I Need Reading Advice

I'm hoping you seasoned teachers can help me.

My 7 year old is struggling with her reading. Using the successful A Beka reading program, I taught my other kids to read. However, this little one isn't retaining the basics. Figuring that a strong foundation is needed before moving on, we are repeating the book we just finished.

While my 7 year old complains of headaches and does anything she can to get out of her reading, her little sister is showing her up. My 5 year old loves to read, and her little mind is beginning to crack the phonetic code of our language.

All of you who help beginner readers, please help me too. What are good ways to build reading confidence?

Broken Glass

I just cleaned up a million little shards of glass. While on the phone, I heard the crash and tinkle of picture frames hitting the floor and the glass shattering. Cleaning up broken glass from a wood floor with grooves is no small task. Those grooves are like caves where the glass likes to hide.

Cleaning the glass reminded me of similar incident that happened almost 8 years ago. We were living in our townhouse. From Ikea, we had a huge 4'x3' framed Van Gogh print. Trying to get around the baby one day, I squeezed sideways by a table where the print rested and leaned against the wall. As I squeezed by, my butt bumped the table. The print fell over and exploded into a million tiny shards.

I shut my eyes and screamed and screamed and screamed imagining glass sticking out of my baby like an acupuncture procedure gone wrong.

Sharp shards showered the floor, yet the baby was miraculously spared a single piece of glass. A perfect sphere of bare floor encircled the her. Amazingly she was unscathed. But there was still that mess to clean up. What a big job!

So I don't have the best luck with glass. Unlike Helen of Troy had a face that launched a 1,000 ships, I have a butt that triggers a million shards.

My Hijacked Schoolday

For the past several weeks my homeschooling has been hijacked. Don't think of the sudden overpowering or powerful takeover. This hijacking took several weeks to build up to the final assault today.

For the past months, I've been preparing my 11 year old boy to recite from memory his 24 weeks of information in 7 subjects. Over the last few weeks, we've completed less and less of other subjects as we focused on his memory work.

All of this built up to today's hijacking. Today, we've done nothing except proof him. My other children have been orphaned. They've been left to their own survival as I shut everything out to just hear him recite his facts.

For 2 1/2 hours, I heard him tell me about everything from the Missouri Compromise to elements of the periodic table to what the associative law for addition and multiplication is to the first chapter of John in Latin. Then he said everything all over again in the afternoon to his oldest sister.

Go ahead and ask me to find all 50 states and name their capitals. Ask what the circumference of a circle is. Ask what an infinitive is. I'll tell you the major purposes of blood because when one member of your family studies to be a memory master with Classical Conversations then the momma is kinda forced to learn everything too.

Brotherly Love

My boys are separated by 8 years, yet, if things keep going as they are, I can already tell they will get along famously for the rest of their lives. That is due to how loving my oldest son is.

As an 11 year old boy, he's pretty unusual. Instead of shunning his little brother, he pleaded with me to move his 3 year old brother from the nursery so that they could be roommates.

When I ask the oldest boy to change his little brother's diaper, I often have to track down the two who are somewhere else in the house. I just follow the laughter. Since they wrestle so much, I'll find that they have rolled from room to room until they are far away from the diaper and wipes that were set aside.

And when I ask him to put the baby down for nap, he surprises me by reading books to him.  He takes the time to cuddle up with his little brother in order to read the three books that the baby must hear over and over.

With all the attention poured down on him, you can imagine that my 3 year old adores his older brother. All around the house you can hear him yelling for his big brother in his cute, little voice. He handles a controller while watching the master play Xbox. He sits beside the skilled architect as he watches buildings rise in Minecraft. He wants to do whatever he sees his big brother doing.

What a relief for me. For years I speculated on how much better life would be for my 11 year old if his stillborn brother had lived. Being two years apart, I kept imagining the lost son to be the panacea to my older son's boredom.

While I'll never know if my oldest son really lost a best friend in his dead brother, I have seen him endure as the only boy amid three girls and their stuff. After 8 years without a brother, he is making up for lost time.

Current Events Via the Ears of Xbox

Years later, my kids will remember the storms that rocked the Midwest. Their recollection will be based on what they heard from their headset. Thanks to their Xbox live subscription, my kids had a first hand account of the storms out West since they play video games with kids all over the world.

My daughter asked me if I had heard about the tornados devastating the people to the west. I was taken aback that she knew about current news. We don't have any TV signal here at the house. Her knowledge of the storms wasn't from the news, though. It was through the Xbox.

This week, my kids could hear Midwestern kids trying to finish an Xbox game while their parents yelled in the background, "Get down to the basement!"

Another kid from middle America kept asking the members of the party to speak louder so that he could hear over all of the sirens blaring in his city.

Gone are the days when we heard about meteorological events days or months after they occurred. In this newly connected world, our kids are growing up to experience history as it happens.

Magic Flying Carpet Bag?

Today I dropped off 3 kids for my mom to watch. while I went to monitor study at the not-a-school where my oldest takes her weekly classes. Combined with 5 of my brother's kids, my mom was a busy grandma.

While at my mom's house, I looked through the 2012 calendar that I made for my parents.  Compiling pictures from last year, I winded up giving them a photo journal of last year's highlights.

Those pictures from last year made me feel so happy to remember the fun memories and proud that I overcame my laziness enough to take my brood places.

My almost 4 year old niece went through the calendar with me. Each time she saw a picture with a big group of kids, she would say, "I wasn't there because I was sick,"or "I didn't go because I had a cough." Poor girl. She really had missed it all. One time she did have a cough, but she missed all the other times because my van can only illegally hold so many kids.

If only my van could hold as many kids as a tiny clown car that rivals Mary Poppins's carpet bag full of household appliances.

Pulling a lamp out of a bag or crowding 50 clowns into a car? Which is better?