Kindergarten is Complete!

And as much as I love what The Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading has done for us, I am so glad to put that book on the shelf and not open it again for at least another year.  Relief.

Yes, Henry read the last page today, with the final lesson being the reading of "supercalifragilisticexpialidocious."  It took him a while, but he got through all fourteen syllables and we both made it out alive.

So, we are done with kindergarten!  Henry completed the kindergarten CAT this week and I've already mailed his test booklet back to Seton Testing to be graded.  We should get the results emailed to us within a couple of weeks.  The CAT wasn't required since this wasn't even a reportable year, but I wanted Henry to get a little practice with the standardized test format and I also wanted that little piece of paper that says, "no, you're not ruining your child's academic life."  Because I'm paranoid like that.

Sooooo, we're still going to start first grade on July 1st.  Until then, we're just going to be doing a lot of read-alouds, some Latin, and plenty of rounds of Uno and Sum Swamp and Math Dice.  "That's not school, Mommy.  That's fun!"  Mm hmm.

And Mommy gets to play with my OneNote, which I've fallen in love with after not even knowing it was on our PC for the last I-don't-know-how-many years.  The program is everything I've been looking for in lesson planning.  I'd given up on all the different free and inexpensive software I've tried and resigned myself to creating week-by-week tables in Word, resource lists in Excel, and a big file folder of PDFs and so forth.

OneNote allows me to do all of that in one spot.  It's pretty much the best of every program in MS Office all in one.  Awesome.

Oliver is showing definite progress with his communication skills.  Really.  We're coming to the end of week three on L-carnosine and there is absolutely something going on.  This week he said, "thank you."  Really.  Matt was eating some chips and Oliver indicated that he wanted one.  He ate the one Matt gave him and signed "more" which in itself is awesome because he picked that sign up after only one demo and is using it.  Anyway, Matt gave him another chip and Oliver immediately said, "thank you."  It wasn't perfect, but it was enough that both Matt and I automatically responded with, "you're welcome."  And then we looked at each other and said, "Did he just say 'thank you?'"

He's been babbling constantly, giving out hugs like they're going out of style, and displaying an increased level of interest in people and things around him.  We're still seeing some tantrum behavior, but I think a lot of it is linked to his potty training.  He's been having mini-shouting fits when he needs to go to the potty.  We're trying some different things to get him to let us know he has to go without resorting to yelling.  I'm hoping he'll get it down soon.

All in all, we're really excited about the progress he's made so far and we're, of course, continuing with the supplement.

Jane is bopping along, singing her Song School Latin, starting to really count with one-to-one correspondence, and exploring every nook and cranny of two-year old behavior.  It's the Two Faces of Jane around here.

Peter turns one next week!