What about Lily? Lily is doing great!

Lily is five years old and attends a Preschool program two mornings a week. Her teacher is Mrs. Toothaker and she has a lot of new friends at school and they do all kinds of things: painting, crafts, creative play, songs, snack, reading time, show-and-tell, playground visits, and even field trips when she got to ride on a school bus!

Lily looks forward to going to school every day and has shown a lot of growth and maturity to be in a classroom with teachers and other kids. It's a nice space full of colors and games and dress-up and she has her own cubby with her name and one of her most favorite things to do is to play with the colored sand table!

She has been busy with homeschool too! In the first picture, she's at the Brunswick Family Art is Fun festival earlier this fall. She had a great time going from station to station and creating all kinds of wonderful art. She had a great time with Sophie and I on our ecology walk and she really liked learning about lichen and did an awesome job identifying all the different kinds of pretty-colored lichen on the trails we walked. She didn't like the mushroom finding at first but once she saw how cool is was to gently touch all the different kinds of mushrooms and talk about their shapes and colors, she had a great time too! That was the day we met the lady scientist from the Ecology Center and helped release a female turtle that they were studying.

She also went with Sophie and I to Rocky Ridge Apple Orchard to pick yummy apples that we used to make applesauce and pies. And Lily loves to eat apples. She had so much fun and was a big help with the wagon and picking good apples. We had lunch and then played in the pumpkin patch and swung on the rope swing in the barn.

For "school" work, Lily has been reading, writing, and learning math. Lily and I spend time together reading and talking about letters and words. Her writing has improved tremendously and she especially likes to copy words I write for her on her own piece of paper. She loves to color and paint and draw and spends a lot of time while Sophie is working on school quietly coloring in the sunroom.

She also loves to play with her magnet and kinex sets that Uncle Aaron and Gamma and Bo gave her. She really loves to build and re-build. Sophie likes to play with these toys too!
Lily is learning math on her abacus. She knows that the plain beads are "Ones" and that each line has 10 plain beads and there are two lines of plain beads. She knows how to "read" a simple numbered math problem that I write for her on a paper, like 2 + 5 =, and she knows to move two plain beads over on one line and then five plain beads on the second line and then to count them to "add" and solve the problem. She's then able to write the number for the math sentence to "answer" the problem.
I am super impressed with her math skills and after two days of working with the abacus, not only was she correctly solving simple addition problems but also understood how to use the abacus for subtraction!

Lily also spends two half-days at the farm and does "Farm School" with Gamma and Bo! She works on art with Gamma and on spelling and letters with Bo. Here is his assessment of her learning:

GOAL: Letter recognition

Objective:  visuallydifferentiate between letters of similar shape or special orientation.

Materials:  worksheets with rows of 2 different letters from this array: pqbp

Lily was able to find the ps in the qs, bs in the ps, etc.

In these exercises, the brain notices that letters may bethe same shape, but appear in different special orientations.

Lily noticed that:

 the “tail” on the band d were pointing up.

 the “tail” on the pand q were  pointing down.

NOTE:  letter features[tails , hooks, et al] that appear above and below the line are cues for thebrain to differentiate the different shapes/orientation of the letters.

Lily demonstrates advanced letter recognition skills for her age.

She likes to play all kinds of fun games with Gamma and Bo and learns a lot on the computer too! She's doing her own Farm School project for Christmas and I am just so impressed with all the cool things she making for her friends and family!

Here's a sneak peek:

Just wait until you see....later.

I couldn't be prouder or happier to have my beautiful Lily home with us and also so happy for her to have such a nice preschool experience. She's learning so much and growing each and every day. Like her Dad, she makes me laugh every day, especially when I really need it. Like her sister, I am continuously amazed with her intelligence and creativity. But she brings her own special skills to her learning too--she's a wicked problem and puzzle solver, is really interested in how things work or how to make and build things, she is a natural scientist with a curiosity to experiment, and she's a talented artist with a precision for detail when she wants to.