A New Year

Thankfully we have moved and the new baby is here. So our BIG things are over and finished with. Now it's just a matter of unpacking the 43,857 boxes that we brought from the old house and finding a spot for everything. Yeah, that's all.

Anyway, we had to start back to our regularly scheduled learning days at sometime and I decided that we'd start today. If I had decided to wait until everything was perfect...well, I should just send Harry back to school. And that ain't gonna happen! Especially since the schools in our area don't start again until next week.

So today I made some scones for a treat (yes, it was a mix, I poured water and shaped the things), got out the books and called the boys down. I decided that teaching one kids wasn't enough and that Sam should start "kindergarten" now, so he joined us. He got out his workbooks and decided to do 3 or 4 pages in each and that was enough. It's interesting--Harry really doesn't like workbooks, but Sam looks through them lovingly wishing that he hadn't done the pages so he could do them again!

But really Sam's kindergarten is whatever he wants to do--it's prep for next year when he will need to work a bit harder. So, I concentrated on Harry. And he concentrated on eating his scone in the tiniest possible bits. Seriously, he'd look at it and decide which side to eat and pull off a tiny piece that wouldn't feel a mouse properly. While he did that, though, I had him working on his Math. He's finally made it into the MUS Beta book, hurray! Since today's work was review, he did three pages. And nearly died from the strain.

Fortunately, he survived after eating another crumb of scone. It gave him enough energy to finish a spelling lesson. Tomorrow is a review of what he's done in spelling so far, I can only hope he'll survive. And maybe spell jet properly.

Grammar came next, at which point I wished I had cut the scones into smaller pieces since it would take him approximately five hours to eat the thing at the rate he was going. But I was really proud of him for remembering "The Months" poem word for word. We haven't done any grammar/memory work for so many weeks, I was afraid it would be lost in the recesses of his memory. And it wasn't. Hooray. We discussed pronouns, and after defining them as words that no longer were considered amateurs, we figured out what they really were. There was a lot of giggling over the pro-nouns, and just as much over the examples of pronouns we figured out.

Before we began his lessons, Harry told me that if he couldn't do History first, he wasn't going to do anything at all. I know, he has developed quite the little attitude lately, which I squashed promptly. But that also goes to show you what he is interested in. I told him we'd get to History in due time, and to be patient. We did in fact get to history, and read about King Ashurbanipal and the Assyrian Empire. It was interesting if only because the Assyrians were great warriors and Harry could compare them to the Romans. But we spent a lot of time looking at their shields and siege towers and deciding if they really did influence the Romans and trying to figure out who would win in a battle--the Assyrians or the Romans.

So, we finished for the morning. The boys are off playing Romans--they got the entire Playmobil Romans set for Christmas this year. Their Romans always beat the Barbarians--of course.

PS: Sam wanted me to mention that they got almost the entire set for Christmas. They did not however, get the Commander's Tent. The set is now incomplete. Also Julius Caesar did not build the Colloseum, Trajan did.