Ooka Island - a TOS review

Bear is loving Ooka Island.  She wants to play it everyday.  What is Ooka Island?


From their website

"The Ooka Island Adventure is a downloadable hero-mission in 3D designed to teach young children how to read fluently and well. The Ooka Island Adventure combines the highly engaging components of a state-of-the-art virtual world with the scientifically proven OokaMethod that builds literacy skills.

Carefully embedded within the Ooka Island Adventure are dozens of interactive instructional activities that captivate the child and motivate them as they learn essential pre-reading, reading, spelling, and writing skills. After completing the Ooka Island Adventure, children will be on their way to reading fluently and well for life."

I like it too.  The island map graphic is beautiful.  Even my husband, who is VERY picky loves that map and the look of the games. I also love how their method of reading places so much emphasis on phonological awareness rather than on sight word recognition.

I don't prefer the avatar.  I think it looks a bit distorted.  Not to mention that  Bear was extremely unhappy when we first started and her avatar got stuck looking a certain way (because of Mommy trying something). She was not able to change the avatar until she earned enough points to go to the Pencil Playground, part of Ooka Island's reward system.  But I can look beyond this.

If you have a strong reader, Ooka Island Adventure will be too easy.  It really is best for a child ready to learn to read.  It is an impressive program and will train your Bear can read beyond the scope of the program which is for K-2nd grade.  I actually contacted Ooka Island about why there was no way to skip levels or something and got a wonderful explanation from the representative, as well as an option to have the Ooka Compass turned on to assess her reading so she could at least skip the first books in the Popcorn Library.  Here is the explanation that was sent.

In the Ooka Island Adventure there isn't a way to bypass the activities to higher levels as it's very important that the sequence of phonemic and phonetic activities (e.g. Cave of Sounds) are followed through so the child is strong and secure in the sound system. However, we do have an assessment tool, called the Ooka Compass, that will allow the child to skip books in the Popcorn Library to the appropriate reading level.... In the near future the ability to turn on this feature in the game will be available to all user accounts through the Ooka Lighthouse Dashboard. I'll turn on the Ooka Compass now and she'll be able to complete the assessment the next time she logs in.

Although Bear can read proficiently at a middle of third grade level, I found these games still helpful for enhancing listening skills. One such game involves listening to a series of sounds and clicking the screen when you hear the sound they asked for at the beginning of the series.  Another is to listen to the segmented sounds of a word and click on the image of the word that was being segmented.  Yet another game is to hear a sound and then pop the bubble with the correct representation (letters) for that sound.  Ooka Island certainly trains a child's ear for reading.

The Cake Factory - one of Bear's favorite places where she gets to decorate cookies with the sound they call out.

I kept asking Bear why she liked Ooka Island so much and what made her want to play it all the time.  She just gave me blank looks.  When pressed to at least tell me her favorite part, she informed me it was finding the new book under the sea.  They get to search with this crane like thing amongst things at the bottom of the sea and find the next reader.  The readers get read to them (at least in the beginning) and I like that as they are read, questions are asked to get the child thinking about the text.  The narrator asks them to look at the illustrations for clues and asks other reading comprehension questions.  I like this; so, even though part of me wants to mute the computer so Bear can read it alone, I don't.  I think Bear can learn a lot about the important aspect of questioning as you read from this part of Ooka Island.  There are comprehension questions at the end of each reader and vocabulary questions as well.  It really is a well-made program and I can tell a lot of thought went into the pedagogy of it.

If you are interested in Ooka Island for your beginning reader the family pricing is as follows:

Disclosure: I am a member of TOS and I was given this product free for review purposes only. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. To see what other members of the Crew thought of this product click here.

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Five in a Row - Mirette on the High Wire - Geography

We've been rowing Mirette on the High Wire this week.

It is a lovely book about a girl whose mom runs a boardinghouse in Paris.  One day the great Bellini comes to stay and Mirette sees him walk on a clothesline in the yard.  She becames entranced with the idea of walking the high wire and though Bellini at first won't teach her, she is not deterred and practices on her own.  When Bellini sees her determination, he agrees to take her in as his pupil. 

