At least when you can't talk, you can write. I have the worst case of laryngitis I've had in recent memory. Actually, when I think about it, I'd say that laryngitis is my illness M.O., my own sickness idiom. Almost every year I lose 2 weeks of read-aloud time and basic communication to my lost voice. This time around, and it's been a while, I have been having Ollie read aloud to me. Sometimes I alternate with him by reading a page or two in whisper, but mostly he has been taking my usual role. It's working out nicely. We are halfway through the Invention of Hugo Cabret right now.

Today we played with our friends Asa, Isaac, and Charlotte at the park in Ashland. The big draw of the Ashland park is that there is a skateboard park right next to a playground, so everyone can be happy and appropriately supervised in a compact area that has plenty of shade. Ollie and Walter's skateboarding skills have improved since last summer when we were there. Okay, so they're hardly thrashers, but they were riding very confidently on their bottoms on the boards down even the biggest ramps and then going across the small ramps and platforms and catching air and landing. I hate to think of the bruises that they will have on their butts tomorrow. Frances, as usual, met a girl while she was there and was off playing all kinds of imaginative things.

We are going through Ukrop's White House rolls like they are going out of style, or going stale, or whatever it is that you would say about fresh baked items. They make life easy, but I have to face the facts: they are white bread. And not just white bread, but white bread of the whitest, sugariest sort. But man are they yummy with the tarragon chicken salad on them.

I have a confession: I am in love with XM radio. Crazy, madly in love. I love XM15, which is the folk station. At any given moment, I might hear Christine Lavin or Richard Shindell or Mary Chapin Carpenter. Yeah, there's a lot of Dylan and Peter, Paul, and Mary and other things that I'm not totally turned onto at the moment (don't worry--it's just a life place, not a lack of love or admiration for them; at other points in my life they have meant practically everything to me), but I'm finding this station filling my cup most of the time, and I'm already cringing at the prospect of life without it. XM Kids is also a pretty good station. I find myself listening even when I'm alone, although I did have to pull the plug on a rather rockin' rendition of "Itsy Bitsy Spider" tonight; a girl has to have standards.

It's not just XM that I love--it's the whole sound system. I'm loving the ease of popping in my iPod. And I'm loving having a 6 disc changer to make our audio books go more smoothly. Today we had a boom box hooked up through the plug in the back so that the boys could listen to "Tucket's Gold," by Gary Paulsen. Because we were in the car so long today going to Ashland, they got through almost the whole book. But when you're cradled in brand new leather seats and taking long drags of that new car smell, a long ride with a good book is no punishment.

This morning, the kids watched Alvin and the Chipmunks. I felt too wretched this morning and had no voice for doing much cracking of the whip...or work with them. I also was out of printer paper, which meant that I couldn't photocopy the math review pages I've decided we're going to concentrate on for a while as we get ready for our test. I remedied that situation today, so tomorrow it's back to hitting some of the books. I'm also printing out an endless (400 or so pages) science program that I'm planning to do with all three of the bigger kids over the next few month. The printer, not surprisingly, is balking a bit. Since we don't always "do" a lot of science, my plan for the summer is to work through this life science sequence, participate in www.quickstudylabs.com's Summer Science Club with weekly material, and work through our three Young Scientist's Club kits. The boys will read the nature reader I picked up a few weeks ago. And I'm hoping to pick up this one particular Critical Thinking Company science book for young elementary kids for Frances. The RRHE used curriculum sale is coming up soon, and I already have my list prepared.

What we've been reading: We just finished Johnny Tremain. Ollie's feelings were that he really liked the human interest part of the story and was less happy when it drifted off into history textbook style. But overall, it was a great experience. We spent the better part of the week really delving into this, adding in other reading from Story of US, poetry, and another book on Paul Revere's ride, which was ever so much more meaningful after we had the context of Johnny Tremain in our own personal backgrounds. Ollie is finding it laborious that we aren't yet at the War of 1812, but I want to finish Volume 3 of Story of US before we move on. We have a decent ways to go.

My new scheme is that I'm having the kids read it, aloud, to me. This helps keep Walter at least marginally paying attention, and it gives Ollie reading practice. I picked up a Christian Liberty Press Nature Reader as well that I think Walter will respond to. I haven't done a lot of required reading, and because I was comfortable that they were reading solidly most of the time, I had dropped specific reading instruction. Now I'm thinking that it doesn't hurt to give it a little more extended attention, just to make sure they are as comfortable with reading as they should be. I gave the DONA test on the website www.letsgolearn.com, and their results were both what I expected and better than I expected. The test was broken down into a number of subtests--word recognition, phonemic awareness, reading comprehension, vocabulary. Both were extremely high on word recognition--late 12th grade and middle of 11th. Ollie was super high on reading comprehension: grade 11.5, and Walter was above grade level at grade 6.5. Both had vocabulary a few grade levels ahead. But spelling. Oh, our perennial bugbear, spelling. Ollie was at early 2nd grade, and Walter was at middle 2nd grade. Both also had results saying that they were "poor" at phonemic awareness, though after I went back and re-read, I saw that they probably weren't even tested on this because they are too old and their grade level too high based on the other tests It did make me stop and think about how proficient they are at what is jargonically termed "word attack." And I do think there is room to work there. To that end, I've started doing the "Advanced Code" Reading Reflex chapters with Ollie (I haven't actually snagged Walter long enough to do much with him yet; the weather is good and he's out making fairy houses and rigging up pulleys to hoist things into the trees in the yard). It's obvious that most of the work is too easy for Ollie, so I may need to modulate it much more than I have, but he really needs to make some prolonged contact with the types of word patterns and combinations of letters that trip him up in spelling. Nonetheless, I have to say that so far, the tincture of time has been helping us more than anything else. We've started breaking down words into chunks and shoving together the chunks we've already decoded so that we're not having to hold ten sounds in succession in our brains.

That's the boring part of our homeschooling life. The exciting part is the many park days, the play dates, and the spate of recent birthday parties. Welcome spring!