October brought another month of singing lessons. Kamy’s starting to understand a basic foundation of music — pitch and tempo in particular. Clayson has done a great job pushing her to improve without her feeling like she can’t do it. Now she’s working on matching pitch with Solfege sounds. Since it is holding her attention, we’ve told her that she can continue taking lessons as long as she commits to practicing for fifteen minutes, three times per week. She chose Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday after lunch as her practice times.
Daddy and Kamy are reading Harry Potter The Goblet of Fire at night. This is my favorite of the Harry Potter books and Kamy really likes the book. Kamy really likes the one on one time with Daddy in the evening when they read together.
Kamy has been a lot more thoughtful and kind to Caden lately! I see her going out of her way to do something nice for him. She’s also agreeing to do what he asks much more frequently.
For Halloween, Kamy decided she wanted to be Elphaba (the Wicked Witch of the West) from Wicked. She looked pretty cute — I even bought some green face paint to complete her look. Unfortunately, not only was it cold but it was also raining on Halloween night! The kids toughed it out anyway in the pursuit of candy, but everyone was pretty cold and soggy by the end of the night. There was plenty of candy to go around though — most houses who were giving out candy were handing it out by the handful since there weren’t very many kids out in the rain.
Miss Kamy finished 3rd grade math at the very end of September. One of my favorite benefits of homeschooling is the ability to move or stay on content as needed. Some math topics we flew through and some require more attention. And I am not making her memorize multiplication tables at this point — it will come with time and there’s no reason she can’t keep learning new concepts. We spent some time this month reviewing concepts and learning about mean, median, mode, and range before tip-toeing into 4th grade concepts and reviewing 3rd grade skills.
In history we have been learning about the early medieval ages — the unification of the barbarian tribes in France, the expansion of the Islamic empire along the Mediterranean, Viking explorers, and early feudal kingdoms in England. I have been enjoying history a lot myself — I either forgot or missed a lot of the overarching context for historical events when I was in school, so it’s been educational for me as well!