We haven't finished the row.  We have some circus fun planned for the coming week, but I wanted to share a bit of it now, as it ties in to the Blog Hop that Leann of Montessori Tidbits is hosting.

The book takes place in Paris, France.  So first, I printed out some pictures of Euros and French stamps, pulled out the Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower from our collection of Toob things, and retrieved the French flag Bear made last week at her homeschool class (they were studying the French Revolution and how it affected the colonies) and put these items on a tray for our geography shelf.

 I talked about France a bit...wishing I had remembered to also sign out Crepes by Suzette to go along with this row.  We found France on the map.  We remembered that Claude Monet was from France and we admired his paintings on our three-part cards.  Our display from our waterlily art project is still up too.

Then I made omelets for lunch.  We ate them with baguette.

And crepes for snack.  I used my mother's recipe (I grew up on crepes, being French Canadian) but was sneaky and added spinach that I processed in the food processor to the batter. The kids have had plenty of omelets and crepes in the past, but Bear delighted in the fact that she was having a French lunch and snack.

Stay tuned later this week for the work done with this row.

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Multiplication - skip counting and Montessori materials

Bear does skip counting every week at Classical Conversations.  They sing songs to memorize this.  They skip count all the way to the 15's and then learn the squares and cubes.  I decided to show Bear how what she was memorizing was related to some of our Montessori materials.

We took out our bead chains - the eights.

Next (not on the same day - actually weeks later), I took out the multiplication board (which I have had printed out from Montessori for Everyone for a year!) and the red pushpins. Bear caught on right away and even realized that she didn't need to push the pins in the board to find her answers; she could just sing them.

So this week, I introduced multiplication with the stamp game.

Here she is taking 46 three times.  She finds the answers by skip counting - she came up with doing it that way on her own. In the above example she sang 6,12, 18 and then traded ten out.  Then she skip counted the 4 tens - 4, 8, 12 and had to trade.  This was her last question of the day but before it I had presented how to do multiplication with trading.  She can do multiplication with these concrete materials, but has no idea how to follow the algorithm on paper, nor do  I expect her to for a few years.

Linked to Montessori Monday at Living Montessori Now.

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Fall Montessori Work

Here's what has been on our shelves the past couple of weeks for practical life and sensorial.

Sorting leaves

 Tweezing spiders.

  This evolved into tweezing spiders onto a pencil stuck in styrofoam

 Beads on a pipecleaner.

 Transferring acorns with tongs.

 A Fall sensory box with all the extra Fall manipulatives that weren't out.  I placed a sorting tray next to it and tweezers and tongs and two little jugs for pouring the erasers if wanted.

 From last year (inspired by My Montessori Journey) - a leaf button snake.  Just cut a small slit into those silk leaves.

J-jo found his homemade toys from when he was still under two.  Look at that concentration!

 

 Instead of pompoms (although I do have Fall colored ones) I gave him acorns to push into the hole.

 And then I challenged him to use tongs!

Linked to Montessori Mondays at One Hook Wonder and Living Montessori Now.

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Learning to Read - overcoming challenges

There's a lot of talk about Dwyer in the Montessori circles.  Unfortunately, I didn't find out about her until after Bear had already learned to read.  Many people have been emailing me recently, asking me how I taught Bear to read and what advice can I give for problem x or y.  After learning all her letter sounds (see this post as I am doing exactly the same thing with J-jo as I did with Bear) she began recognizing words she saw frequently like cat and dog and many others.  But we did hit a snag when she started to need to blend words she hadn't seen frequently (ie those she hadn't memorized).  She could tell me instantly what a word was when I segmented it, but could not hear the word when she segmented a word herself.  I continued to model segmenting and then going faster and faster until I could hear the word.  It also helped to use words with letter sounds that were more continuous - like m, and n, and l (as opposed to d and t which are clipped) to practice blending.  Eventually, she got it.  It didn't take long.  We all just had to be patient.

