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I'm playing with SWR again. I really like this program. It is the kind of program that "should" work for just about everyone and every learning style. It is just really labor intensive at first and I never really put a lot into figuring it out. Okay, to be fair to myself, I did put a lot into it right at first, but it tapered off pretty quickly and then I just couldn't be bothered. But I really credit the program for the huge leaps Maria made in reading toward the beginning of the school year. I want to give it a try again. I don't think the Spectrum workbooks have hurt the girls any, but they are really boring and they don't teach phonics the way I believe it should be taught and lot of it is just busy work. We don't need that in our homeschool. Plus, they don't teach cursive, which is a problem. Anyway, I'm going to give SWR another chance. I "discovered" a pretty detailed lesson plan outline in the back of the SWR book that I didn't know was there before and light bulbs went on all over the place for me while I was reading through it. I think if it will dramatically cut down on the time I spent trying to "design" lesson plans. I looked intently at the All About Spelling program recently, thinking it might solve my problems, but the more I read the more I realized I already have all the stuff I need to teach reading, spelling, and writing if I can just figure out how to implement it. Sometimes I feel like I'm back in school myself. I can't believe how much I've learned in the last two years teaching my children.

I'm currently in love with History Odyssey from Pandia Press. (Thanks, Jessa for introducing me to it!). After months of struggling to come up with history lesson plans and notebook pages, I think History Odyssey may be the answer. I downloaded the ebook version of ancient history and started with lesson/week 8 because that was the first lesson we had not already done something similar. We will probably have to skip over a few of the future weeks as well, as we HAVE been doing history, just not very well. I need to pick up a few more books too. Yes, new books!! I'm very happy to have found it. We've done a couple of lessons so far and it is just the right amount of guidance for me. Enough that I don't have to scramble around trying to figure out what to do, but not too much so that I can easily adjust it to my girls ages and interests. Very cool!

Luci is very, very interested in learning to read right now. But I don't know how to help her as she just cannot seem to retain even single letter phonograms. The vowels especially seem to elude her. When I point to a vowel and ask her what sound it makes, she just goes through all the vowel sounds in existence in rapid succession. She doesn't really seem to understand what I am asking. I'm trying not to be worried about this. We've worked on basic alphabet phonograms for over a year and she turned five in December, so it is hard not to worry. Maria and Zoe both had this much sooner and were starting to read short vowel, single syllable words by this point. Luci recognizes her name and her sister's names, but that it about it. When should I get worried? When should I be doing something more or different with her than with her sisters? I just don't know. This is another reason I want to get back into SWR. I think the method might work a lot better with her than this workbook approach we've been doing recently. It doesn't seem to be going anywhere.