Finally a new post!

I'm so sorry for falling behind with the blog in the last few months! It's been crazy with sicknesses, traveling, my sister visiting from California, and to top it off our computer died.

In the past month we completed our Animals and Their Worlds Curriculum. Overall I was very happy with Winterpromise this year. During a creature presentation at Discovery Place Museum last week Rebekah surprised me by telling the guide that an iguana can use it's tail as a whip. We all really enjoyed the last read aloud, Christopher Mouse.

Schooling has been going very well for Miriam. She's nearing the end of her Growing with Grammar 1 and Explode the Code 6 books. She thinks synonyms are super fun. She's been working on double digit addition in math and moves on to carrying numbers next week. She read the entire Catwings series in the past few weeks and is now reading The Boxcar Children.

Rebekah is struggling during school time lately. She wants so badly to do what her sister is doing. Her fine motor skills just aren't where her knowledge is. She's very frustrated even though she's doing very, very well learning to read using The Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading and All About Spelling Tiles AND really seems to be understanding math topics loosely using Rightstart and many different math manipulatives. She wants to use workbooks like her big sister and then gets upset when she can't get her hands to do what her mind tells them too.

Michael is joining in school time more and more now. He loves to scribble on extra worksheets, color and use scissors.

I'll likely not be posting much until late June/ early July when we begin our next homeschooling "year." For the rest of this year we're going to be finishing up the last of Miriam's language arts and math, doing lots of free art time, playing outside, and visiting the zoo, nature museum, and the science museum.
I'm planning to go to the local homeschool convention book fair this month to make some decisions for next year. My goals are to find some workbooks for Rebekah that will allow her to work on her fine motor skills while not being too easy. I'm hoping to find something special just for her to make her super excited about being a kindergartner next year. I'm also looking for a Bible curriculum for the entire family. I need to make a final decision about where we are headed with our math program; looking forward to seeing and touching the next level in Rightstart, Singapore, BJU, and CLE before deciding. I'd also like to find more affordable spelling and grammar programs (leaning toward Rod & Staff). I'm hoping to find a fun writing program for Miriam; though she's young to start a formal writing curriculum she just loves to write anything and everything and I'd like to take advantage of that.
Next weekend I'll be at a local used curriculum sale to sell some of this year's curriculum to fund next year's stuff!
I'm also working on scheduling Story of the World and Building Foundations of Scientific Understanding for next year; I've been spending my nights going through our library's online catalog to find out what books we'll be able to borrow for those studies next year.