If your child is struggling with blending, Reading Rockets has some great games to play.  Another thing that helped was to use trap door readers that I got from Walk Beside Me. 

Do you have any additional tips for helping a child blend?

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Funny and Heartwarming Books

Limelight Larry and The Three Billy Goats Fluff are two Tiger Tales books we are enjoying reading these days.

In Limelight Larry, a vain peacock wants to star solo in his book, but keeps getting joined by more and more friends.  Initially upset by their presence, Larry finally realizes that company is a pretty good thing.

While I found Limelight Larry amusing and enjoyed the illustrations - especially the full page spread of Larry Peacock - I loved The Three Billy Goats Fluff.  Considering how often I've had to reread The Three Billy Goats Fluff, I'd say it's a favorite of the kids too.

The Three Billy Goats Fluff is a fractured fairytale telling the story of how the three billy goats fluff befriend the troll.  I love this story.  It is up there with Fox in the Dark and The Best Pet Ever as my Tiger Tales All Time Favorites. I love how the notes from the troll rhyme, how the mother comes up with an ingenious plan to quiet the trip-trapping hooves, and how the illustrator used bright, cheerful colors.  I love reading the troll parts in a big scary voice:)

What funny or heartwarming book have you read to your child lately?


Disclaimer: I received these books from Tiger Tales Books in exchange for a review.  The opinions expressed are my own.

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Learning to Read - first the letter sounds

J-jo (26 months) is working his way through the letter sounds.  Although I love Dwyer's method of teaching reading, I decided to still teach him the symbols to go with the sounds as I did with Bear.  I am a visual learner, Bear is a visual/auditory learner, and just in case J-jo is a visual learner, I am showing him the letters.  Dwyer would focus just on the I-Spy games without the symbols.  I have grouped the letters and we do activities to go with a group (of 4 or 5) per week.  When we reach z, I will present him the phonograms (ee, ai, etc).  That way he will still be exposed to all the sounds of the language the way Dwyer and Gettman emphasize. 

First, I show him a sandpaper letter (let's say m) and give him the first period lesson for it.  "This is the picture of the sound /m/ (letter sound, not name)  Can you say /m/?  This is /m/"  According to Reading Reflex (which is how I was trained to teach reading prior to finding out about Montessori and Dwyer), I really should say "This represents the sound /m/" EACH time, but it is really cumbersome to do so. 

We play "I Spy something that starts with (insert letter sound)" with the objects from our alphabet box for the letter just introduced.

I will introduce the additional letters from the group for the week either at that time if his attention span hasn't depleted, or later in the day, or the following day.  Once he has had the first period lesson for all the 4 letters, we play "Swat the sound."  This is really just the second period lesson, "show me the (letter sound)."  However, to make it more fun and to use the fly swatter we purchased way back to do fly swatter painting, I have him swat the sandpaper letter.

Then we will do a sort together.  I give him an object and he places it with the right beginning sound.  He can be successful with this if I only give him two letters and two objects for each letter.  I finished the one below for him so I could take a picture lol.

He's not at the third period yet.  Perhaps he knows, but he won't tell me what the letter sound is when I point to a letter and ask, "What sound is this?"  Sometimes he will, but whether he will or not is not consistent.

I also leave out his beginning sounds alphabet puzzle - only the letters from the current group - for him to work on, as he is really into puzzles right now.

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Educating the Wholehearted Child - a TOS review

Educating the Wholehearted Child, by Clay and Sally Clarkson, is a fabulous book.  It lays out a model of education that starts out with the firm foundation of a Christian home and then focuses a lot on living books.

The WholeHearted Learning model is a discipleship-based, home-centered, whole-book approach to Christian home education that integrates real books, real life, and real relationships in a life-giving expression of God’s biblical design for the family.  Educating the WholeHearted Child  p. 115

I wish I had had Educating the Wholehearted Child to read two years ago, when we first started our homeschooling journey.  It is so full of information and advice that I don't even know where to begin in writing this review.  One important aspect of the book is that it doesn't just focus on the academic aspect of school, but addresses raising children as a whole.  It has helped me be more visionary with regards to the children, looking to the future, as opposed to just looking ahead for the current year.

