what's new at our school...

Well, we are having such a grand time doing all sorts of stuff! The girls are busy memorizing the 23Psalm, and learning new hymns. Oh how they both love to sing! I have an old hymnal and have been trying to pick out some of the older ones. I thought that they would turn up their noses, but they LOVE it!! Aly's current favorite is "I have decided to follow Jesus" and Lili's is "Near the Cross". We gave Poppy (my dad) a concert this morning. He was in quite the bad mood and it certainly lifted his spirits!!

Aly is busy learning all about nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs and the like. I wasn't EVEN going there yet, but when I found a Mad-Libs site online and was telling her about how much fun I used to have with those things when I was a kid, she wanted to play. It didn't take her long to realize that she needed to know what a noun was before she could participate. Needless to say she had a ball doing Mad-Libs with me! I tried to explain plural vs singular and she quickly cut me off and told me she knew what that meant...sure enough...she did!! So when I was getting dinner in the oven this afternoon, she wandered around the kitchen finding every noun she could discover and picking adjectives to describe them all. I couldn't believe that she actually got it and so quickly. I think I have my work cut out for me with these two!!

I am really trying to find things for her to learn that will not only stretch her mind, but things that she will use at some point. So, we have started memorizing the books of the bible. I stumbled across this great link for learning them in order but with some sense of understanding them (not just mindless memorization) Anyway, click here and check it out. Aly loved it and Lili was parroting her as usual. We are just doing one section at a time and taking it slowly.

A few days ago we were looking through some books and there was a picture of the United States. She knows where we live (Florida) and where we used to live (TN) and where David's family lives (South Carolina), but that is about it. Oh...I forgot, she knows where Canada is!! LOL Anyway, she asked me when we were going to learn "what all the states are called". So I printed out a blank map of the USA and put it in her folder. We started with what we knew (FL, TN, SC, AK) and I wrote the abreviation on those states and then she used different colored pencils and colored those states in. Then she picked out 4 more states at random. I told her what they were and we did the same with those. She wanted to go on, but I told her that was enough for her brain today. Anyway, I figure once we can get through that map and she has a rough idea what is what, then I have some online games that she can play to nail them all down really well.

My little type-A discovered the dictionary this past week. She now wants to look everything up. So we are having fun looking up every word she doesn't know and I can't wait to start hearing some of those words show up in her conversation. I can't remember what it was, but she used some big word the other day and David and I just looked at each other bewildered. She used it correctly...I didn't teach it to her, but she absolutely knew it!! I signed up for one of those "word a day" sites on the web. I figure I better get a jump on my vocabulary or I won't be able to understand her soon!!! :-)

In HIS Mighty Grip~