Lydia

Lydia is our 2nd child.  She is sort of in 5th grade. I say that because I really don't think about what grade my children are in but it is useful to peg them somewhere so people can relate.

Lydia is our first "mixed dominant" child. She is right hand dominant, left eye dominant.  According to Dianne Craft, mixed dominant children often have more trouble with handwriting glitches.  Lydia's handwriting is readable but she does struggle to stay on lines.   Her letters tends to rise and lower as she is writing across a page.  We are working on that.

She's a very bright girl, and in many ways different from her older sister Naomi.  Despite the occasional sibling fight, though, they are very much best friends.  And they have a great deal in common too.  Both are artistic and love animals. They like some of the same kinds of games.

Lydia read very early, even earlier than Naomi.  I was shocked when she sounded out a 3 letter word at the age of 3 and a half!  She was fluent by 5 and reads voraciously.

Math proved more of a struggle.  Naomi, Isaac and, I think, Miriam are hard core mathies.  Math concepts just come easily to them.  That wasn't true for Lydia.  She didn't learn her math facts very easily and some of the concepts were tough. She has gotten frustrated with math on occasion and said that she was not "very good" at math.

We encouraged her that she WAS good at math. This year she is charging through MathUSee gamma, which covers multiplication.  And she finally has all her multiplication facts down cold.  She also understand completely how to do long multiplication, which is my goal.  It is important to understand the concept of long multiplication though in actual fact, she'll rarely have to do a long multiplication problem as an adult.  Unless she is stuck somewhere without a calculator (and that HAS happened to me) she'll just reach for a calculator.  But I want the children to understand where the number comes from and she does.

Lydia has never written long prose and even her emails generally are short.  Naomi encouraged her to start a story for Na-No-Wri-Mo and she decided to try for 2000 words.  (Naomi decided on 10,000 words and is almost there...she might try something longer since Nov. 30th is a long way off!)  Lydia sat down and started plugging away. She hasn't worked on it a lot the last few days but she is over 1000 words at this point.  That is very impressive for her and she thought through her plot carefully.  So I'm delighted.  We haven't done as much structured writing practice as I would like due to busyness on my part, but so far the older girls are developing as writers anyway.  It probably helps that they read so much. Well, I know it does.

So this year is going well for Lydia. She does some of her work with Naomi and I am thankful that works well.  There are things that are tough for her, and Naomi is usually willing to lend a helping hand.

I am grateful that the Lord blessed us with 2 girls close in age who were both early readers and can work together so well.