Light Bulb Moments

One of the awesome things about homeschooling is seeing your children 'get it'. That light bulb moment truly makes all that we parents put into teaching our children worth it.

Click recently switched to Right Start Math B. We are working on partitioning. It's a new concept but it makes you think. Click is used to just rattling off answers from memory, however, he cannot use that skill for some of the math exercises. Today, after feeling my fuse getting hot, I asked him to use his brain and think about the problem. He looked at me, the problem on the white board, and then his abacus. After about a minute he said, ' oh I know,' moved some abacus beads and gave the answer. Whew! This curriculum is a lot more work in terms of walking the student through the problem solving thinking process, but when the gears are clicking and they produce a thought out answer, it's invigorating!!!

Right Start Math - Finished lesson 10

Story of the World 2 - Chapter 4, The Emporess Theodora

Reading - Click read aloud a few pages from Message in the Sky Corey's Underground Railroad Diary by Sharon Wyeth. I read Hewitt Andersonson's Great Big Life by Jerdine Nolen. This book will be added to my Good Reads list. It's vibrantly illustrated by Kadir Nelson, but I also love the new vocabulary it introduced to Click. We may add this to our personal library. I think he read two Nate the Great books. I'm not positive because he was flipping the pages pretty quickly.


I read an interested book on teaching Spelling. It suggested allowing children to invent spellings (teacher code word for 'misspell words') while they are young and instead focus on encouraging children to write - composing stories, writing letters and grocery lists, etc. Click is my first born, and therefore he's also my experiment baby, so I'm going to try this method.

He's a natural speller and an early reader, but at 5 his fine motor skills are still developing. Most spelling programs that come highly recommended require a lot of writing or busy work. He doesn't enjoy workbooks, so I was debating how to approach spelling when I came upon the book Spel..... a four letter word?

For the past two days I put the concepts into practice. Yesterday I had him write a grocery list. Today I asked him to write something about the Hewitt Anderson story. It's late, but I'll have to post pictures of his writing.