Friday, November 04, 2011

Our Joy and Pride

No one prepares to be blown away... otherwise they'd hang onto something.

Homeschool has been trucking along with this Mommy creating random letter-focused practice sheets for Rachael to do and coming up with various other curriculum ideas and Rachael just going along for the ride. It's been fun to be creative and watch Rachael's discovery and pride in her accomplishments.

We have been slowly working on Rachael's letters in her name each week. Repetition, repetition, repetition in tracing the individual letter per week, recognizing each capital letter in books and amongst other letters, and learning shapes, colors, and numbers along the way. I've been very goal-focused in targeting Rachael's weaknesses (fine motor control) while blending them into her strengths (identifying shapes, colors and numbers). We've had our frustrating days (sigh) and our moments of victories. And then came today's in which I found myself blown away.

We were sitting down to the normal homeschool with an audience of Abi and Rachael's newest "goes with her everywhere" stuffed animal. We were working on squares today, Rachael showing off her advancements in fine motor skills over the past 3 weeks of focus and I decided to try it out... Rachael has learned the letters R, A and C (we're working our way through her name - other letters didn't really sick). Thus far we have only been tracing them because her fine motor skills are *ahem* "age appropriate". This is not a problem, but I do like to challenge her. So I decided to try it out... NO DOTTED LINES....

And man did she blow me out of the water writing the letters she knows...





It's so cool to see her advancements and her increased focus and hear her ecstatic laughter as she masters a skill for the first time.

- love homeschooling.

Some pictures of her work over the past 3 weeks:


Week 1: "R"


Week 2: "A"


Week 3: "C"


We had done other homeschooling prior to this, it was pretty light and didn't focus on writing at all. Then we took a break from it for a while (helpful of homeschool) after I started getting my feet wet so I could reorganize and so life could happen. And then we started into a more "let's get ready for our real written preschool curriculum for the winter" process which I have charted above.

But anyway, thanks for celebrating with us on Rachael's great successes!

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