Caleb is Reading!

Here are a few school highlights from our week.  The biggest news of the week is that Caleb is officially reading!! Whoo hoo!  He is so excited to be reading real books.  He has been really close to reading for awhile now, but now he has made that leap of putting words together and is zooming ahead on the reading road.  We are using the Ordinary Parent's Guide to Reading supplemented with Bob books and sometimes Funnix or Starfall on the computer.  Pictured below is him reading his Bob book.  He is so cute when he comes to something funny.  In this book the main characters sit on everything including each other.  When he got to the part about them sitting on each other he just giggled and then read it again to be sure he understood.  I love this part of homeschooling my children!

We continue to plug away at All About Spelling.  We began last year and then ended up having to take a bit of a break because Mom had a hard time directing the teaching.  Since we picked it back up again I have really fallen in love with the systematic approach the curriculum uses.  It is a lot of review until sounds are mastered.  I have seen great progress with both of the boy's spelling.

This year is our first year to do Artistic Pursuits.  What a fun curriculum!  The assignment was to draw a picture using their imagination of a special time they remembered.  

The best thing about this lesson was the medium they used.  Did you know there was such a thing as watercolor crayons?  They drew their picture with a pencil and then colored the picture with these watercolor crayons.  After coloring they took a paint brush, dipped it in water and painted over the crayon marks resulting in a beautiful water colored picture!

 

Timothy chose to draw our dessert from last night.  Those huge piles of red are the strawberries we dipped in chocolate and the three people sitting at the table are me, Gregory and himself.  When Caleb asked why none of them were in the picture Timothy said, "I couldn't draw all those people!"

Elizabeth continued learning her letters this past week, but one of her favorite activities she did was to work with the pattern blocks.

So, how was your week?  What were the most exciting events?