Here's our homeschooling highlights from April.

There were two holidays this month. First was Easter, which we celebrated with crafts, bible stories and an Easter egg hunt. The second holiday is Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting. It runs from mid-April to mid-May this year. We read "Ramadan Around the World," written by Ndaa Hassan, and used this as a chance to try out our new markers: 24 colours designed to represent people around the world.

The girls tried first matching up to their skin and hair colours in self portraits and then tried to find the colours of their friends from around the globe. MsE took this very serious, taking close up selfies on the camera so that she could get the colours of her face just right.

For History and Social Studies we studied Mesoamerica, the Ancient Maya, and Mexico. We read a number of books from the library about these, in addition to our History Quest Chapters. We compared a Mexican Cinderella story to the Disney version we are more familiar with.

I made a book for the girls to show them the photos from our own family members' trips to Mexico. They were excited to discover that Mom had been to Chichen Itza, the Mayan ruins we'd been reading about, and had even climbed one of the smaller pyramids there. MsC liked knowing that she had been swimming in the Caribbean Sea as a toddler.

This month we made a point of doing daily self-reading and writing. MsC loved reading Pippi Longstockings to herself and is still reading The Land of Stories. Her Harry Potter Fan Fiction Story is still coming along. I am amazed by her descriptive writing and use of dialogue, such as this unedited excerpt below:

"All of the new students were Oohing and Awing with the shock of the greatness of the GREAT Hogwarts doors. And so were Nini and Mia. Alright! Shouted a woman wearing tall RED robes. Listen up! You will be following me to the great hall. My name is professor McClanaghan.

So all the first years followed professor McClanaghan to the great hall. When they arrived at the great hall, all the 1st Years gasped. For there were dragons🐉flying above them. Wow! Mia whispered to Nini."

Evelyn's getting quite confident at reading. She likes to read "Jay Saves the Day to Herself," but also enjoys reading aloud to others now. When she doesn't want to do her school work she often will ask, "Can I just read you a book?"

She read all these rhyming words below, but her reading and writing is quite past that. She completed "Level 2 of Teach Your Monster to Read" which included the graphemes / phonemes: ch, sh, th, ng, ai, ee, igh, oa, oo, ar, or, ur, ow, oi, ear, air, ure, er; blending and segmenting words;  reading sentences and tricky words that can't be pronounced phonetically. It works on both reading and spelling.  

Outside of the game her phonetic spelling is doing great. She doesn't mix up her vowels. She can spell multi-syllable words phonetically and is learning some spelling rules. When I thought she was almost asleep the other night, she suddenly asked me if she was spelling "planet" correctly; she was.  

MsC finished the subtraction unit in the Beast Academy 2B book. She also deconstructed one of Daddy's Lego Technics sets and set out to build it. Both girls used the computer with Prodigy Math for extra practice. In it, among other things, MsC was working on converting time into different units (e.g. understanding how many days are in a year, how many seconds are in an hour). MsE was adding together 3 numbers (addition to 20), and using greater and less than symbols. MsE was also doing her Minecraft Math, like her word problems below.

MsC is in her 2nd term of her Jazz class and also her Musical Theater class. Neither class has dialogue, so we haven't figured out a way to practice these 2 at home, other than listening to the music on occasion. That's been odd; usually we spend a lot of time memorizing lines. As far as I can tell, she's doing fine in her classes without our extra practice.

We got in quite a few nature walks this month too, including at Hort Park, Clementi Woods, Tiong Bahru Park, Labrador Park, and exploring the beach on Sentosa Island.