Happy Easter!

I took advantage of a great little offer from Shutterfly and decided to create Easter cards for close family to enjoy. You can see it below.  May you too have a wonderful and blessed Easter!

Stationery card

View the entire collection of cards.

Handling Haikus

This year we have been studying geography pretty in depth, thanks to Expedition Earth homeschool curriculum, and we love it!  In our study of Japan earlier in the school year, we came across the practice of writing haikus.  (See definition below.) The boys wanted to share their haikus with you so please enjoy.

*hai-ku
noun, plural 
1. A major form of Japanese verse, written in 17 syllables divided into 3 lines of 5, 7 and 5 syllables, and employing highly evocative allusions and comparisons, often on the subject of nature or one of the seasons.
2. A poem written in this form.

This is Jayce's haiku:

Bohdan is my friend.

He took a long trip to France;

I miss him a lot.

Here is Reagan's:

Christmas is coming -
My favorite holiday.
So is my birthday.

On a funny note, I just came across Visual Latin's haiku of the day which made us laugh.

It reads:
Haikus are easy.
But sometimes they don't make sense.
Refrigerator.


*From dictionary.com

LMNOPs

As most of you know, Landon has from birth struggled with verbal skills and been tentatively diagnosed with speech apraxia or as having a speech motor planning problem.  This is why for about a year, he attended weekly speech therapy sessions and still would be had it not been for the birth of his young brother and the subsequent stage of colic limbo in which he put us all.  It is also why we still use Reagan sometimes as Translator as he seems to know what Landon says better than most.  We do still hope to have him reevaluated soon but in the meantime I've been very intentional with helping him with his letters, numbers and even starting reading.  To my great surprise, Landon has done remarkably well in the one week we've started.  We have the old bulky LeapPad with the Phonics system that worked great with Reagan, enabling him to learn to read at the tender age of 4 so we decided to go ahead and see how that worked with Landon.  So far, so good.  But as luck would have it, I received an email only a day to two into our "schooling" that invited us to try out Reading Eggs on a trial basis.  It's a very fun way for Landon to learn to read while playing games.  I do it with him to ensure he's not skipping ahead or not understanding something, but overall, it's very easy and fun.  And only one week in, he's learning how to read!  His first words so far that he has read completely on his own (independent of the computer and in a real book) are F-O-X, F-A-T and S-I-T.  Needless to say, I'm extremely impressed with his fast learning and can't wait to see where this takes him!  

Earlier I mentioned him reciting his ABCs and wanted to share a little video of that so enjoy!