Notes on the Second Day

This often happens, I fall asleep by mistake with the kids and wake up 7 hours later, unable to go back to sleep. So here it is 4 in the morning and I'm at the computer. Why not make some notes on Day 2.

Madison claims that she likes this year of homeschooling much better than last year. I can't get her to pinpoint why. She says it's more fun. I have this sneaking, guilty suspicion that it's more fun because I've been able to devote much more uninterrupted time to school time. (No clients called on Labor Day, only one called on Tuesday.)

Hmmmm. Will have to think more about that.

As for Ella, the summer gap in formal learning has made noticeable two new strides:

1) In logic: Ella is able to manipulate abstract ideas much more readily. I have a Mind Benders Warmup logic book for K-2 which went nowhere last year. But this year, she is having fun solving problems like:

Mrs. Jones is Henrietta's mother.
Mrs. Pembroke is Mrs. Jones's mother.
What is Mrs. Pembroke's relation to Henrietta?

and

Jane and Henry have two professions: Bricklayer and skycap.
The man is not the bricklayer.
Who has what profession?

For that last one, I showed her how to use charts, with Xs and Os. Madison has been using this since late first grade, and it happened she heard me doing Ella's first one with her while she was working on logic, too. She came over and showed Ella the complicated chart *she* was using. Ella was impressed.

Also with Ella:

In terms of reading, I kind of take back what I said in a recent post about her having regressed. She's gotten right back into the swing of things with much more enthusiasm than she had last year. In terms of skill, not only is she reading faster and, with two days of practice, recognizing words much more than before (not just deriving them from first letter and context), but she's also learning new words a lot faster. Last year, she would have had to re-sound-out a word that she had already sounded out at the top of the same page, but now she just recognizes it from the work she had done. That seems mundane, but I think it's a pretty big step.

Second, she actually *wants* to read. I did what I did this spring, I had her start again WAAAAY at the beginning of the EPS Phonics books series, at Set 2. (Each storybook set has 10 books of 16 pages each. I love this series.) She had read, painstakingly, up through Set 5 last fall/winter/early spring, then I made her start again in the mid-spring and she progessed through them much faster. I'm doing the same thing now, to build up her confidence. The first day she read five books. Yesterday, she wanted to start really early in the morning, while we were still snuggling in bed, and so she actually read the last five books in Set 2 before setting foot on the floor. Then she wanted to bring more of the books with her to the lawyer's office (David and I had to sign some will documents yesterday morning), which she did. So maybe she is in a period of actually wanting to do this reading stuff. Fingers crossed.

Note to self: Stop feeling frustrated when we're out in the world and she doesn't try to read signs and other things that she could actually read if she put just a grain of effort into it. Patience, Grasshopper.