A little more school stuff

I wanted to add a little more info about the school work that I am doing with the girls. We have been using Hooked on Phonics since last March and we love it. There were 6 boxes in my set and we have almost done 4 of them. I think she will be done by the end of October or a little sooner. She has loved this program. She does great at learning new skills and then there is lots of practice time. Lily loves reading. She is so good at her phonetic skills and she does great with the comprehension questions. I love that she loves it so much!

Math is my least favorite thing to teach. I hate that I am not better at teaching it, but she does seem to learn quickly. Right now we have beend doing a kindergarten full year book. It has lessons on graphing, sorting, adding, subtracting, telling time, etc. She enjoys it. I don't love worksheets, but it is a very good way to make sure that I teach her everything she needs to know.

In October, we are planning to start on the Hooked on Phonics Math program. It looks hard to me. I hope that I can get her ready for it soon. I like that it comes with play money and dice and other fun manipulatives. I also need to be working on other things that I haven't found in the books. I want to work with her on counting by 5's and 2's.

Can't leave Valerie out. She is 2 1/2. I am thinking that I might start her in preschool at 3, but for now I am doing some worksheets with her. She loves them. She has a letter sounds one and a colors and shapes one.

We are starting with our colors. Valerie is doing great!

I love homeschooling my girls!

School is about ready to start

Back to School Time!!!! Our homeschool co-op starts back on September 9th, but we have already started the homeschool year. Lily was just too excited about learning for us to wait. I love that about homeschooling. We can start whenever she is ready and we can take breaks when needed. Due to co-op, we needed a beautiful new backpack. Lily found this monkey one at target and loved it. We then had Poshy Tots Boutique put her name on it. Lily loves it sooo much!! Today the girls tried on their back to school oufits. Don't they look pretty!!

Lily is so proud to finally be a Kindergartner...even though all of her work is first grade level.

This year, Lily's favorite subject is history. She is working on Alpha Omega's first grade history. There is a different book for her to study each month. The first month is all about herself and her friends and her faith. She loved it so we went through it twice as fast as I had planned. So we are already starting the second months book. It is all on different methods of communication.

She reads all of the lessons and then completes the activities. There are also three quizes in each book and one final test. Lily loves being tested! ;)

My favorite subject to teach is bible. She has two devotionals. One of them we just finished and it was so perfect for her age. This next one is just for girls and I hope that it is perfect. We will be finishing the first one soon.

When teaching Lily her bible lessons, I also want to do activities each week that teach her about generosity and giving so we will be looking for ways to bless people around us. I think that is so important for her to learn.

We are also learning about Paul and his journey. Here is a map of his travels and Lily has been practicing reading the names of the cities. That is not easy, even for me. lol.

The last thing that I will share here is just a little bit of Lily's writing and journaling. We do writing every day. Some days we work on getting the letters properly made, but other days, I let her just free write about whatever she has done lately. I try not to be too picky with spelling and such because I want her to learn to try to spell on her own and to have initiative.

That first writing was about her fondue party and the second one is about riding her bike. I am so proud of her already. She is doing great!!

I left off reading and math and Valerie's work from this blog so I will add those soon. :)

Peters Family Update

I have a friend who writes the best blogs on her facebook. She kind of updates us all on her life and her kids. I just love it. So I thought that I would try to just be better about doing a whole family update every once in awhile. Here it goes! Lily is very ready for school to start. She will be doing co-op every Thursday and we will be doing a mixture of different curriculums at home. I have to admit that doing school work with Lily is one of my favorite things. I think it brings the best out of Lily. She is a very hyperactive and often challenging child, but when she is focused, she is brilliant and funny and a true joy. I love watching how quickly she learns and she loves school. She always wants to do more than one days worth of work. We are also going to be getting her signed up for girl scouts this year. I hope that she gets a great leader. I think she will make some great friends through that.

Valerie is the funniest little child ever. I love that she is still my cuddly baby girl. I have never seen a child smile so much and so true. She is always giggling and making silly faces. She truely has her daddy's goofy personality. I think she is much harder to teach though. She is so stubborn and she does not like showing off like Lily does. She does things when she wants to! One thing she really loves though is drawing. She is so much better than Lily was at this age. She makes circles and straight lines like crazy. She even writes the letter V for her name. We have had a really fun time lately with her speech. She is talking so much, but she definitely has a hard time with saying certain words. Valerie had a hard time saying Daphne. At the beginning, she was calling her Baby Daddy...lol. She just couldn't get the right sound so we practiced and she started calling her Dappy...so then we all started calling the baby, Dappy Duck. :) Now she has been working really hard and she calls her...Daaaa____Ne. I think it is so cute!

Daphne is our sweet little baby. I can't believe that she is already 5 weeks old. She definitely loves to smile and she loves car rides. Really if she is ever crabby, a car ride fixes that. This is very good since I love to be busy and on the go. She also loves to breastfeed...sometimes more than I like. lol. She is sleeping great at night. She really only had a problem for the first 3 or 4 days after she was born. I love having a baby again! I realized today though that both of the girls were rolling over by 6 weeks and I have hardly even layed Daphne on her belly...she is not a belly baby like they were and Jason is really letting her get her way in that. lol.

Jason is doing good. He is working a lot, but his job is pretty flexible so he can take off when we need it. That is wonderful. I actually really hope that it picks up more so he can hire a second employee, but I don't think that is going to happen this year with the economy the way it is. Everyone just can't afford to get their carpets cleaned every 6 months.

As for me, I really got my hopes up on selling our house and buying a new one, but houses keep going down in price and that scares me. I don't want to have to sell our house for too little, but I know we could probably make that up by getting a really good deal on a house. I think that we are going to take our house off the market. I just don't want to think about it for awhile. Our house really is big enough for us as a family. I think I just really wanted a bigger house so I would have more room for homeschooling and for having friends over. I love having playgroups and friends over. I really would use my house for that every single day!

Well that is pretty much all that is new with us! Just thought that I would share or atleast write this down for myself. I am not very good at journaling, but I love to keep these memories to look back on. :)