Time to encourage myself:)

Two days ago, as we got in the car to head out, Rebekah said to me, "can we listen to some nice classical music mummy?".
Well, this was truly music to my ears:)

It got me pondering on the past year - as one tends to do at the end of a year - and I was really encouraged about all we've done this year with Rebekah.

For instance, I thought of the fact that she started writing her letters in cornmeal early this year



















and now she knows pretty much all her lower and uppercase letters and can write them quite neatly. She knows approximately fifty words that she can read, she has progressed a lot in maths without a whole lot of formal teaching (apart from some lessons in the Singapore Math books that we started a few weeks ago), she has learnt to play "twinkle twinkle little star" by herself on her toy keyboard, and she would say her favourite books are her "art" books - we have quite a few of those:) One of our recent additions is a book called "100 Masterpieces of Australian painting" that we picked up for $5 at a recent second hand book sale (can you believe that!). She loves this book so much and it has become a recent favourite to take with her for her car rides.

When all of this dawned on me the day before yesterday, I couldn't believe that I actually had a part to play in this! Did I actually help her with all of that! It's amazing when you add up all the little bits and take a look at the big picture! I was truly encouraged at my efforts to "home school" her!

She has progressed to listening to read alouds from the Beatrix Potter books to ones like "The Magic Pudding" and "Stuart Little".

As for spiritual things, they are a bit hard to measure but judging by what she said the same night, I am encouraged. She said that she is going to start a "group" in her bedroom where she goes and prays by herself regularly..hmm not sure about the "group" thing but I think she's trying to emulate some of our prayer meetings:)

She loves her science experiments book and maps! In fact she has a child's atlas that she is truly in love with and loves looking up countries and places. She often takes out her history book from next years lot of books and loves looking at it!

Also, she loves nature and we have helped nurture that sense of wonder with things in nature and helped her develop her powers of observation. In fact, she loves drawing in her nature journal and has made quite a few entries, this being her most recent one: (sorry no scanner at the moment so had to resort to taking a picture)




















These are just some of the bits and pieces from our past year of homeschooling.

So, time to pat myself on the back:) and thank God for His grace this past year with a successful year of homeschooling!