Growing and Changing

It's been a while since I last blogged so I will just try to fit in everything we've been doing the last few months.
The biggest change is that I started teaching Karim how to read. I put in tons of research time on homeschooling and finally have at least a tentative plan of what I want to do. For now our focus is on reading English and Arabic and then we'll go from there once we have to prepare for formal schooling. Karim was born 3 days before the Maryland cut-off date so he's always going to be a year behind his buddies, but really that is ok with me, especially considering his active personality--putting off sitting in a desk is better for all of us. So we've been working through The Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading and so far it's been great. We started with short vowels and now we're almost done with the consonants, next we will start putting consonants and short vowels together to read small words. Then we move on to long vowels and common letter combinations, at which point Karim should be able to read simple books. He has picked up a few tricks for reading already. One of his favorite things is reading books and he seems to do well at memorizing words from these books that we read a lot as well as common words he sees around outside. He stores all these words and when he sees them elsewhere he "reads" them (but really he has just memorized what they look like).
We ordered him some Arabic language activity books to work on letter recognition and he watches YouTube videos to practice pronunciation and vocabulary. I was finally able to find an Arabic teacher book with English teacher notes, so we ordered that and will start it next week along with the activity work books. We're having a really good time and I have enjoyed teaching him and look forward to more with Karim and Roqaya when she's ready, although she is still getting a lot out of Karim's lessons.
It's been getting colder so we've been staying home more often. It's not easy finding indoor things to do that don't cost a lot of money. We have 2 weekly activities we do that work well--the Toddler group and the story time at the library, at what time we also do our weekly library check-outs which seem to be growing. Each time I leave the library I have more books than I returned. There are just so many good ones and I'm pretty sure the kids put some in the bag when I'm not looking.
We've been playing Wii fit and Wii sports to keep somewhat active at home (right now Karim is biking and I'm able to have a little time to myself). Karim (and sometimes Roqaya) has started helping out more with chores. Karim loves to vacuum and put laundry away and I recently started using a timer to motivate him to clean-up toys. I came across the idea in a book and wasn't sure if it would work, but the timer works for getting him to do just about anything--cleaning, getting dressed, getting ready for bed--things that shouldn't take long but do for some reason.
That's where we are and I will try to update more often