Iowa Testing

Niles is doing his mandatory Iowa testing for the school year. I was pleased that Heather told me his confidence is much higher, he's finishing everything w/time to spare & he's talkative w/her! Woo hoooooo!! Go Niles!

Luca doesn't have to take that this year, thank goodness. I have no idea how it will go for him next year. I don't see why he needs to take it at 7 when kids in public school don't have to take it til 3rd grade. Oh well, I don't make the home school rules, I just follow them.

Homeschooling Philosophy

• Muad'Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. It's shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult. Muad'Dib knew that every experience carries its lesson.
o from The Humanity of Muad'Dib by the Princess Irulan

Leaps & bounds

Luca is making huge leaps right now. It has been such a satisfying time for me. To finally get to experience him making the connections, building the blocks and reading has been so gratifying! I love it!!

Niles is also reading two books for pleasure. He's still working on the Neil Gaiman book but also picked up a Goosebumps book when we did school at Borders one morning. That's our boy!! So glad someone else finally likes horror in this house!

Progress

We started a new reading program [me & Luca]. ABeCeDarian - and it is working much better. I'm very pleased with the progress he's made in a week. He's definitely more interested & it starts on making words out of the sounds right away. So he can sound out mop, sat & tap already! I said, "Luca, you read those words!" And he said, "I did? Hey, I DID!" Very cool!

Luca is progressing rapidly through math now. I started w/Sinapore's early K books & we finished both of those & are now doing the K book A. We are zipping right along & it's giving him more confidence, since he 'knows' some of this already. I like how the present the info in this series. It's a good fit for us.

Niles is reading The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman. His teacher,from the co-op, who he read Tom Sawyer with, recommended it. He started reading it on the way home from the book store. I thought that was very cool!

He also had a light go on re: fractions this week. I sat down with him and he got it pretty quickly that way.

Our friend has emerged!

Overnight

...our friend made some progress!

Caterpillar

We have a visitor on the side of our house.We saw three or four the other day crawling around on the side of the house. I have no idea why this one decided to make it's home there. I think it is a Mourning Cloak caterpillar, aka nymphalis antiopa.