Conference, Lessons and Teaching my Girls

*Note: The following is a list of my garbled thoughts. I'm still working on organizing them in my head. There just seem to be an overwhelming number of them. Does pregnancy contribute to this?

Conference was wonderful. We loved it. The week before conference I had been really studying what to teach my girls. I've been reading a TON and teaching Emily how to read. I started searching through for the "best" books to be reading my children. Not just randomly going to the library and grabbing what I thought looked interesting. After spending quite a bit of my time researching what I should be teaching my children I was interested in noting what seemed to be the theme of the conference, Teaching Our Children. One of my favorite talks (how can one possibly choose just one favorite) was the first talk of the Saturday Afternoon Session. http://www.lds.org/conference/talk/display/0,5232,23-1-1207-11,00.html

I then spent the next week looking into the things I had found the week prior to conference a lot more closely. We've implemented a few things in our home for this week and I'm eager to implement more. We're keeping up with Emily's reading lessons, which she is doing great at. But this week I added a "scripture time" where the girls color while I read the Book of Mormon for 10 minutes and quiz them periodically about what we're reading (we have not replaced this with our Family Scripture time in the evening with Daddy. We just concentrate a lot more on reverence with Daddy because that is a 4-handed-parent lesson ;). We've also added, "scripture memory" (see my links at the bottom of the post for the system) and we've been working on the 1st Article of Faith. Emily has it down and Meredith almost has it down as well, so I'll probably stick to it for another week and let her get it before I move on. The one thing that has surprised me is how much clarity Emily has gained in saying the scripture by memory. It sounds wonderful! And is music to her mother's ears. We are also continuing to read our "Let's Get Ready for Kindergarten" book. Meredith loves it. She's learned her left and right hand, she knows all of her capital letters and their sounds, most of the lower case letters and most of her colors and shapes. Emily has upper/lower case letters and sounds, shapes, colors, and quite a few numbers (although numbers is what I will be focusing on for the next few weeks, including telling time.)

Anyhow, here's my list of "favorite links" that I've found.
simplycharlottemason.com, but in particular the Scripture Memory System found there.
http://simplycharlottemason.com/timesavers/memorysys/
Also, there's a book list, or a "book finder"
http://apps.simplycharlottemason.com/
But, I think my favorite book list I found was here, http://www.amblesideonline.org/index2.shtml
The Ambleside website I'm still digging deeper into and love what I see.
And then, more websites for handwriting worksheets
http://www.writingwizard.longcountdown.com/multi-word_handwriting_worksheet_maker.html
http://www.handwritingforkids.com/

Speaking of handwriting, I need to search for a book like this next one to improve my own, less than desirable, handwriting.
http://www.pennygardner.com/italicsbk.html