I’ve been absent on my blog for almost 4 months. The start of the year has been trying to say the least. We were broken into and they took our mobile devices (both tablets and my phone), then the whole family came down with a nasty bout of the flu and we were all in various states of healing and then to crown it all, the car (our only car) went in for repairs which took a week!
On the bright side, Fifi turned 5! All the photos of her actual birthday were on my phone and tablet *sob*, but we did manage to take photos of her birthday celebration with family the next day.
The birthday girl ♥
Fifi with her best friend Jossi and cousin KK, two of her favourite people.
The Hello Kitty birthday cupcakes Fifi and I made.
Fifi got her first “big girl” bike for her birthday. She got to pick it out herself. She loves it!
The kids have made TONS of new friends this year already. We have been attending a lot more of the homeschool social and educational outings and the kids have made a few lasting friendships 🙂 During the course of meeting a ton of new people, we have decided to research a new primary school curriculum for the children. The current curriculum is just not working for us any longer and Koko is incredibly bored with it. Fifi will use the Grade R (kindergarten) curriclum that Koko used and then she will go onto using the curriculum we decide on for Koko. We will, most probably do the same for Pixie in the ensuing years.
Curricula we are looking at are:
English: Learning Language Arts Through Literature(LLATL)
Maths: Math-U-See
History/Geography: Story of Our World
Art: Artistic Pursuit
Science: I’m not 100 % sure what we are going to do for Science yet. I have MANY resource books we will be working through.
Fifi is FLYING through her work for the year. I just CANNOT keep up. I have decided, with support from Papa, that she will be starting reading lessons with Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons, by Siegfried Engelmann, Phyllis Haddox, Elaine Bruner, also available in South Africa on Kalahari.com. We will be continuing with the Letter of the Week curriculum and once she has completed that, she will start Grade R! I have tried to have Fifi do two letters in one week, but it was a disaster and we now complete only 1 letter per week with supplementation to keep her occupied.
Pixie is growing like a weed! She now has a new Totschool area. She has her own desk and I have made her a little Tot tray shelf out of a shoe stand, that can be put out of reach (very important, in my opinion), with all her trays for the week. She LOVES animals and dinosaurs, so most of her trays have something related to that.
A few random photos of the kids:
The three big kids
Koko busy with school work
Fifi being nebulized while she was ill
Pixie in her little reading nook. She has pillows and a blanket in there for comfort. Its her favourite place in the house.
The kidlets at soccer. We are in our third year of Soccer fun. Pixie has started taking part now too. All 4 kidlets love it!
