We have been blown away by Ranen’s reading.  My dad was trying to give me some credit but sadly, I can’t take any.  All credit goes to Starfall and 100 Easy Lessons (and Ranen of course).

In this video, we had just gotten this book from the library and it was his first time reading it.

Because of his reading, I was curious as to his reading level.  It is a little hard to assess because Ranen is only 4 1/2 years old but someone suggest this assessment.  Ranen got 33 words which puts him at a 6.11 reading age.  When asked his favorite subject or part of his lessons, he will say “reading”.  So we are feeding this and hope this desire continues for a lifetime.

I have gotten a little behind in updating our lessons.  I have been knitting like crazy to get Kaiya’s birthday gift done.  Now that it is done, I can update before I get to far in with Christmas knitting.

Turtle Unit

This unit was a little slower for us.  We read books and learned about tortoises, terrapins and turtles.  The boys got their backpacks and stuffed them full and then walked around like turtles.  They also made these cute turtles.

And the turtles had a race with the hare at the end of the unit.

We then moved onto our Us unit.  This unit was definitely more interesting for Ranen.  He really seems to be showing an interest for the sciences.  We got a couple books from the library that have some great pictures in them.  We learned about the human body and our bones.  We then moved on to studying our senses.  We did many blindfolded activities.  They had to guess certain sounds, taste different foods with and without a plugged nose.  We also did smelling and touch tests.  We finished off the unit with tracing the boys’ bodies and they got to fill in the features.

Now we move onto our Dinosaur unit.  I am interested to see if this will be a new obsession or not.  We will see…

For this lesson, we learned about how “God takes good care of me”.  We made birds nests out of chow mein, chocolate and jelly beans.

We are enjoying My Father’s World more and more.  I am really getting the hang of it and it is feeling more natural now.  We are also managing our time a little bit better which is helping in the stress department.

We started off our lesson by getting all kinds of apples.  We got Fuji, Gala, Jona Gold, Pink Lady, Granny Smith and Red Delicious.

We had ourselves a little apple tasting.  Favorites were: Jason-Jona Gold, Ranen-Pink Lady, Micah-Granny Smith and I also liked the Pink Lady.

We made applesauce with some Granny Smith’s.

And the leftover apples from our tasting turned into my first homemade apple pie.  Jason said I was welcome to make that ANYTIME.  I think there was a *hint* *hint* included.

The pie didn’t last long.

Ranen is getting much better with his cut and pasting.

I was reading my friend Kristin’s blog the other day and commented that this PlayFoam that her boys were playing with was pretty cool and I would have to try and find some.  Well the friend that sent it to Kristin is also a friend, AJ.  (We all know each other from a discussion board for our February 05 babies).  Well AJ and her boys surprised us by sending us some.  Wasn’t that so thoughtful and kind?  Thanks again AJ!

We made a snowman.

As well as studying apples, we also studied the Fruits of the Spirit.

And we made a lapbook

which includes little books describing each fruit and a matching game

as well as a board game in which the game cards ask how you would demonstrate each fruit in different situations.

We read more books which is one of Ranen’s favorite things to do.  He could sit there for the longest time just listening where Micah will sit for a short time before he needs to get back to moving around.

We added another element to our Calendar Binder.  We are going to learn the Hebrew calendar alongside our calendar.

Ranen working on his math rods.

He made an alligator

Our caterpillar is getting longer.  I finally put a head on him.

And our wall is getting more and more filled up.  As my mom mentioned to me that when you walk into our house, you will know where our priorities are.

Ranen is coloring more and more and actually enjoying it.  I took this picture because this is his best one yet.  He is really starting to color inside the lines and have much more control over his colored pencil.  Now remember that up until we started My Father’s World, we didn’t do a lot of coloring because there was not much of an interest.  So I think he has come a long way in a short amount of time.

Here he is cutting all by himself.  I have had to hold the paper in the past but now he is on his own.

Micah is almost a natural at cutting.

Here is the lion that Micah cut.

Apple trees!!!  These are Jason and I’s favorite art piece so far.  It is hanging under our mantel by our fireplace.

(Ranen)

(Micah)

Now we move onto Nests.

We just finished our Leaf Unit in My Father’s World.  This one didn’t create as much excitement as the Moon Unit.  But we still had fun and got to go outside a lot.

We started off the unit by looking at one of my plants which was to symbolize God and the leaves representing God’s children.  This little leaf in the bowl didn’t want to be with God and didn’t need him.  So we got to watch what happened to this poor little leaf during the week.

