigs, Skitter and Scamper, only a few months ago and Scamper had already fallen prey to a mysterious sudden-onset illness and had to be put down by the vet. Hence Skitter being renamed Skittery-Scamper. The kids don't seem to upset by the whole thing, though, and Jeff's take on it all is at least they get to understand that death comes to us all before they have to face it in aperson they love.

To end on a positive note, our other major accomplishment this week was the Nature Study walk. Some of them actually relished the opportunity to get close up to nature:

I think they are beginning to understand that we smell flowers with our noses by bending over them and sniffing them, not by ripping them out of the ground and bringing them up to our faces to sniff!

A lovely photo of the three biggest kids posing by those gorgeous pink flowers:

And here's what they did right after that photo was taken:

Chase the ducks and come for cuddles ... gotta love homeschooling!