this spring

Summer is totally here now so it's about time I get this note posted to record our fun spring of learning! It just struck me that we have about one more month of preschool here before summer... and then we'll (finally) launch into the long-awaited, highly anticipated journey of homeschooling!  I'm so excited for that!  (Do you hear the ridiculously naive optimism there?  :) )

So, this spring...

I am grateful beyond words for the sweet preschool our kids are at.  Joyful Preschool is run by a local group of believers in Christ so the instruction is all in Chinese but the classmates that our kids play with there are from all over the map (Australia, South Africa, England, Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore) so they also get some interaction in English with friends at playtime.

This will probably sound really silly to others, but we've had our kids in preschool here for mornings M-F for years now and usually I've thought that this was simply their time to learn Chinese.  I know they're playing, doing cute crafts, singing songs... but I had very low expectations that they would really be learning much else, anything substantial.  But I was wrong!  Yipee!

Isaiah especially has learned so much this spring.  Matt and I both spent time with the big two over Chinese New Year Break (Jan- Feb) going over double digit numbers....  43 is forty three kind of thing.  It was strange to us how difficult it seemed to be to them.  They were doing better in Chinese than in English!  But very soon into this semester, they both took off.  There's no hesitation on numbers now for Isaiah and usually not for Marian (though she sometimes still gets 43 and 34 mixed up.... that sort of thing).

But Isaiah has really blasted into the math world with surprising speed recently.  He often likes to ask  "what's 4+10"  or "whats 10-7?".  In April (I think) he asked me "what's 7-9" and I thought he'd be blown away with that one......  I told him "negative 2" and he told me I was right.  But I was sure he had no idea what the negative deal really was.... again, I was wrong.  I don't know where he's learned it, but he really does get it.  And I thought it was his teachers in his kindergarden level math class at school that must have taught him, but they thought it must be us at home....  He was introduced to negative concept at school but he's far past his class in it evidently....  we are just so excited to see him learning and loving math so well!

So this spring, as I realized that our big two especially are learning so much, and their days are full of class and book time already I've simplified our homeschool goals for this season to just this:

**Bible verse review, hymns at home
**8:30- 12:20 morning preschool:  lots of excellent math, Hanzi (Chinese characters), crafts, songs &
    exercises, nature observation, China culture...
**Reading lesson with both,
**Piano lesson (weekly) and piano practice daily for Isaiah  (God has provided a wonderful teacher who comes to our home and opens each lesson with prayer:) )

That's it!  It's been fun and it's been super exciting to see them both becoming readers.  We've stuck with the "Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons" book by Engelmann and have thoroughly appreciated it.    I think I already wrote about how I forgot about this resource that had been recommended and then I got it, and thought we couldn't use it since our kids were so far past where that book starts.   I wish so much I would have started those lessons with Isaiah a year earlier!  It is what it is though... He finished all 100 just before he turned 6.

It worked great to breeze through the beginning and make the most of the latter lessons.  I was feeling so stuck at the slow sound-it-out spot we were at... but Isaiah is well past it now.... and Marian is well on her way.  Thank you Lord!

What a joy to learn together, to serve my kids in learning to explore and marvel at our world and it's Maker!  Oh God be glorified in our learning together!