A Glimpse Into Our Homeschooling Life ...

OMGoodness, what a day - it started off with all of us being very tired today, we helped our friends with packing their house up and moving some of it over to their new place.  Josh and Charlotte worked very hard yesterday and I was very impressed that they actually dragged themselves out of bed and started school - not quite on time, but they got up and got at it. 

Josh finished his math early today so I suggested that he put in a math CD into the laptop and play it during his remaining time.  He put in I Love Math and it wouldn't play!!!!!  I looked around for our Math Blaster CD's but could not find them (it is still baffling me as to their location), last resort was to put in their Spy Masters CD .... it wouldn't play at all, kept showing this error message, grrrrrrrrrr.  So, the laptop got shut down so that I didn't physically harm it, lol.

When it was time for the kids to work on their typing program, guess what happened .... yep, couldn't find that disc either!!!  So, we swapped Friday's computer time with today and the kids worked on their blogs (Josh now has a bat on his blog).  Charlotte was half way through her computer time when I found the typing disc - maybe there is hope for the Math Blaster disc's.

For art today, Josh continued working on his crocheting today - his afghan is really coming along.  I'll try and remember to post some pictures of it.  Charlotte finished the scarf that she was making for her Maplelea Doll and she started knitting a dishcloth today, she had bought herself some variegated pink cotton yarn a few months ago and is finally getting her chance to use it - she got her stitches cast on for the dishcloth and then on Thursday she will start knitting on it, I think she is planning on just doing garter stitch for it but I could be totally wrong on that, lol.

The Mad Writing Minutes that we have been doing for over a week now is proving to be a wonderful thing - I have been having the kids only focus on handwriting their first and last names (on alternating days), they do great on their first names but slow down quite a bit when they are writing their last name.  Josh has increased his speed on his first name from 6 times (when we started) to 10 times (which is what he did today), Charlotte was consistent with writing her first name 6 times and the past couple of times we have done our MWM she has gotten up to 8 times.

Math is going well - I do want to add Mad Math Minutes to their math lessons.  I had ordered a Mad Math Minutes book, it is reproducible so I can photocopy the pages that I want them to do for that day.  I think it will be a wonderful thing for them to work on, Charlotte isn't so convinced, lol.

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Well, today was pretty much a wash-out for getting school done.  Last night Charlotte was complaining that her stomach was hurting, she was pretty pale and hardly touched her supper.  I asked her if she wanted to go to bed early and she did - she was in bed between 7 & 7:30 last night.

This morning when I went in to check on her she said her stomach was still hurting - Josh brought her in some of her school books (isn't he a loving brother, lol).  However, any time she moved or made a sound he was up out of his chair and running to her room to check on her - so, as a result of all of this, I told the kids we would take today off.

About an hour ago I went in to check on her and she looked at me with these pathetic little eyes and asked "Can I get out of bed?, I'm really bored", to which I replied "Nope, you're sick remember" (unfortunately I couldn't muster up much sympathy in my response, lol). 

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Well, that's not exactly true - it isn't a 'New Schedule', just a tweaked one. 

Our first "Subject" every day (Monday to Friday) is the Bible, we started out where I was having the kids just read their Bibles from a 'through the Bible chart' ... we'll still have the kids do that but I added something new to this time (and extended the amount of time on their schedules for this subject).  I order some books from CHER, last week they came in and one of the books is called Christian Studies Book 1.  There are three books in this series and from what I have seen so far I'm really liking - there is a section called Facts To Know, there is a memory verse, it is set up in a question & answer format and you can either use the Golden Children's Bible or you can have the kids use their own Bible's - which is what we will be having Josh and Charlotte use, this will give them practice with looking up verses in their Bibles.

I retyped out their schedules and printed them off - however, I messed up with the times (forgot to change the times when I moved the subjects around) ... this proved almost to much for Josh today.  Have you ever seen the movie "A Bug's Life", the ants are carrying back food and this leaf falls in front of the one ant, he starts yelling "I'm lost!!!!!!!!" and then this other ant has to come over and guide the 'lost' ant around the fallen leaf.  That's kind of how Josh was today - the times listed on the schedule did not line up with the time that was showing on the clock .... really messed him up, he almost stopped doing schoolwork today because of it.  He really is a kid that has his schedule and needs it all to line up just so - good thing we understand how to work around his PDD.

We are also trying to figure out if we are going to keep our school year on a public school schedule (sort of - we start in August and finish in May), what I mean by this is have us take the same holidays that the public school does (2 weeks at Christmas, a week or so for Easter, etc). or switch to a year-round school schedule.  Don and I have been discussing this and he feels that this would work really well for us (I'm thinking that he is right), the kids are trying to figure out if they will end up with more or less days off per year, lol.

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