Well its the middle of May and we are so ready for a vacation! It's a struggle every year to finish strong and complete as closely as we can, our goals that we made at the beginning of the year. [or adjusted goals back in January or March!] So when we do meet a goal it is a good reason to celebrate. Today Lillian completed List I4 in SWR by adding her sentence at the bottom. As the youngest of 7 with many years between them she's had the cynical view of school way younger than her siblings ever did. She's got college and adult siblings that moan about annoying professors, unreasonable papers or projects and those dreaded finals. Not a happy picture of school really. I wish I had never called our time together 'school', but instead called it one-on-one time or mommy and me time- something she wouldn't associate with her worldly knowledge of that word. Because of this she's had an ornery attitude from pretty much the beginning of our very loose, fun, relaxed introduction to the basics. For some reason, she loves math, so no problems there, but spelling and phonograms? Not so willing. Since she is young and I've had a few later readers, I decided to take the nonchalant approach. So I am very satisfied that we completed the suggested K grade track for her first official year with the program. Next year I will let her know she's expected to do more with less attitude, but for now, we'll celebrate!
The plus side; she's well on her way to automaticity in reading. My summer goal is to simply read, read, read together; preferably in a hammock under a tree.
I really appreciated
Janet Spitler's post on the IEW website on finishing the year well. I agree with her whole heartily and plan to use all three habits here during our last week or two of formal schooling.
So for a good deal of the time moms may wonder if this is all going to work out; am I doing anything right at all? And then there are those moments that mom just goes 'aaaaahhhh.' So Nice. I had one recently that I don't want to forget- so I must share it here. That day I was quizzing Lillian on the 26 single letter phonograms. [you know, the letters] I say the letters by sound- so A is a/A/ah -giving all three of it sounds, and B is just buh without the uh. She did not learn them in alphabetical order but rather by the way you write them in cursive; so clock face or circle letters first for example. She does know the ABC song, but I have purposely not connected it. This day though, I gave the quiz in alphabetical order and afterward I asked her if she knew what that meant. We sang the song. I explained what it meant and I said the order is very useful. We can organize our words in this order and then be able to find them easily. I pulled out the huge 1828 dictionary and started to show her. She was so mesmerized by this book! We spent quite a bit of time just looking up random words, or flipping through it. 'spelling time' easily lasted longer than usual. Then she proceeded to carry the book upstairs and around the house for a couple of days to look through it. I was happy twice. Because not only was it so cute, it was nostalgic for me. See, her oldest sister loved to read the dictionary, so it reminded me of that too. The first photo is during the real event of first explaining a dictionary. The second one I had her pose for this post so you can see the scale of her carrying such a large heavy book. 
