Rockin' and Rollin'

W is on a good track to finish AO Year 2 before January.  It would be nice to get to Year 3 while he's still in 4th grade.  Yesterday we spent almost 3 hours on:

• Wind in the Willows - Readaloud with narration
• Abraham Lincoln - W read a page to me
• Five Children & It - Readaloud, no narration
• Teaching Textbooks Quiz - W took another math quiz.  It had 25 questions which included fractions, area, perimeter, rounding to the thousands, subtraction with borrowing, 4-digit addition, and types of triangles.  He missed only one. 
• Copywork - W asked to do this.  He copied the first half of a poem into his notebook and used cursive.  He was so proud of how nice he writes, that he even signed it when he was done, lol. 
• An Island Story - 2 stories on King Edward.  We're in the Middle Ages - right around year 1200.
  
• Spelling Skills - This week he's doing words with the Long E sound (e.g. reason, between, scream, squeeze).  Today's exercise was to proofread a paragraph, circling spelling mistakes and adding missing punctuation and missing words.  He found all the mistakes.  I was so pleased to see that he can recognize misspelled words and know the correct spelling - except for 1 where he knew it was misspelled, but wasn't sure of the right spelling.  This kind of exercise is so difficult when you have issues with reading. 

His reading is improving every week.  I feel that the excellent books and slow reading schedule used in Ambleside Online, and what we do for spelling and writing has turned W into a capable, confident, fairly strong reader.  The strength of those 25 out of 26 dyslexia symptoms he exhibited about a year ago has decreased so dramatically and some have even disappeared.  It's almost shocking to see how far he's come. 

In other news, J is doing great in high school.  She loves it so much.  It's tough.  Her schedule is grueling.  She's still dancing at her studio and doing a work study there on Saturdays.  With all of that, she gets her homework, studying, and projects done without issue.  She's pulling top grades - she even has a 90 average in French.  It's been so wonderful for her.  Homeschooling allowed and nurtured so much of J's independence, self-sufficiency, self-esteem, and the confidence that she can accomplish and achieve anything.  Her amazing high school gives her the platform to use these skills.  It's working out better than I could have imagined.