So glad the school part of our day is over …

Are Mondays hard for anyone else? Our day of rest sure wears the children out.  Then starting back into the school routine can be mis-er-a-ble.  Today was the worst we’ve had in a while; but we had two big days over the weekend with the holiday.  Perhaps I should’ve taken today or this week off what with the Homeschool Conference coming up Thursday and Friday.  I’d really like to get three good days of lessons in, though.

Circle Time was the bear.  It went a lot longer than usual and was pulling teeth to accomplish.  Somewhere the kids heard that it’s April Fool’s Day and got the mistaken idea that this meant they could tease each other all day and not get in trouble?!? They actually articulated that! We started learning The Church’s One Foundation for our next hymn.  I have it scheduled for 6 weeks, hope we can accomplish that. I moved N-boy on to the second to last page of catechism questions (Hooray!).  We managed to get through everything in Circle Time, which is something, I think.  I recently added reading Peril and Peace to our Circle Time and I think that’s going to be a great addition for my kiddos to think about the history of the church.

Math went OK.  M-girl and N-boy, thankfully, both had review lessons in MEP.  R-girl and I fought through a Math Mammoth lesson dealing with making two digit numbers and place value. We got it done, but really, it wasn’t as difficult as she seemed to think. Oh, and I had R-girl do a couple of lines of penmanship.  She’s reviewing h and k. 

For history, I’m trying something new and crafty.  I am not (not not not not not not) crafty and don’t care for bringing out the scissors and glue to do projects, but thought the Explorers of North America History Pockets looked kinda fun and since we just read the chapter on Explorers in Story of the World, I thought it would be a nice time to try something new.  So far, while it is fun, I see why I usually stick with the read books, narrate, mapwork, copywork of the Story of the World Activity Guide. We’ve only done the set up and introduction, so maybe it’ll be more learning soon, but there wasn’t really anything to do with the maps we put in the first pocket … so my kids – on their own – traced the routes with different colors.  They questioned why Magellan wasn’t one of the explorers … until I explained these were only North American Explorers.  Mostly they’ve learned about using glue, which I suppose is something I’ve deprived them of long enough …

Grammar and Latin went well.  R-girl and I made new flash cards in Latin and talked about writing dates in Grammar.  N-boy and I finished up Lesson 15, he has to do the section review next.  He also worked on using and diagramming adverbs which tell when.  M-girl worked on her Latin on her own, I should probably check it.  Then we did Practice 4 from Killgallon’s Elementary Sentence Building book.  Having worked on lessons like this will be a great precursor to parallelism in Lost Tools of Writing.

They ended up getting done early enough to play out back for half an hour before Quiet Time.  Hooray!  We made up some time by doing the history pockets and not working on new content. 

I’ve been very happy with the schedule tweaks I made with moving Grammar and Latin together.  N-boy’s Latin lesson was on adverbs as was his Grammar lesson. The reinforcement and somewhat different definitions and explanations is really helpful.  Moving our Library trip to Friday instead of our hard day on Monday helps me to plan the books I’ll need ahead of time.  Just two little examples of living a plan and fitting the plan to life rather than life to the plan.

I am very behind on my EdX coursework.  I think I’ll sign off here and go work on some of it.  Or take a nap. It’s a toss up.