Forever and a day

It's amazing how busy you can get without realizing it.

Doodle and I are enjoying our summer. LOTS of swimming time and outdoors fun. We've abandoned the garden idea due to our seedlings frying in the summer heat.

I've also made the decision to abandon sight words all together. After researching some more, I realized how I would much rather Doodle learn phonetically than by sight words.

And lastly, Doodle is prepping to be gone from home for 3 weeks starting next week. Eek.

Progress

The past two or three days Doodle has been waking up in the morning and asking to do his workboxes, without prompting from me. He is understanding that I am setting them up for him each night so he can do them in the morning. I love this.

I love that I can stay in bed for an extra 20 minutes because he's busy working on his first drawer or two which are normally activities he can do on his own. I love that he's learning how to do things on his own without my help and that he has the interest and initiative to do them right away in the morning. We're still only doing 6 boxes a day but they're really helping keep us organized on our steady progress this summer.

At the same time, our garden is coming along well and we even added two blueberry bushes this weekend. While I don't anticipate much fruit from them this year, Doodle does love to walk out there each day and pick off the few ripe berries and eat them straight from the bush.

I KNOW I should be taking more pictures of things, but if I'm honest there are times when it just seems such a hassle to pull out my camera. When I read through my entries I feel I'm missing out not having pictures to go with the stories I'm telling, so I hope to be able to spend more time getting back in the groove of taking pictures of our daily activities.

Mark and I have found the spot where we're going to plant our garden seedlings in. Now just to frame it out and fill it with dirt. :-D

Reading

I'm hitting a point where I don't know what to do.

Doodle is interested in reading. He LOVES reading. He knows his letters, their sounds, and we're working on sorting out the vowels. But how do I teach him to read a word.

We've been working on sight words, but I just don't know... it seems opposite to everyting else we've been doing. Suddenly I'm asking him to memorize words...

So now I'm researching a more phonetic approach and STILL just don't know if I know.

More changes and progress

Doodle has picked up 3 of the 5 sight words we've been working on this week. He also wrote the number 6 which is a HUGE accomplishment as Doodle has ZERO interest in writing.

I've decided to change our workbox line-up to so instead of alternating subjects each day, we'll be doing a page or two each day. I believe this will help stick with Doodle's attention span (5 minutes) and allow us to see faster progress. I'm also trying to get more painting time in as it's Doodle's favorite at the moment. However the clean-up is something I just hate doing each day. Time to tackle my demons. 

Tweaks

In trying to prepare for this fall and a more structured curriculum many of my evenings have been searching out information on teaching subjects and how to better help Doodle learn without much effort right now. I want his lessons to be natural and easy, more of a simply explanation than forcing him to memorize something he's not ready to yet.

One of the fun things I've found is an online math website which allows for a short daily free practice. This is perfect because it's short enough that Doodle doesn't get bored and is excited to come back the next day and do it. It's also good because the website is set up to allow Doodle to naturally progress in his math with minimal effort. We now allow Doodle to log on to the website in the mornings and play it while Mommy and Daddy get dressed so one of us can help if he gets stuck. I can also see what lessons are coming up which makes it easier for me to know what concepts to work with him on in our school area.

Check it out : http://www.ixl.com/math/grade/kindergarten/