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!