Aren't I Lazy

I haven't posted in a while!


Life moves fast.


The Veggies are busy with their dancing and what not. Rutabaga has her final swim meet today while Butternut will be transported to a dance workshop. (Rutabaga went yesterday but her swim meet trumps dance today.)


We've ordered our new school books for our Mother of Divine Grace curriculum. Rutabaga will be in the 4th grade as of September 1st while Butternut will be in the 1st grade. As I witness other moms celebrating the return of their kids to school--as in they get their freedom back, I celebrate the privilege of educating the Veggies at home.


The Mother of Divine Grace curriculum is a Catholic-Classical Method syllabus that we use. Celery found it for me several years ago as his engineering mind proceeded to accept homeschooling as an option and help me as his mind knew how. It is a wonderful syllabus.


In August the Veggies will begin their "return to school" studies as in--we didn't quite finish "everything" last year. But no one is worse for the wear. Rutabaga has to get over her hate of math to work on speeding up how she does math. I don't get it--the kid picks up on "how" to do the math problems so quickly, but thinks she's horrible at it. It is very amusing. If she spent less time "hating" math, she might actually get her work done. She'd get it done quickly enough to move on to other things.

Among other events this summer--Rutabaga turned NINE!!!! Ummmm, she was just a tee tiny baby like yesterday. HELLO!


Butternut was in First grade math anyway, so she will continue with that. And we will resume learning how to read. We left off at "scared" a--that's short "a" to all the traditional phonics folks. We use Scaredy Cat Phonics. When the vowels are "brave", they say their name. When they are scared--they get very scared and thus produce those short sounds. This was all per her request as she wanted to learn to read the same way that Rutabaga did. Our curriculum actually directs us to "Teaching Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons". While very easy, my kids though it was B-O-R-I-N-G. With Scaredy Cat Phonics, they began reading fairly quickly.

Alfalfa Sprout is doing wonderfully with his speech therapy. His Therapist uses the Kauffman cards. I have no idea who this Kauffman person is, but what a blessing that she has broken down speech into the most basic sounds for an Apraxic child to learn. His words sound very much like a 15-18 month old...but we have WORDS!!!
Let's see--he can say:
(Parenthesis are letters that are not really there but not fully dropped either)
Ba--Ball, E(d)--Red, Bo(o)--Boo, Bu--Blue, Ee-eh-ow--yellow, ee(n)--green (kid knows his colors!), pu(p)-pu(p)--dog/puppy, po(p)-po(p)--lollipop, Bi-Bi--bye bye
Alfalfa still signs and we have obtained more Signing Times videos--fabulous for teaching kids ASL in a way that they can learn it. They also encourage talking since it is a video for hearing children. The day we watched the video about colors--he finally said is 4 colors. Yeah!
Alfalfa still does his tumbling class for toddlers and is having a blast.

That's the update from our little Garden Patch.


Postscript:

This was written on Saturday night and by Sunday morning, our modem was kaput as was our WII. We suspect (though we never heard) a thunderstorm or something. But it is too much of a coincidence that both died at the same time.

The modem was replaced free by our cable company. We cannot say the same for the WII. Poor WII—its parents didn’t have a proper surge protector. We have learned our lesson and have to await available cash to replace it. This will not be anytime soon.