Team Eli Raizel!

Teaching Eli and Raizel together has worked extremely well. Linguistically, she's miles ahead of Kindergarten and Eli is egged on by her linguistic talents. Eli is far ahead of her in math, but it's very easy to teach them simultaneously. Raizel is halfway through Singapore Kindergarten math, so as long as she does one page per day, she's doing enough. I can usually tell her the gist of the page and she can do it on her own there next to me. Ditto for Eli. I just lightly bounce back and forth. Raizel is also doing great with 1st grade Writing With Ease, and she and Eli love doing it together. At this early stage, it pretty much consists of listening to short (but dense) stories and answering oral questions, condensing a thought about the passage into a single sentence, and doing copywork. They're both very capable, and I'm thrilled that Raizel can join in. She loves the physical act of writing and works hard to make beautiful letters. I'm very happy that it has been good for her too.

With them working together in language arts and math, it eases our schedule a bit. Right now, we're finishing our day in 5 hours (10:00-1:00 and 2:00-4:00). I had thought it would really take us 6 hours. Those hours don't include history or science which I generally do outside of normal learning hours, i.e. evenings and weekends. All of this comes together to make the day not quite as pressured as I had anticipated.

And one more thing... WE ALL LOVE XTRAMATH.COM! Amirah has been making terrific progress, much faster than at any other time in her math facts history. B"H! She has utterly detested any other way of practicing her math facts. She and Eli both really enjoy doing it, and it only takes about 10 minutes per day. Very happy about this one. I'm really hoping it will help shoot Amirah on to the next level. I really think that once her computation speed is faster she will enjoy math so much more! And what happens to the students who are pushed beyond that point to where they can't do the basic computations easily and are frustrated beyond belief with higher mathematical thinking?? I'm so glad we didn't have to just rush merrily along and could take the time to cement the basics.