T-Bird Anni Rides Again

Proper blog will follow when my brain catches up with my body.  So taht should be round Melrose time then…. sigh 

Spelling game boards

We ahve played a few of these now and they are being very enjoyable.  Basically there are 8 different printed boards, a dice and a load of clear tiddly winks for counters.  Games include one on spotting the vowel sound in the middle of CVC words - not terribly taxing but I’m sure you could print off pictures of other things and place them on the board if you fancied.  It was satisfyingly quick and silly though as you need to place counters on the "beach towels" relating to the right vowel sound.  There is snakes and ladders with those funny vowel sounds like "or" and "ow" which she needed much help with but was fine really (if you get the sound right at the snakes mouth then you don’t fall down the snake, get it right at the bottom of a ladder and you get to go up it).  There is a consonant blend one ("br", "str" and so on) where you have to find something in the picture with the blend in it, another nicely quick one there!  Other ones have sight words to read in order to prgress round the board and other suchlikes.  It’s definitely been worth the money for us but it’s nothing you couldn’t put together yourself as file folder games if you were that way inclined (which I always plan on being then fail, she would be reading War and Peace by the time I got round to making them)

Not had time to play the Maths ones yet but they look fun anyway. 

Vicki - Box day is when I get the Sonlight books for the year.  Sonlight is the "curriculum in a box" that we use here.  It gives me science stuff both to read out and to do, story books which at this level are just usually nice stories but in later years relate to themes much more, history and geography stuff and reading books for Aprilia.  The last part being probably the least useful just now as we still have a few issues with reading so are using other things for that.  Whilst I know that following a curriculum isn’t what makes a lot of home educators get excited, it’s what suits us as it gives me something to follow rather than trying to make it up as I go along  (see above for how well organised I am at making things for my child!)  I’m looking at using Winter Promise instead of Sonlight after next year as they are very similar to Sonlight so it won’t be a huge change but I just don’t fancy 2 years of American History when I could be doing things like Animals in the Habitats and "Sky and Sea" which has loads of stuff on oceans (obviously!) and flight including space exploration then I can decide with Aprilia what she wants to do after that, either with bought in curriculae or wading through my stash of completed Open Uni short courses or whatever.