All About Reading Continued

 We are still working through All About Reading, pre-reading with Dot, who will be 6 in May.  We finished lesson 32 today, lower case F.  I still really like it, and so does she.  My goal is to get through all the lower case letters before she turns 6, hopefully sooner.  She's just very gently absorbing letters and sounds.  I have noticed that some of the pre-reading games have been challenging for her, which makes me glad that we are not pushing any kind of formal reading at this time.  And then one day things click.  Today, she seemed to understand a lot better about the sounds of words being broken up.  So, waiting for her brain to be ready on its own seems a better strategy than trying to push it.  I'm really thankful that she is not in a kindergarten class, and that her brain is free to learn in a non-stressful way.  

We may play a little more often with letters, as she thinks it is fun to form them.  I want to make some Montessori phonetic object cards to encourage this.  

Schiller Math Continued

 Dot and I have now completed lesson 55 of Schiller Math.  I am very glad that I bought this kit.  She loves doing math and probably would have liked to have moved at a faster pace.  We are going to try to do math a few times a week now so that I can get her moved through material she is ready for.  

What I like:

• Lessons are short and easy.  
• No prep.  
• Covers concepts I might miss if I were planning on my own.  
• This program is really solid, and the workbook is attractive.  

Ways that I adapt it:  

• The cardboard thousand cubes were annoying.  They kept getting crushed.  I actually switched to my Montessori Outlet golden bead material, which Dot finds far more appealing.   (The hundreds and thousands are wooden, except for the demonstration set, which are beads).  That is the one thing that really put me off from Schiller to begin with, and why I didn't use it--I don't love the blue cubes.  But it's really, really easy just to use the bead set that I have with it.  
• I've been skipping some of the left-right and even-odd lessons.  I feel like left-right is learned more developmentally.  I think even-odd is easier to understand once someone has mastered division and gotten a little older.  
• I think that the four operations are best learned with large quantities, not with small ones.  So I will be adapting the Schiller lessons and using the ones I learned in my Montessori training.  

So, yes, I'm still very happy with my Schiller purchase.  Next year, I plan to supplement it with math story books.  Around the third grade, as we work through the material, I will transition to Life of Fred.  I imagine there will be a little workbook work too, to prepare Dot to take a standardized test.