school year update

We are LOVING most of our school choices for this year! We had so much fun a few weeks ago going to visit Chicago: 2 zoos, Navy Pier, and the Field Museum. Aidan and I were SUPER excited at the Early Americas exhibit...lined up EXACTLY with what we've been reading about. Aidan's favorite part? Seeing all the weapons in person. :)

I've loved seeing Iona pipe up with Latin words she has learned from Aidan's studies. She likes to come over where I'm working with Brendan and try to weasel in the correct answer to his work.

I've loved seeing Aidan get excited about reading his Bible and memorizing verses for AWANA. He taught himself to read silently, and he knows how to find his Bible passage I have noted for him to read.

I've loved seeing Brendan practically drool over seeing workboxes set up for him. He is often the first one to start and finish. He is such a hard worker.

What has not worked:

We had to drop Math U See Primer for a while. I hit a BIG FAT wall with Brendan AND Iona. After talking with some friends and doing some research, we made the decision to start using MEP Math, a free online math program, for the rest of the year. I am using the Reception level with both of them, though I have them staggered about a week or so apart to prevent Iona from giving Brendan all the answers. :) It is going SO WELL!! I love how well planned the lessons are. We adapt some of them from classroom to home use, but I love how much practice we are getting on some very new concepts for Brendan...just taught him what "above" means. It's been great to fill in some of those gaps with him since we brought him home from China last year.

Things are also getting interesting with teaching Brendan how to read. He does not have a bunch of the prereading skills necessary, so we're finding ourselves backing up a lot and doing a LOT of extra practice. We are possibly going to get a complete eval done at the public school just to see what is going on for sure, but we have some possible ideas from his speech therapists. Don't know if we will do services at the school, since we had a rough experience with that in the past, but we can at least get free evals done and work from there. I've been doing a lot of reading lately on learning disabilities and looking into some alternative learning-to-read curricula just in case we need to switch next year. There is so much great info available that I'm having a hard time getting through it in a timely manner. Or at least as fast as I want to!