Reading & Writing

This whole school year I've been home schooling the boys on days they don't go to preschool. It's nothing too heavy just twice a week for about 1 hour each day. They've been working mostly on reading and a little bit with numbers. It's been slower than I had anticipated but I guess I have to cut them some slack since they are only 4 years old and not 5-6 when most kids learn to read. Currently they can read close to 3 dozen words. They are mostly 2 and 3 letter words and a few 4 letter words. The boys are getting really good at sounding out 2 or 3 letter words (if they forget a word I make them try to sound it out) but the 4 letter ones they get kind of overwhelmed so they tend to give up. But I am so relieved that they've caught on to the concept of sounding out words and joining the sounds together to make one sound (the word as it's spoken). Also all of a sudden their penmanship has gotten so much better. I kind of gave up working on writing letters because it would frustrate them. So I just left them to their own devices and they have all just started writing stuff on their own. Thomas was my only boy who had any previous interest in writing letter and numbers so I'm glad all three are showing improvement. We still have a few hang ups like getting our b, d, p, and q's mixed up but we'll keep working on it.

 I'm so thankful for Pinterest because that's where I get a lot of my ideas for teaching. We work strictly in Spanish so I get kind of frustrated too because there are tons of work books available in stores that teach reading but I can't use any of them because they are all in English. Gosh it would be so easy if only they were in Spanish! So I pretty much make our own worksheets in Word or Excel using clip art and such. Our lessons would definitely be longer but it takes me so long to prepare that we have to keep them shorter. The boys have great attention spans and could totally go longer but alas what can I do? I only have so much time in the day : )

Here is an example of a lesson we did recently (notice how Thomas elongates the 'm' in his name, he thinks that doing this will make his name will sound really loud. I think I need to work on teaching them punctuation because an exclamation mark would be much simpler to write out, ha!)

Caleb did this all on his own unprompted (top says 'mommy' and bottom says 'bear' in Spanish)

The boys have learned to draw something new! This kitty was by Thomas : )