The Reading Race

Well, thats what it feels like when it is "time" for your child to learn how to read. Of course, that time keeps getting earlier and earlier. They used to let us actually play in kindergarten, remember that? Now kids are expected to go in already reading or ready to go with all the phonetic awareness under their belts. As a homeschooler, i really don't have to worry about what kids in school are expected to do, but still, the knowledge of what the expectations are is in my head. Even if I don't have the same kind of pressure I maybe would feel if my child was in public school, I still know what their peers are up to, and what they are up to is reading at an early age. Molly was writing at age 2. I mean writing letters, the correspondence type. She didn't know how to spell the words, so I would sit next to her for what seemed like forever and spell each word aloud for her and she would do the writing. I assumed she would be a super early reader given how much she wrote. She wrote story after story. She had a little notebook she kept in our car and she would copy down the letters from billboards as we drove around the city. The car would go faster than her writing though, so often she would have only parts of the signs copied before we drove away. I remember flipping through the book one day and seeing, in bold capital letters, V-I-R-G-I-N. There used to be a stupid billboard campaign around Baltimore that read VIRGIN! Teach Your Kids Its Not a Dirty Word! Well thanks for teaching her its a word at all ! Luckily at 3 she still was writing, not reading. Thats how it went for years. She read at 6, fluently at 7,which wasn't early, but wasn't late, so I never had time to get too worked up about it. After all reading is the key to learning, so if you can't read...... I had bought Reading Reflex which is an approach to teaching reading through games and simple word puzzles. We had fun with it. Well, now Sophia is learning to read. I'm using Reading Reflex again with her. She really wants to be a reader. She can read 3 letter words, and some 4 letter words, like when you add an s to cat, she can read that :) Anyway I'm really proud of her. I'm relieved too, cause I know for some kids it's not so easy, and as a parent, maybe even more so as a homeschool parent, cause its your responsibility, noone elses, can't blame it on the school system, its a big "monkey on your back" until they learn to decode the code. So I'm grateful that Sophia is well on her way to being a reader. Knowing all the pleasure and knowledge reading brings a person, its got to be my biggest goal for my kids, for them to become avid readers.

What's it worth to you?

That is the question I was asking myself this morning. Math. Ugh, I wasn't that great in it in school, after middle school at least, so when I do Molly's math lesson with her, i have to really, really concentrate. OK, remember I have a three year old and a very loud 5 year old. Molly and I were learning how to get a percentage of a percentage. Now, you math whizzes out there, be quiet, I was struggling, that is why I have an instructors guide that teaches the instructor . Anyway, at the same time, (we homeschoolers juggle many things all day long), Sophia was working in her Singapore math textbook. I was helping her find different ways to add up to 10, which she had to record by writing equations. Such as 7 plus 2 plus 1 equals 10. No small task for her, since she tends to reverse numbers and then needs help writing them correctly. So, I'm juggling between the two of them, and along comes Benny. Benny usually is happy "working" at his desk in his "workbooks" while we do math, but today he would rather play with rice. Yes, a big bucket of rice I actually had in the homeschool room that I use when we learn measuring and estimation and all that jazz. He starts pouring out the rice into 3 different sized bowls, spooning it into cups and generally making a huge mess. He throws into the bucket some wooden alphabet letters,and some dice for good measure. Then he stirs and stirs. Rice is flying. The carpet is covered. Do I even react? Do I care? Nope, and I bet every homeschool mom out there knows what I'm talking about. We happily will pay a price (in my case a lot of vacuuming later today) in order to get the math, or whatever subject it is, in.

THe Very Last First Time

Great title isn't it? It's the title of the book we are rowing this week, five in a rowing that is. Fiveinarow.com Its the literature based homeschool program I'm using with Sophia and Benny. Benny because you can't seperate him from Sophia. He insists on "doing school" with us, which I think is fantastic. Anyway, this story by Jan Andrews and Ian Wallace is about a little Inuit girl who lives near Ungava Bay in Canada. She is allowed, for the first time by herself, to go under the frozen waters of the bay and search for mussels which her family love to eat. She and her mother search for mussels by first shoveling snow away from the frozen bay while the tide is out, carving a hole in the ice, and lowering themselves down the hole. There , at the bottom of the bay, in utter darkness, save a few candles they have brought with them, they search for their mussels! They have to listen for the whooshing sound of the tide coming back in and get out before the waters come. Pretty exciting huh?! So today, I covered the dining room table with white sheets to resemble ice, spread seashells under the frozen bay/dining room table that we collected this summer in much warmer waters than Canada can offer, and set my little explorers off with ice chisels (aka butter knives), mussel pans(aka pie plates) and candles and matches (aka flashlights). They were suited up in their winter finest. Parkas with fake fur hoods, mittens and snow boots. They took their assignment very seriously, and after they had been under the ice for a while, collecting mussels, I began making the whooshing and roaring noise of the tide returning. You would never have known we were pretending the way they scrambled out from under the table, letting their mussels and pans clatter to the floor,as if their lives depended on their speed. It was so cute. But then we had to do it again, and again and again...........
Anyway its a great winter time read with little ones.

Yum!

Here is my favorite recipe for caramel corn. This has served me faithfully on many movie nights, karate instructor gifts and potluck contributions. If you are a Fishers popcorn fan, there will be no going back! Not only is this tastier, but it costs almost nothing to make, as opposed to the small fortune they charge for it on the boardwalk. Enjoy!

1 cup butter 1/2 tsp baking soda
2 cups brown sugar 1 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 cup corn syrup 5 quarts popped popcorn ( I pop mine in a hot air
1 tsp salt popper)

directions:
Preheat oven to 250 F
Place popcorn in super sized bowl
In med saucepan over med heat, melt butter. Stir in brown sugar, corn syrup and salt. Bring to a boil, stirring constantly. Boil without stirring for 4 minutes. Remove from heat and stir in soda and vanilla.
Pour over popcorn in bowl and stir to coat.
Place in 2 large baking dishes ( i like to line mine with parchment paper so the mess is minimized at cleanup time), and bake in preheated oven for 1 hour. Stir every 15 minute during the baking time.
Remove from oven and let cool before you break into pieces.

What's happenin'.......

Molly and Sophia are both in a production of Pollyanna. Its being put on by our homeschooling group, South carroll Covenant Keepers. they will be performing at the end of the month at the Carroll Arts Center. Molly is Lucille Payton, a 45 year-old mother of 5, from the "other side of town". Sophia is her ahem... child. Sophia is Mary Elizabeth Payton, named after me, isn't that sweet?

In the picture, Molly is missing one of her kids. Sophia is the short one.

My kiddos!

Welcome to my blog

Hi everyone!
My name is Mary. I have 3 great kids, Molly who is about to turn 12 (yikes!), Sophia age 5, and Benny age 3. We are homeschoolers, and as homeschooling fills most of our days, it will probably fill much of this blog. Thanks for reading!