Preventing Grace
It’s been understandably hard to carry on with school these last few weeks. The gray weather, the constant desire to think about Christmas, the laziness produced by the sun, when it bothers to rise, doing so later and later. I have been dragging myself up, they have as well, and then once up we all wander around in a fog, stepping on each other’s nerves and toes. It is a foretaste of the long home bound days to come, but hopefully we will settle in to contentment and kindness, and this present fractiousness will be just a long ago dream.
Anyway, the week before thanksgiving was pretty good. Romulus got into the idea of reading books and writing paragraphs and making covers for his work. He did Vikings, first, and then later Knights.
He worked very hard.
This week Gladys figured out on her own how when you add, one line of numbers is going up and the other is going down, then you reach the double and they cross over. She did twelves out for herself and then had me write a title to say what she did.
Lots of backwards numbers and letters still.
She also helped me reorder all the colored pencils. They got mushed in the thanksgiving madness and were driving me crazy. We sat together and put them all back together with their own colors.
As far as I remembered we carried on with all the various subjects. We started and finished The Little Prince and tried to review all the spelling for the year up to that point. We finished Life of Fred Edgewood and began Farming. I had a total melt down mid week and told them all maybe I had failed them so much it wasn’t worth it any more. They all felt bad, yay me, yay guilting your own children, and pulled themselves together to actually work instead of lying around complaining all the time. Mostly so frustrated that every single basic activity still requires my direction. Did you get dressed? No. Get dressed. Did you practice the piano? No. Practice the piano. Did you practice your spelling words? No. Practice your words. They each possess a laminated list that is daily flung aside so that I still have to remind and admonish and finally lose my temper. After my melt down the week went better, I guess.
This week Elphine finished her geography book and got half way through The Wheel on the School. Romulus applied himself pretty well to D’Aulaire’s Greek Myths and Alouicious got ahead in science. They worked hard enough that we spent Friday, I guess that is today, as a reading day. We started a biography of the Wright Brothers, started The Hogfather, got to chapter three of The Drunken Forest, started It Couldn’t Just Happen and got all the way to the Alamo in American history. Friday I try to do some American history, since we are still mired in the long lost past. Rome forever, now the Middle Ages. I’m tired of people asking them who Abraham Lincoln is, a question they can vaguely answer, but never asking them about Cincennatus or Pepin the Short. I managed to dig out my beautiful art cards and they drew while I read.
The Annunciation, basically.
And then, not the Annunciation, but a knight that I rescued from a pile of gross drawings, by Alouicious, with blood.
So that’s been the last few weeks. And I probably won’t really do anything except survive next week. Because, as I said before, it’s beginning to feel a lot like Christmas/Panic.
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