What a busy day we had. Three of the four kids had well child check ups and wow they are all doing great, tall and light, not a huge surprise to me! Hannah comes in at a whopping 17 lbs 3 oz which is a weight gain of almost 3 lbs in two months! Moriah at 30 lbs and Austen at 41 lbs. I am assuming Jayden is between 49-51 lbs so they are all doing well. Besides Hannah, they are all at the tall end of the spectrum so great trip.
We then ventured over to a nearby store to check out some sales and I ended up purchasing a piece of furniture originally $140.00 for $19 (including tax)!!! I love saving money; we swam, ate lunchables and then came home to do some school and put the younger girls to bed.
The boys and I cuddled in the rocking chair and read Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel by Virginia Burton together. I really enjoy this story. I love the small town feel, the hardworking aspects of Mike and Maryanne and the wisdom of the small child over the adult bickering. We discussed, again, who was responsible in the story and why. I think they understand responsibility after all this talking about it. We read a couple of more stories and then moved on to our language arts and math for Austen (I am still waiting on Jayden’s math in the mail).
Earlier this morning over breakfast, we discussed what our responsibilities are given to us by God. A few examples we came up with are: “Love the Lord your God…”, “Go into all the world and preach the gospel”, “Love your neighbor as yourself”, etc. We also read some questions from our “Answers in Genesis” children’s series that we are enjoying. This particular series really involves the kids at a young age by equipping them to learn why they believe what they believe and giving them a basic foundation in apologetics.
Finally, with Jayden’s language arts he is working on spelling correctly five words a week and I am adapting some of Dianne Craft’s (a speaker from this past year’s homeschool convention) methods. Sitting in one of her seminars, she talked about how if the left brain method is not working on a child ( logic, black and white, systematic, orderly…) then that’s fine just switch to the right brain ( sporadic, colorful, creative, spontaneous…). She then continued to explain how many kids are right brain learners and so reciting things like spelling words is not helpful to them; no matter how hard they try, they will not be able to spell the word correctly. Dianne suggests adding pictures to the words to put a visual picture in their mind, increase their brain retention thus making it much easier to remember and learn these words. This can be applied to math, spelling, phonics, etc.
Last year, spelling was somewhat of a challenge to Jayden and I know that Austen learns by pictures already so I figured that it’s worth the extra work on my part, to save on time and frustration on their part. Below is an example of how we are learning the silent “k” words. You can get more information at Dianne Crafts website: www.diannecraft.org
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