Signing Videos

I found out from another blog that Signing Time is having a big 10th Anniversary sale on their videos.  The videos are only $10 today and tomorrow, I think.  I absolutely love the Signing Time videos.  We watched a lot of them with Sophia when she was little and she used to sign all of the time.  The next two, not so much.  But I do take Em and Grace to sign language class in the fall.  So our family really enjoys signing so I ordered a bunch of videos.  Their web site must be overloaded because it took a long time to get from page to page.  But I still got it done.  So, if you like signing videos, now is the time to stock up, go check it out! 

Sophia's Favorite Teacher

I had to take Brooke in to get her sports physical on Wednesday morning.  I was very thankful that Josh was home so number one, I didn't have to drag everyone with, and number two because I left him to do Sophia's phonics with her.  I got everything ready and laid out for him and gave him a brief description of what needed to be done.  Well, when I got home she was all done with her work.  But, I was very surprised when I looked at her worksheet.  Sophia always has really nice handwriting.  She is pretty good about staying where she is supposed to be as far as the lines go.  But on this day, she was making the letter J.  Her lower case J's were awful!  So I asked her what happened and she just half smiled and shrugged.  So I asked Josh about it and he looked at it and pretty much said he hadn't really even looked at what she did.  He did have her erase them and rewrite them.  I thought it was pretty funny though.  Well, the next morning when I was getting Sophia's phonics ready she told me, "I like when you do my school better."  I wasn't sure I heard her right so I asked her what she said and she repeated herself.  She said "I like when you do my school cause dad always weaves."  Meaning leaves!  Ha ha, sure, he says what has to be said and then gets up and leaves.  That is why her handwriting was so bad, he left her to do it herself.  It just cracks me up because I really can see it driving him crazy to have to sit there and do that lesson with her, much less have to sit there and wait for her to finish her writing!  Oh I'm still thankful he did the lesson with her and I certainly would ask him to do it again.  He means well and tries to help.  Sophia I am sure wouldn't complain too much.  But really what it comes down to is that she would rather ME teach her.  THAT is all I needed.  It's kind of nice to be chosen over daddy once in a while!

A Couple New Books

I ordered a couple new books for school and they arrived on Friday.  Nothing like starting something new two months before school is out!  Can you say "summer school"?

This first book is a new phonics book I ordered for Grace to work through.  It looks really easy so it shouldn't take her long to get through it.  We obviously quit the Vo-Wac we were doing.  Life is so much better since we quit!  Anyway, I do think there are some important rules in this book that we may have missed so that is what I'm hoping to accomplish by using this book right now. 

This second book I am pretty excited about.  Brooke saw it up in the cupboard and said she loved working in this book so I just had to order one for both Emily and Grace.  The book is set up as if you are working at a newspaper.  They will learn all sorts of things from writing a column to a news article to sale ads.  I haven't decided yet how to work it along with the Writing Strands book they are both working on.  Maybe alternate days or weeks?  I think we'll just dig right in to this tomorrow and see what it entails and go from there.

I also have Grace all tested and set up to use the Spelling Power program.  She seems fairly happy with it so I hope it will help her.  She tested at a much higher level than I expected her to so that was a nice surprise.  She has been learning!

The girls did start their science experiment book this last week and they enjoyed doing an experiment.  The vocabulary words the second day, maybe not so much but they did it anyway, knowing if they didn't that they wouldn't get to do any more experiments.