Me - when I was no bigger than a watering can.
This was taken in June of 1981 - I was 15 months old.
And my mom loved sun bonnets.
***********************************************************
I am off to a pleasantly slow start this morning. My kiddos are still sleeping. Which is nice. I have a bit of time in front of the fireplace with my tea and the land of blogs.
When I am done here, I will be diving into the new kindergarten curriculum that I ordered for Maddie. I am going to try to start her schoolwork at 9:00 every morning. That will give us enough time to finish before lunch - for sure. I will post more about this curriculum after we have a used it for a few days.
Some of you may remember this post about the Teach Your Child to Read book. It was great for the first 60 or so lessons. Then it got hard. Hard because there were a lot of reading concepts that aren't taught phonetically, they are just supposed to be recognized by repetition. Maddie was starting to get really frustrated. Her mind works like mine. We need rules and reasons. So, I was trying to explain phonics rules, but having a hard time explaining them to her level.
You may also remember this post. Ben and I talked things over and we decided that making it to lesson 70-something, almost 80, out of 100 wasn't bad. And making a decision to keep learning enjoyable for Maddie wasn't quitting. That's the beauty of doing school at home. We get to choose when to make a change and when to just buckle down and power through. I do not intend to change what I am doing every time we have a slight frustration, but this seemed like a decision we needed to make to keep Maddie from beginning to dislike learning. She had loved her 'reading lessons' through a good share of that book, and I want her to continue to love learning.
When Isaac is ready, I will try Teach Your Child to Read with him. He may be the kind of learner who is able to plug right through it.
So today is a new day and I have some fun charts to put up on the wall and some new books for Maddie to get started with and I am excited about a fresh start.