We picked a bunch of different leaves and examined the edges, veins, color, shape and size.

We made place mats with our leaves.

We pressed our leaves.

We painted and traced our leaves (top is Ranen’s and bottom is Micah’s).

We made a book about trees and all the things they do for us (top is Ranen’s and bottom is Micah’s).

I forgot that we were suppose to be doing this but we have a classical CD that the kids are to listen to and do different activities.  Today, we listened to Vivaldi and they let their pen/pencil dance across their paper to the music (top and bottom same as previous pictures).

This week, I have decided to change our curriculum a little and teach Ranen cursive rather than manuscript.  There are many benefits which you can read here.  I just got the A Beka K4 Cursive workbooks today and we will start them our next unit.  We did start a little this week with practicing the letter L and I wrote things in cursive for Ranen to read rather than manuscript.  Some think it would be hard to read cursive because books are in manuscript but Ranen hardly had any trouble reading cursive.

We also decided (from some prompting from friends) to actually do 100 Easy Lessons.  This was a book that I bought a couple years ago because I heard it was so good but we didn’t do anything with it.  And then once Ranen started reading, I didn’t think there was any use.  But my friends suggested that I do 2-3 lessons at a time to get him to a point that it starts becoming challenging.  So in the last week, we did 26 lessons so that they would line up with our numbers of days in school.  He is breezing through them that I hardly have to give the instructions.  In this short time, I have noticed a difference in his reading.  He is catching himself if he makes a mistake or if I catch a mistake, he easily corrects it.  For instance, the word was “sack” and he said “sock” but I asked him to read it again and he got it right.  Today, he read his own instructions for his math rods and it said “build the L with rods of all different colors” and he read that correctly.

So those are the changes I have made so far and we will see how it goes on our next unit. We get to study Apples.

To finish off our Moon unit, we made a crater cake.  Ranen was so excited about this that he looked forward to it all week.  He asked every day if it was time to do the crater cake.

Do you think he is proud of it?

It was out of this world!!!

For this lesson, I used a new website called Lesson Pathways to assist in my preparation and what a difference it made.  They had so many resources.

Jason drew the boys a little picture to start our adventures.

We began by reading some books and proved ourselves pretty intelligent.  Some of the books were saying that one theory as to how we got the moon was an asteroid hit the earth and broke a piece off.  Jason and I pondered if that was so (which we totally know it’s not since God created the sun, moon and stars on Day 4) why are we spending billions of dollars to fund scientific research of the moon if it is just a piece of earth.  It would have all the same elements.  See what happens when you don’t believe what God says.  You follow all these rabbit trails that don’t lead you anywhere.

In one of our books, we read how to make a balloon rocket and our first moon experiment began.

I also dyed some more rice for some tactile activities.

And the boys had an absolute blast.  They could play for hours if I let them.

Since we began homeschooling, Ranen has already grown so much.  Especially in his handwriting, drawing and cutting.  This is his first stick man.

We also finally got to use that dishwasher box that has been sitting in our bedroom for the last month or so.  It became our rocket ship.

Don’t forget the flag to put on the moon.

Next, it was astronauts.

And all astronauts get hungry.

We finished our lesson by making a mobile.

This is Ranen’s

And Micah’s after I let him hold it.  I think he was spinning it around.

Maybe he was testing the big bang theory.  But we know that God is a god of order.

I have been reading “The Way They Learn” by Cynthia Ulrich Tobias.  I have figured out that I am a dominate concrete sequential with alot of abstract sequential but I have been trying to figure out Ranen in order to teach him better.

After this morning, I am pretty confident that he at least has quite a bit of abstract sequential.  I think his learning style is very much like mine but I am trying to pin point it more.

Take a look

I decided to change when I post because I was breaking up each lesson since they are 6 days long.  And I would rather blog about the whole lesson rather than per school week.  So I am finishing our Sun lesson and then will continue with the new format.  So official sounding.

We did a sundial but only got to work on it for about 3 hours until it was so cloudy that we couldn’t see the shadow anymore.  The following couple days were the same way.  Plus, the boys didn’t seem to interested in it.

We also learned about their shadows.  I traced their bodies on the drive way, I probably should have done their shadows instead but oh well.

Then we colored some clothes on them.

We made raisins but it took a little longer than we thought.

We finally threw them out after mold started to grow on them.

Ranen said his favorite part of the week was reading.  There are of course things I would do differently but it was a fun first lesson.