Braille

Yesterday Jasmine and I read about Louis Braille and his Braille alphabet.
She thought it was a fascinating pattern, and wanted to try it for her copywork.
(drawing the dots, not actually making raised bumps on the paper).

She decided two words was enough work:

We have a goal for ourselves...I think we might be able to finish first grade this week with a little push. It means we won't do all five of the hideaways left, which is perfectly fine with me. It would be awesome to finish and have time to get second grade put together before we start that in May!!

Finishing the Second Quarter

Technically she still has to do a little more cutting and gluing...
but we're done. We've finished the quarter. And that means our school year is half-done.
On October 14th.

I'm shocked, excited, and SO proud. It's crazy to see how much has changed since the year started, but how much is going the way we'd hoped and how much we still enjoy it!

Last week Jasmine tackled a huge project. In her Copywork, she has her choice of two sentences. One is very short, and the other more involved. Until this one, she'd always chosen the short one. But she decided she could tackle the long one, because it involved "supercalifragilisticexpialidocous." Bekah wanted in on the action too:

I let Bekah just write the million dollar word, but Jasmine had to write a whole sentence.

And they both did great!
Her handwriting has gotten a million times better since we started doing copywork 7 weeks ago. I think the fact that she knows it's the only writing she does helps. Bekah is happy doing anything involving writing, so we may use a lot more workbooks/worksheets with her, but for Jasmine, less is definitely more.

While they worked on this, I let Hudson work on one of his "busy bags." I'd been a little concerned that he didn't know his colors (and of course it made me wonder if he might be colorblind), but apparently it's just that he's playing the game my brother Phillip did, not wanting to name the colors but being plenty able to tell them apart. Because he played this game perfectly:

(sorting pompoms onto plates that matched). He loved it!

We finally did a Hideaway again! I've been dragging my feet lately because I'm so tired of cutting doors out of the boxes. I need to keep doing it, though, because they love them and we bought the boxes!! (and it's why we chose Hideaways in History, after all!)

So: we made the Taj Mahal.

And they put on their Indian garb for the pictures:

"namaste!"

New Directions

Things are changing a little.
After pulling teeth for the first 11 weeks of school, trying to get Jasmine to do the workbooks, I realized it just wasn't working. So after talking to a friend a few years ahead of me in this learning experience, we're now using Susan Wise Bauer's materials for language arts.
We're using Writing with Ease and First Language Lessons, Level 1. She still didn't want to write yesterday for the first copywork assignment, but she eventually did it (she got paid in chocolate chips for each word written. I fed her like a sea lion, which she thought was hilarious. We will not consistently use bribery or sweets, but I needed her to start out with a success).
I also bought triangular pencils in hopes that it would help her hold the pencil properly. Hopefully that will help it be more comfortable, in case comfort is part of the problem here.
It's possible it's just some of Josh's genes showing up. He's always hated writing. Fought it his whole life. But she needs the basics, no matter how much she wishes she didn't.

We celebrated by finishing a project that Bekah did the bulk of. I traced starfish onto a bunch of pieces of construction paper, and Bekah cut them out (and added smiley faces to most of them), and this morning we taped them to yarn and hung them up. We learned a little about sea creatures last week and have been reading about shells and the animals that live(d) in them, so this was a fun little celebration! The kids think it looks like a party in the homeschool room!