Special Connection Homeschool

Now that spring finally has arrived we are taking advantage of playing outdoors. Gess kept asking me to play "hitch" so I thought it was time to teach her the game, as well as the appropriate title, which is baseball. (Maybe she came up with hitch as a blend between hit and pitch, which is not a bad nickname at all!) Gass had played kick ball at AWANA a few times last year and she really had a hard time with the rules. So we took apart some old linoleum, made some bases and just worked on what to do after you hit the ball. We went over which base was first, second and third. Then when she would hit the ball (which she was pretty good at) we would have her run the bases. Now that she is getting that down we are trying to work on teaching her how to determine whether to stop or keep running. For now she is simply to follow the coach's orders. She is having fun, we just need to get a real game going sometime. Here she is learning the game and enjoying the outdoors.

Gess has been doing great reading through the New Testament with me this year. Together we have read the first three gospels and are now starting the book of John. It has been great to hear her read along and see how much she improved, not only in her reading skills, but in her understanding of what she reads. To help supplement that reading we got her the Read and See DVD Bible . The Read and See DVD Bible has 40 Bible stories with pictures in the book and they also read and show the pictures from the book on DVD. The text of the story is shown on the screen as they read it which is a great help for her reading skills. Then, after each story is a song that fits that theme. The words for the songs show up on the screen as well, so it is not only fun to sing, but also is another good way to practice reading. So that makes 40 stories and 40 songs on the DVD and Gess just loves them all. If we cover one of the stories during our reading or lesson time we will end by loading