Monday

A guy from our builder was coming over at 8:30 this morning to look at a couple of issues we're having, so our morning got off to a chaotic start--not the best when you actually want to accomplish something.

So after showing him the issues, he went off to solve them. I went off to educate the little ones. We started off with history. I got Evan-Moor Ancient History History Pockets the other day for Harry and Sam. They looked like fun and something easy to reinforce their learning. We cut, pasted, and colored the first batch today on "What is History." Although I figure if they don't know by now, they aren't going to. After all of the cutting and pasting, things had to dry. So we moved onto...

Reading. We read a story from James Herriot's Treasury for Children. I can't think of what it's called right now, but both Harry and Sam enjoyed it. I tried that book with Harry last year about this time and he hated the stories in it. He just couldn't relate to them at all. And while I'm sure he still isn't a veterinarian in rural England at the turn of the 20th century, he is at least willing to listen to the essays. While they listened all three worked on lacing cards. Annika interrupting every few seconds to shriek "mine" when the boys went near one she might've wanted to have at some point in her life. I decided it might be better if we did some actual...

Math so she could have the cards to herself. Harry and I sat down to learn regrouping. This is where all of the practice adding from right to left comes in. I explained to him what needed to happen, how, and why and we worked on a couple of problems together. I then moved away to talk to Sam while he finished the page. And we had fun with...

Grammar. Lesson 65 in First Language Lessons is way fun. Just so you know. It seemed like time to go outside and play, so that's what we did. But I'm mean so I brought them in to work on some...

Spelling. But I'm not that mean, because we did it in a cool way. It was review from last week because the concepts just didn't sink in too well, so we got out the dictionary and looked for all of the words that started with "wh." There are a bunch. I wrote them on a big piece of paper so we could see them all week. We read some more. Annika shrieked some more. Sam made yet more Roman Maps. If it weren't for recycling, I'd feel really bad about the amount of paper he uses for his maps.

Now it's 2:22 and I'm hanging out with the littlest one (no not the turtle), completing our March plans, and listening to Harry read every book I checked out of the library the other day. I'm not sure if I should hide the books I check out for future use or just let him read them early. Ahhh, if that's my biggest problem...