28 Oct 2009

For review & info on most of the books I mentioned here, please goes to http://www.squidoo.com/ahomeschoolingmomjornel (updated 28 Oct 2009) & http://homeschoolingmombookreview.blogspot.com/


For the past week and this week, we had been very hardworking. Even though Den was sick on Mon and I was sick today, we still continue our lessons. Why? Haha! because we got our new Sonlight K program!! After I wrote my last blog, I suddenly realized I only have 8 weeks of Sonlight PreK lessons left. We can finish 1 week of lessons in about 1-2 days. So we were almost out of lessons to use! So I ordered the K program and it reached us last Thurs (19 Oct) and we had been sooooooo excited about it. That motivated us to finish the remaining lessons in order to start the K program!

Ordering Sonlight can be very easy and can be very complicated. The easy one is to go to their website http://www.sonlight.com/ and just order a newcomer set according to your kid's age group. That will come with everything but cost a big bomb!

The complicated one is to order acc to your own need. In the process of doing that, you might miss something. Last year, I missed a book to go with the Art book. This year, I missed the Bible and the CD for verse!! Order again is out of the question because of the shipping cost, so I need to be inventive! Last year, I found a similar book from Popular plus another 2 from garage sales to compensate for the one I missed. This year, I searched through my bookcase and found a children's Bible that come with narration & song CD, so that's the one I'm going to use! Hopefully, it will work. If it doesn't, I'm sure I can think of something else.

We had finished week 29, 30 and 31. The verse for week 30 from Exodus 20:7 :

"Do not misuse the name of the Lord your God."

She learned a new word - "Misuse" and a new concept - What is a misuse of the name of God.

The verse for week 31 is from Matthew 6:20:

"Store your treasures in heaven, where moths and rust cannot destroy."

New concept - storing treasure in heaven! In today's reading from The Lion Storyteller Bedtime Book (under Read aloud 2), we read about how a farmer burned all his crops in order to draw all the people from the village to his field and thus saved them from the tsunami. I used the story to explain to Den, that's storing treasure in heaven.

We have finally finished the two big story collections we started last year - The Lion Storyteller Bedtime Book and A Family Treasury of Little Golden Books (under Read Aloud).


We also finished two very interesting books about Science. We love Sonlight Pre K Science books and can't wait to see what is in store for us in the K program.

1. What's Smaller Than a Pygmy Shrew (under Science 2) by Robert E Wells, the author of Is a blue Whale the Biggest Thing There is? (under Science). This time round we learn about protozoa, atoms, electrons, neutrons, and quarks! Not sure how much Den understood since Im still MCC myself. However, she enjoyed reading it and requested me to read it again and again and at least she understood, things are not just what meets the eye. They are made up of smaller parts. She is also very much looking forward to having her own microscope.

2. How To Dig A Hole To The Other Side Of The World (under Science 2) is another wonderful book to read. It is about Geology!! I had never ever found geology interesting until I read this book. Read more about this two book in my book review blog at http://www.squidoo.com/ahomeschoolingmomjornel

Besides all the reading from Sonlight, I also started Den on Sonlight K Language Art. I brought that with the Pre K program but ended up did not use it because I find Teach Your Child To Read in 100 Easy Lessons (Under Language) is much more effective. So I lend it to my friend MA and intend to use it as a review after I finished teaching Den with the 100 easy lessons.

Well, we still have not finished the 100 not so easy lessons!! But I think she is able to read all the books from Fun Tales (part of the K LA program) and it will help build her confidence in reading. So I decided to start her on that and intend to finish the 36 weeks program in 2 months. So far we can finish 1 week's program in 1 sets. I was hoping to resell the whole program by end of this year. Her new K program has cost RM2200!!!

Sonlight K LA program consists of a few parts:

1. Introduce the sound of each letter. Which I'm not using since Den already knows most of the sound. However, I find the two games rather interesting for practicing sound -

(a) Go A to Z. It is a card game that goes like Go Fish! or Donkey! Basically, you try to match the cards that you have. However, instead of taking cards from your opponent's hand, you have to ask him or her for that particular sound.

(b) Alphabet Bingo. It comes with 8 Bingo cards and basically, we draw out mini alphabet cards and read the sound out loud, if you have the sound on your card, you cover it. Whoever gets 5 in a row wins!

2. My first Picture Dictionary (under Sonlight K Reader). It is used as part of learning the sound. I used it as a review for Den and also learned new vocab. We were very excited when we watched the movie UP today and saw something we just learned today - zeppelin.

3. Language and Thinking For Young Children (under Sonlight K Reader) For PreK to 1st Grader. It is a very good manual meant for parents to teach their kids at home. All units in the manual are flexible to use either very simple learning or more advanced learning and the units are not sequential so they may be taught in any order.

4. Fun Tales (under Sonlight K Reader) - 27 small booklets that come with phonetically correct sentences. Great for kids who just are learning to read using phonics.

5. Activities: The IG (Instructor's Guide) offers some interesting ideas for kids to learn to make up a story or complete a story, etc.

6. Writing: The IG also comes with instructions and activities on handwriting. Since I have been using Handwriting without Tears (under Workbook) with Den, I did not use this.


Talking about writing, I have started Den on Handwriting Without Tear K program. The pre K was too easy for her ( I will recommend it for ages 3-4), so when I got the K workbook along with the new Sonlight program, I decided to switch her to that. Still working on her mirror image!!