Well, since I shared a post about Will recently, I thought I better do one of each of the kids. This one is about my beautiful talented daughter Elise. She gets more and more pretty each year. I can only imagine how beautiful she’ll be as an adult. I hope and pray that she will be even more beautiful on the inside.

Elise is the only one so far that I am officially schooling. I do some preschool with Will, but it is very minimal this year. Elise is in second grade, so her school each day is more official. We have some issues enjoying math, but she is actually quite good at it. She is doing a 3rd grade math book and acing most of her tests. Today we learned how to add more than 2 single digit numbers together. I thought this lesson would be hard, but she breezed through it quite easily. I have found that the secret to getting her to enjoy something is to make it feel more like a project to her. One day we took a paragraph from a book and practiced tallying data by counting how many times each letter was used. She didn’t say anything about it at the time, but later she told someone that “we did something really fun in math today.”

Science is more Elise’s cup of tea. Especially if it has to do with animals. This year we are studying astronomy, which doesn’t have any animals in it, but she still enjoys it. I am making an effort to actually follow through on the experiments, as again, this is what she enjoys. When we learned about the sun, we used a magnifying glass to burn holes in leaves as a demonstration as to why you shouldn’t look at the sun directly. This was so much fun, it drew in our neighbor as well.

Literature is also a strong point for Elise. She has a list of books to read herself this year and a list that I am reading to her. She reads really well now, and seems to retain the information just as well. When we started out the year I was a little concerned about her spelling. I had asked her to write something on her own and she said she wouldn’t know how to spell the words. I told her to do her best, thinking she would do better than she expected. I was discouraged to find that I could barely read what she brought back to me as the words were all garbled as she guessed at the right spelling. She was also very slow at writing, so that I would often finish her spelling words for her as she spelled them out loud because we ran out of time for her to write them. Both of these issues has improved greatly. She writes much faster now, yet still retains her great handwriting (something that also has improved as we’ve concentrated on that this year). She is also finding the right spelling for her words on her own more easily now. Today she had to spell “picked.” She wrote “piked,” took a look at it and said, “That is piked (pronounced with a long i) isn’t it?” I guess the spelling rules we’ve been going over have helped. Though she didn’t know how to fix it, she recognized that it needed something else in order to make the short i sound.

Because she is now getting through her spelling words much quicker, I am able to have her do more of her extra assignments that require great writing skills. Poems is what we’ve been doing lately. I’ve scanned one in because I was impressed with both her handwriting and her choice of words. She had a framework to work off of and I helped her sometimes find the right wording, but really a lot of Elise is in this poem. Cloud, by the way, is a real wild mustang that we have watched a PBS Nature series on.

There is obviously more to Elise than just her school skills, but this is what is at the forefront of my brain right now. Perhaps I will write another blog post about her personality and other characteristics. This is all part of my new goal, by the way, of spending time thinking and praying about each of my kids in a more planned out manner. I want to really consider where they have grown lately, where they need more growth, and what I can do to work alongside God as he works in their lives.