This update is very special edition because Josie is writing it with me. She’s read the whole book of the first two years of her life (the blog made into a book) and enjoyed hearing the stories so I wanted to give her a chance to contribute too. We’ve also been very behind in our Josie reports, but she’s been more consistent all year so it will be easier to catch up.

This year Josie has been homeschooling. We’ve been making a weekly list of things that I try to finish each week. I study math, multiplication, addition, and subtraction, mad libs (part of speech), journaling, handwriting (with the handwriting without tears curriculum), spanish reading, spelling, reading out loud and reading independently. This week I did a worksheet on the words ‘there, they’re and their’. I think homeschooling is going really well and it’s fun. I want to homeschool next year.

Other than school, I have been doing gymnastics, ballet, swimming and choir. At home I have been working on my cartwheels and handstands, gymnastics is the funnest thing in the world. For my ballet recital this year we will be doing the happy prince, and I get to be in it! We started learning the dance and we’re trying to get to know the places we will be on stage. I just finished a session of swimming and now I started a new one with the same teacher, Miss Sarah. This last session I got rid of my bubble and now swim with no flotation help all class.

And now Josie has mostly lost interest in writing about herself so I’ll add some more. We’ve had a great year with her at home, I can tailor her lessons to her interests and to her strengths and weaknesses. We slow down and speed up as needed. Plus I can include Ewan and Celia in a lot of the lessons at different levels. Josie also teaches Celia a lot of her lessons (not by my request! this is them playing) to review math and reading. Plus we all get to cuddle and read. Josie is also a voracious reader herself. Most mornings she hangs out in bed for an hour reading. It improves her mood and gives us all some time to wake up and get moving.

As a six year old she can really communicate complicated thoughts and ideas to us and it’s a blast to hear what she’s thinking about and understanding about the world around her. It’s also interested to see what she’s picking up from books because she has more  free time to read than I do and so I can’t pre-read the stuff she’s reading. We generally read a book together at night, we’ve been reading the dolphin diaries series and also Charlotte’s web lately. I made sure to finish up Charlotte’s web during the day though, not right before bed since it is a rough ending.

Otherwise Josie plays with a number of friends from choir and around town. I also ran a math club for two months that Josie and Celia joined in and we got to meet a number of new friends and practice our math. One of her favorite activities of the week is Games Day which is a homeschool get together at the local library for a few hours of playing (mostly board) games with other kids, we all go and it’s been a great way to learn about other new games and try them out.  Let’s hope we can stay healthy as the weather warms up and we can all enjoy getting outside more and Josie’s dying to get back onto her bike (but she’ll need a new one as the current one is too small!)

• Size/weight: 8, ~50″ tall, 62 lbs
• Favorite foods: pasta, pizza, cheese
• Favorite toy: stuffed cat named ribbon
• Favorite book: Animal Ark series (Also re-reading Ramona series, the Dolphin Diaries series, and the Buddy Dog series)
• Favorite activity: play dolls with Celia and Ewan
• Sleeping: bedtime ~8; gets up about 6:30
• New skill: swim without a bubble, better handstands and cartwheels
• Teeth: Lost her first two! Gained 5 more, 23 teeth
• Literacy: reading chapter books

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 19th, 2015 at 9:02 pm by Jen. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.