Learning Notes: 10/20-10/24

Rambling

The last two weeks remain kind of a jumble in my mind. I meant every day to write notes, but it was really all I could do to just show up and do school. Last week we took three days off to attend to the church and for me to really truly and finally get my quarterly reports done. Because of the church I was not able to concentrate on my reports, which made them take much longer than normal, and because of my reports I was not able to concentrate on the children and their school. On the one hand it’s good discipline to have file reports, and on the other hand, it drives me nuts when I have to cancel school so I can report on school. Anyway, I’m not so flexible and bendable as I once was, or maybe I should say, I’m more based in reality. I probably have never been good at multi tasking, but now I admit it and just don’t even try.

This Week

Monday: No school. Clergy meeting. Mission Group. Cleaning of the House. Gathering of Groceries.

Tuesday through Friday

Did a full day of work every single day. Got through three whole lessons of history and science, rather than one repeated each day. Did math every day. What a triumph. Maintained a solid rhythm of spelling and Bible Reading and French and writing.  Brought poetry back into the mix in the form of limericks. Found an old address book with a limerick for each letter of the alphabet. A was an Afghan Emir, who played the accordian by ear, and so on and so forth. It’s not the grandest of language but it’s awfully fun and a help to bring in the littles who are supposed to be doing the alphabet and get lost a lot in the shuffle.

In history we had chapters on Clovis and Mohammed. In the middle of reading about Clovis Romulus began to breathe heavily and finally shouted, “how can we know any of this is true?”  Stopped everything and talked about how history is made and recorded, about journalism, about how Matt and I wrote about leaving the old church, about the New Testament. Appreciated very much the skeptisism  of all the children and about their sudden deep desires to all begin keeping a journal. Reading and talking about Islam and Mohammed generated similar amounts of energy. Watched YouTube clips of Muslims at prayer and talked about Christian versus Muslim evangelism. Felt like a real Homeschooler.

In the way of spelling we also had a really good week. Won a couple of  battles with Elphine who wanted to give up. Found that Aloicious was finally paying attention to detail. Managed to give actual spelling tests to Gladys and Romulus. On Friday was going to skip the test and was faced with an angry teary Gladys who had, unbeknownst to me, been practicing her words and memorizing them, and who therefore beat Romulus because she had studied.

Was also surpriaed, on Friday, by a frantic, and on the verge of real sobs, Romulus who has apparently been working on a story every day, but who hadn’t ever put his notebook away where it belongs and so that the pages were falling out. Had to stop everything and find him a book with more firmly fixed pages. He settled back down and started copying the story from the old book to the new.

Didn’t get to Latin. Have a hard time justifying spending any time on it when math and spelling are so pressing. Did have better consistency about piano practice. Did end the week with a sense of hope.

Scenes from the Week