Progress

Well, we started school again this week after taking off essentially two weeks.  Yes, we went to Kennedy Space Center last week and that was educational to say the least.  And when we saw the rocket launch on Saturday, we made sure to explain why it took so long for us to hear it (we never turn down an opportunity to teach if our children ask us a question).  I guess it would be more appropriate to say that today was the first time in 2 weeks that we had "formal" classes.

And what a day of classes it was!  I started a new math program with my son.  I'd been noticing that he's been struggling with a few concepts and I think part of that is because we haven't really been using a curriculum for math.  To that end, I found one for him for second grade and rather than just start him at the second grade level, I'm going to go back a bit and do a "refresher" of sorts to get him up to speed on the system itself.  We made progress on some things and I think this was the most engaged he's been in a long time (and he likes math too).

I've also been working on letter sounds with my daughter for a while now, so today I decided to push her a bit and see what she could do.  I wrote out a few letters (which happen to spell a word) and had her sound them all out.  After a couple of tries she figured out it was the word sat.  Then we moved on to a few rhyming words (cat, bat, fat, rat).  It was awesome to see the "light" turn on with each new word she figured out. 

There is one other "aha" moment I feel I must share.  I've been covering the basics of government with my son and one day while we were in the car (can you say captive audience?) I decided to do a little review.  We were talking about who the president was.  What his responsibilities are.  And how we pay taxes so that the government can provide services to us as well as other people who don't have money.  My 4-YO daughter said "Obama can take some of my money and give it to poor people.  That would be nice."  Then she got quite for about 10 seconds and said, "But wait!  What if I want to buy toys?"