Other things we've been doing...

Another new development in our homeschool is Mommy is expecting another baby! Due date is November 4th, so I'm about 6 weeks along. We're all looking forward to welcoming another little one to our family and teaching about human development along the way. Caley is going to be especially helpful, I hope. Keep track of things through the baby ticker on the right.

What We've Been Doing

We are into the next unit on horses and it's been pretty fun. We have been coloring pictures of horses, learning about how to control the horse by using the bridle and the purpose of a saddle, reading books about horses and we even watched "Secretariat" about a racing horse. The girls have really enjoyed it. In the next week or so I'm hoping to visit a horse farm. The weather just hasn't been conducive for such a trip. This week we made stick horses out of Daddy's old socks. We raced them and pretended to ride them to playgroup this week.

For math we are up to about lesson 80 in the Saxon K book, and ahead of schedule to finish on time. I'm so glad! Lately I've been trying to think of more natural ways to teach whatever concept the lesson is addressing, such as by ordering or graphing Caley's toys or suckers instead of some uninteresting thing the lesson suggests. Last week the lesson was on ordering by length left-to-right, longest-to-shortest and I asked her to order my jewelry instead of whatever the lesson said. She really got into it! Another lesson was about ordinal position (1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th) and we were able to work it into dancing to music and making a parade.
I've also been trying to be more intentional about involving the kids in whatever projects I need to get done around the house. They very enthusiastically helped me wash the refrigerator, vacuum the car, sort the toys in the mud room, and Caley just today helped rinse the dishes before putting them in the dishwasher. I'm thankful to have a lot of time with them that we can work on things like homemaking. In my mind I count it as school, just an additional activity to their academic work.

Caley is also continuing her speech therapy, and still loves going to see Mrs. Rose each week. She loves getting stickers and practicing her words. I have a feeling she'll qualify again next year, as Mrs. Rose said she's doing very well but still not consistently generalizing in her daily speech.

And as always, Amelia is being silly!!