I just impulse bought Hooked on Phonics' Master Reader for Milo, because it was $30 with a half off coupon code (originally $199), and it sounds like it will be a good thing for him for this summer and next year....for 7 year olds and up to work on fluency and speed. AND it's mostly on CD-roms, which means he can do it without my help! I love things Milo can do without my help, and I'm excited about the list of such things expanding beyond Explode the Code next year.
Milo, speaking of Milo, is suddenly a voracious reader. He's upstairs right now finishing up an Arthur (the monkey, not the aardvark) book that he started less than an hour ago. It's a Level 2 I Can Read book, around 60 pages long. I'm so incredibly impressed with how far he's come in reading this year. He's just started reading regularly at bedtime over the past few weeks, and I keep finding him reading on his own during the day, too. Milo's transformation into Milo the reader is definitely near or at the top of the list for this year's biggest homeschooling accomplishments. I went through a period where I was worried he'd never like to read; that maybe I'd pushed too hard too soon or somehow it would always be a struggle for him. And now, ironically, he's my kid with his nose in a book while the others play outside. So hooray. This week he's torn through much of the library's collection of Arthur books and worked very hard at a graphic novel that Ari checked out and already read, Into the Volcano by Don Wood.
Ari's bedtime reading, on the other hand, is driving me nuts. Now that's he's through with Harry Potter, it's a constant struggle to find books that Mr. Picky will read. Dave reports that right now he's reading one of Milo's Arthur books. Sigh. School reading is not a problem, as he'll usually read whatever I assign him with relatively little complaining. But left to his own devices (and his own giant bookcase filled with books, not to mention many hundreds more to choose from at the library), he sighs and moans dramatically about how he has "nothing good to read." I am not sure what to do about all that. Andrew Clements is usually a hit, but we'll have exhausted his catalog before long. And of course, he reads very quickly when he does read, so an Andrew Clements book might last him 2 nights and then we're back to the search. Series books would be great, but he gets bored with them after he reads a couple. He read the first two Percy Jackson books then got tired of them. He might get back to them sometime, but there's no telling. He took long breaks between Harry Potter books, too. I blame the stars; Geminis are difficult, fickle little people.
So there's my weekly report for reading. I will not be so wordy about the other stuff, I imagine. We've started on WWII in history. We finished the Time for Kids Franklin Roosevelt bio and now we're reading Eleanor's. And the American Girl book about Molly and life in 1944.
Milo's still working on Singapore 1a. It was a little trickier for him this past week, with adding and subtracting stuff like 13-8 and 7+5. I explained the Singapore making 10s thing, though, and it seemed to click with him pretty quickly. We'll see how next week goes.
Ari finished a review section in 4B and started a geometry section (symmetry and whatnot). He may finish the book next week if he's feeling especially motivated.
We're finished reading in Sentence Island, and Ari's just working on a few more writing assignments. We still have maybe 3 or 4 stems to go in Building Language and quite a bit to do in Music of the Hemispheres.
Ari's last Spanish class for the year is on Monday. Board game class is still going strong. I'm trying to give some thought to next year's extracurricular stuff, but it's all a bit up in the air. Dave is planning to run a Math Olympiad club/team, so that's in the works. I'll probably sign Ari up for Spanish again. Gus wants to play soccer. Beyond that, I have no idea. I would like to be a little more intentional about where we spend our extra time/money, so at some point I will sit down and really think it out. But not tonight, for it is the weekend, and we have homebrew beer tasting and Mad Men watching and a very special cookie from the Publix bakery ahead of us tonight!
8 comments:
Rick Riordan has a new series out based around Egyptian mythology. Maybe that will catch Ari's attention?
ooh, thanks! It might, at least for a week or so ;-). I might save it for next year when we're doing the Egyptians, though. Two of his best friends are reading the Guardians of Ga'hool series right now, so I think we'll check into that, too.
Sounds like you had a lovely week and very busy. Good luck keeping that reader satisfied. My dd11 has the same difficulty. Usually what she find interesting, I find inappropriate.
I want to hear more about the special cookie.
Ahh, the special cookie! The special cookie is two chocolate chip cookies with buttercream frosting in between them, and then the whole thing dipped in chocolate. It was yummy.
This is my first time visiting your blog! I have three boys as well; my eldest is nearly 8, then I have a 5 year old and a 2 1/2 year old. My eldest is also a huge Harry Potter fan and it's very difficult to find something else that can fill that void. He didn't seem to like Percy Jackson, sadly...so anyway, I can understand that struggle of trying to find appropriate things to read! Thanks for the report and Happy Mother's Day!
Has he read The Mysterious Benedict Society? I just read the first one and liked it. Also R. L. LaFevers has a couple of interesting series - Theodosia and the Serpents of Chaos is the first in a series about a little girl in London who can see curses and such attached to ancient Egyptian artifacts. I also enjoyed The Misadventures of Benjamin Bartholomew Piff: You Wish by Jason Lethcoe, and there are more in this series too. They're not as long as HP but fun to read. (I really like juvenile and YA fiction. Heh.)
He has read Mysterious Benedict Society, but didn't want to read the next in the series. And I bought him Theadosia on a friend's recommendation and he rejected it after a few pages...which does not, of course, mean he won't pick it up again in a few months and totally love it..he's a fickle boy :)
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