Homeschooling is Working!

     I went to an early morning Mass yesterday.  I got home, and started a timely, orderly homeschool day.  Inspired, I moved all of the girls into the sun room where Annie's painting was going on, so that I could monitor Annie and the school girls at the same time.
     It occurred to me that Clare and Leigh were ready for daily dictations.  They have completed their handwriting books for this year, and have done copy work all along.  They have done spelling and phonics as well.  Additionally, they had learned about some punctuation, capitalization, and proper versus common nouns, and paragraph structure.  Suddenly, I realized, it had all come together.  I have recently been dictating a paragraph, and they could write it down.  We work on the spelling of some words aloud together.  It is remarkable to me how good their guesses are, how much they know.  Yesterday, we stretched to two paragraphs!  They were worn out by the time they got to the bottom of the page.  But I was about to pop open some bubbly!  They have accomplished so much!
     Additionally, Leigh and I determined what her reading should be for the rest of this school year.  She is going to finish her Little Angel Reader D, and then do 5 level one Blue Saint Books.  Clare, however, asked if she could just opt to stick with Magic Treehouse books, which are a level above those.  It is true, she is working through them with facility!  She needs some help, but she is not struggling as though reading is laborious!  What an answered prayer!
    We have almost completed an entire Children's Bible, an Ancient History book, a good amount of science, and the geography of the Mediterranean and the Middle East.  They have memorized a dozen poems, a dozen Bible versus, and have almost finished memorizing a history timeline with 144 items.  Clare is playing songs on the violin from Les Miserable and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and Mary is working up the Moonlight Sonata on the piano.  Mary now flies through novels and has written a long series of compositions of our readings of ancient history.
     There is more to do, and so much we wanted to do that we have not done.  But all in all, it suddenly feels like we have accomplished something this school year!