Ordered!

Went to the local huge book sale this weekend. First we went on Thursday and I bought 2 big boxes full of books for our home library. I'm so thrilled that I found a lot of Canadian History realted books and some great books for read-alouds. Then on Sunday they had a $2 a bag sale so I came home with another 2 bags full of books (and they were big bags too!), this time I splurged and picked up some for me too.

And, big excitement today. I ordered Animals and Their Worlds today! I can't wait. It's been a looong time since I've been this excited about curriculum. I really think ds is going to like it. Right now we are just doing the basics: Math, Reading and all the other Language Arts. Reading is coming along, slowly but surely. Oldest ds was an early reader and I didn't have any problems with him, so this is something new for me to work with a struggling reader, but he's only six and I know it will come eventually. We just keep plugging along.

Nature Walk and Phonics

We went for a nature walk this afternoon. We do every day, weather permitting. The Niagara River is at the end of our street and we walked down to the American Falls. Not all the way down to the tourist area but close enough to get a good view. On the way down we saw turkey vultures in a tree right in front of us! Two of them were sitting in the tree and then they took off and we saw there were several other ones flying around as well. We also looked at dafodils in a garden and saw baby pine cones growing on the pinetrees. Beautiful warm day but a bit windy.

I stumbled upon an awesome Free Phonics Program the other day and we started using it this week. What Fun! Ds6 is really enjoying it, we played Bingo today and he is really starting to take off with his reading. The program is called Stairway to Reading and it is very tactile and uses games as well as a reader and a full teacher's manual and best of all it's FREE.

I also found out about some phonics readers that are new to me. They've been around for a while but I hadn't hear of them before. The Now I'm Reading phonics readers by Nora Gaydos. I took a look at them on Amazon and splurged on the two level one sets: Animal Antics and Playful Pals. They really look good, especially for boys.