Reading and spanish cooking!

I will put pictures here, I promise!

We're doing blocks of work now. I hated the k12 language arts so I skip it now. We supplement by doing what we have always done- read a ton. We recently finished James and the Giant Peach. We also listened to Talking to Dragons and are currently listening to the next in the series of which the name escapes me.

Trevor started reading yesterday! Phonics has been focusing on letter sounds. He knows letter sounds and what letters make what sounds so we pretty much breezed through that part of the curriculum. Yesterday we made it to the section that puts letter sounds to actual letters and sounded out simple words. He sounded out "The cat is at the mat". Then he looked at me and exclaimed "I understood it, mommy!" I was so proud! So was he! A very exciting moment. So this morning he sounded out more words. Maybe he will be reading books soon? We have phonics readers, I wonder when we get to drag those out.

We're doing blocks right now, so I am focusing on K12's history for a few weeks. Then we'll switch with K12 science for a few weeks. It doesn't mean we never do science. I don't think that would be possible, given Trevor's interest in space. Or answering Rachael's question "Why do the leaves change color?" So we do science on the fly right now.

History for k12 is really more like geography. We did a brief lesson on Australia, but I didn't like how little detail was provided. So I ended up Tivo'ing a travel show about Australia, and we looked at websites about Aborgines, and the diggerido and listened to autralian music. Then we went back to the curriculum and started on Spain. The curriculum only spent one day one Spain! I'm really unhappy that we just gloss over things. I suppose it goes into more depth later. However, nothing says I can't stop and look more in depth now, does it? So after our day, I set the TIVO to record a couple things about Spain. Then I looked up some recipes. Tonight we made this and it was quite tasty. We used only chicken and I had to use boxed yellow rice since our grocery didn't seem to have saffron or smoked paprika. Trevor cut the veggies, grated the tomato, peeled garlic. He LOVED the result. He ate three helpings. While it was cooking we looked up why so many spanish recipes have rice (because it grows in the region was as far as we got) and why chickpeas are CALLED chickpeas.

So we're having lots of fun. I tried to take pictures of us cooking but, alas, my camera battery was dead. Ah well.