We have moved back to our original reading lessons – 100EZ lessons, and scrapped Original Parent’s Guide for the time being. We liked the stories in 100EZ lessons – and Original Parent’s Guide seemed a bit forced. Plus Allison just didn’t seem to get as much from the way the material is presented – phonograms/pure phonics rather than the distar approach of 100EZ lessons – so I made an excutive decision. We are going to finish 100EZ lesson, and then we may do the last 20-30 lessons in Ordinary Parent’s Guide (it seems to go a bit further than 100EZ lessons), and then move on to spelling, ala Writing Road to Reading and lots of just reading out loud. SO, this week we shifted back and I realized something, Allison seemed to be struggling with reading before we moved to Ordinary Parent’s, and seemed to continue to struggle even more with Ordinary Parent’s – not really struggling in her ability, but more in her desire…and some in her ability too…but now that we are back with 100EZ lessons, it is apparent that she was struggling because she was about to make a MAJOR jump…I can’t believe the difference in her reading! She is so much more fluent now! It is incredible! I am blown away. Our reading lessons have been back under 15 minutes, without the timer. Before we shifted from 100EZ lessons, we were breaking a lesson up over two days so that it wouldn’t be overwhelming or too long to maintain focus. And now, here we are, and she is BLASTING through these lessons, and reading the stories with much increased fluency and comprehension. It is like night and day! Today she even asked to do two lessons (I talked her out of it, lol). So we are on lesson 82 – only 18 more of 100EZ lessons!
In other news, we resumed piano with a new teacher, and even Meredith is partaking in piano lessons! She is just basically doing a preschool thing, playing around with pitch, tone, etc. Not really learning to play 
But their teacher says that Meredith has a great deal of focus for a three year old and should do very well! Allison likes her new teacher a lot. She didn’t think she would, but she does
And, in even more news, I found the Kindergarten level of our math program on ebay for a good price, so now when Meredith is older (probably in a year or so), she has her math all ready to go!
And in even more news, unrelated to education, Lydia has a tooth, talks and is working on mobility! Watch out world! I think she is going to be a dainty gentle little thing She doesn’t seem as destructive as Meredith:
But time will tell
We LOVE 100EL here. However, we’ve never made it far. Rachel started it, and froze up when we got to TH cause she couldn’t say it – she thought she was, but she wasn’t. She was almost 4 then. She then went to a pre-school and came out of there reading. Zachary wanted to learn to read last year, so I got it out again. Turns out he already knew ALL the phonetic sounds!!! Maybe from the Alphabet Songs we bought from Singapore??? Who knew he was really listening? All he needed was to know how to blend all those sounds he knew. He’s now reading some level 1 books! I did VERY little with him.
Are you sure my Natalie wasn’t there with your Meredith??? That is soooo a Natalie kind of mess. Any chance there’s chewed up apples, mushed bananas or spilled cups of yogurt under all that? I would have that to deal with as well….sigh. WHAT are these girls thinking??? LOL!
Thanks Diane, We are loving 100EZ lessons, but there have been a few bumps in the road. We bought it back when Allison first started asking me to teach her to read. She was three. Since then we have picked up, discarded it, picked it up, discarded it, picked it up, etc., etc., etc., numerous times. We really liked it because Allison has speech difficulties, and the early approaches in 100EZ really seemed to help her speech problems! I really think that without this program, she would have had a horrible time learning to read. Many of the phonemes were just sounds that she couldn’t say! If she were in PS, I really think that she would have been labled with a learning problem – when really she just really needed an individual approach
Yay homeschooling!
I’m pretty sure there wasn’t any food under that mess, but who knows
Yeah, from other discussions, your Natalie sounds a lot like my Meredith 
They’d probably have a blast together – although who knows if the house would still be standing when they were done 