It was a bit overwhelming to dive into the book when I first received it.  The layout was distracting to me - the sidebars are as full of information and great quotes and scriptures as the main text.  To help myself focus, I started off by reading all the little boxes labeled "In Our Home" that are scattered throughout the book.  These are blurbs in which the Clarksons give us a bit of insight into how homeschooling worked in their home and they were very inspiring.  Being inspired, and having gained focus, I proceeded to start at the beginning and started reading.

One of my desires as a homeschooler is for my children to love God and to seek a relationship with Him.  The base of the Clarksons' Wholehearted educational model is discipleship studies and this is well explained in the book.  I loved the chapter on "shepherding your child's spirit to long for God." 

Educating the Wholehearted Child also emphasizes nurturing the love of reading good books, which resonates with my family's favorite activity of snuggling on the couch with a pile of books toppling over at our side.   The Clarksons reassure that a curriculum is not necessary for an effective education. They offer a plethora of ideas on how to get around not using curriculum.  It helped me tremendously to read this advice as I sometimes struggle with wanting a curriculum to solve all my homeschool problems.  My entire book is peppered with post-its and miscellaneous wrappers - whatever I could get my hand on - to hold the page of some interesting idea, piece of wisdom, heartfelt conviction, etc.

In fact, I loved this book so much that I went ahead and puchased their daughter's book, Read for the Heart, a companion book that consists of hundreds of reviews of living books.  You can read the TOS reviews from last year of this book here.

Educating the Wholehearted Child  is a book that deserves a place on the bookshelf of all Christian homeschooling families.  I am so thankful to have discovered it.  It is now my go-to book and the number one (non-Montessori) book I will recommend to anyone just starting their journey in homeschooling.

I encourage you to go view the sample chapter and the table of contents here.  You can purchase the book from Apologia for $22.00.

Disclosure: I am a member of TOS and I was given this product free for review purposes only. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. To see what other members of the Crew thought click the picture below.

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Artists and Art - Claude Monet

One afternoon, I was extremely tired and headachy so I let the children watch Linnea in Monet's Garden on Netflix.  Then, I remembered an art project from Fairy Dust Teaching and that we owned Claude Monet - Sunshine and Waterlilies by Stephen Plackard (a Smart about Art book), so I whipped together some Claude Monet art cards, printed out the waterlily painting for the frame and changed up the art shelf. 

I let Bear use my acrylic paints and we followed the steps at Fairy Dust Teaching (see above link).

As you can see, we used a stencil for the lily pad.  She ended up getting unwanted green on the blue, but I showed her how to paint over it - the beauty of acrylics is it covers up previous paint really well.  If I were to do this again, I would skip the stencil and let her free draw it.  I was really proud of how well she respected the paint and was extra careful not to get it on herself.  I totally forgot to remind her to get a smock.

Bear's rendition of the water lilies.

Bear kept telling me she was just like Claude Monet because she layered her colors.  Thank you Fairy Dust Teaching for a great art project.

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e-mealz - a TOS review

I  have such a hard time with dinner.  In a time before children, I enjoyed cooking.  Now, I would rather be doing anything else.  It overwhelms me.  I've tried making menu plans and trying to organize freezer meals and it always works for a time, and then I fall back into the same old rut.  The dinner question mostly brings up feelings of panic for me. 

Consequently, I was really excited to review E-Mealz.   E-Mealz is a simple system for grocery budgeting and menu planning. The weekly menu prints out as a single page and includes a corresponding grocery list.  It really is a time saver in terms of planning.  There are many choices for meal plans such as store-based (use the weekly specials as the basis for their meals), vegetarian, low-carb, Gluten-Free, and others.  Moreover, E-Mealz has been exclusively recommended by Dave Ramsey since 2007.You can see view all the available meal plans and samples of each here.  

I wondered if E-Mealz would work for us.  My kids are picky.  I am picky.  My husband says he's not picky, but he kind of is, too.  Maybe this is why I don't like making dinner!

I chose a vegetarian meal plan because, although we aren't vegetarian, we do not prefer to eat pork or beef.  It was love at first sight.  The vegetarian meal printed out as two pages of menus and included lots of vegetables and fruit.  The dinners for the first week sounded appealing, too.

Well, maybe not egg salad sandwiches.  I also added in chicken to quite a few meals, since there is no way my husband would be satisfied with a vegetarian diet:)

The shopping list was easy to follow.  I love how each ingredient has the corresponding meal number next to it (on the left).  This makes it easy to adjust the menu and know quickly which items I won't need if I cut out a recipe.  I also like that there is extra room to write other things I might need.  I appreciate that the list includes the staples I should have on hand (in case I might not, or might have run out).

The first meal, Orange Tofu with an addition of grilled chicken was a great success with both of us.

The second meal - Greek pita pizzas - was equally successful and I ate it before I remembered to photograph it!

The third meal was also a success.  (Eggplant and provolone sandwiches with pesto)

My husband raved about these vegetables on the grill (and he is not a vegetable lover).

The next meal, Tamale Pie, was such a flop that I didn't photograph it, but I think the cornbread mix I bought is to blame.  The inside of the pie was good.

The peppers were a bit too soggy for my husband, but I enjoyed them.  However, after being stuck with all the leftovers, I was quite done.

And the same with this almond penne.  He really did not like this one and the recipe made a lot.  I ate leftovers of this for a week.

I didn't expect to love every recipe so I was still excited.  I felt we had had two great weeks of meals. However, the next two plans only had a few options that seemed appealing to us.  Did I mention my husband and I are picky?  (And why am I not mentioning the kids, you wonder?  If you think they even tried one morsel of any of this food, you do not realize just how picky they are!)

That puts us at this week, the week the review is due.  I switched plans in the middle of last week (you are allowed one switch per month) because everyone on our private TOS forum was raving about delicious fish and chicken recipes.  We switched to a Publix Family Meal Plan.  Again, because we are picky eaters, I am having a hard time with the menu.  I have deviated from it a lot, but at least I can accumulate some fish and chicken recipes for my husband for the next few weeks until our three month subscription is over.

The Low-Down

Cons:

• You are billed for 3 months and it is automatically billed to your credit card UNLESS you go to the website and cancel.

• If you or anyone in your family is picky (like ours), E-Mealz is probably not a good fit.  You are better off creating your own meal plans of family favorites.

Pros:

• ALL the planning work is done for you.

• The recipes are nutritious and have good variety.

• The recipes are simple to follow and do not take much time to put together (not including cooking time)

• The E-Mealz program is inexpensive - it works out to $5 per month.

• The recipes are budget friendly.

I love the concept of E-Mealz, but ultimately and unfortunately, we are a bunch of picky eaters, and I need to see a few more weeks of meal plans to know for sure if it can work for us.

Disclosure: I am a member of TOS and I was given this product free for review purposes only. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. To see what other members of the Crew thought click the picture below.

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Fall Math

 
I've only put out a bit of Fall material.  We've been spending hours outside enjoying Fall and picking and drying gorgeous leaves though. 

 Cards and counters using acrylic pumpkins.  We did this last year.  These are for J-jo as a Mommy-and-J-jo work.

 Completed work.

One to one correspondence of pumpkins.  These are larger than the ones in the cards and counters.

Counting pumpkins after rolling the Education Cube.

Using a number line to see relationships between numbers.  If you are at 10 and want to go to 7, how many jumps?  Or, if you are at 3 and want to go to 9? We will be spending more time doing work like this.  I need to make her little cards to go with it to make it an independent choice.

The stamp game comes out almost every day.  She's done addition and subtraction, both static and dynamic, and I'll soon be introducing multiplication.  I recently read that it is important to word the problems as a number taken X times.  For example 2x3 would be worded 2 taken 3 times, and not 2 times 3.  When you think of how the child takes the tiles from the compartments, that wording makes more sense.  I will be presenting multiplication with the golden beads first to make it more concrete, then returning to the stamp game.

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