Light day

Jimmy worked a little with Grandmom this morning. She brought us workbooks with lots of learning games, like "which one is different?" Jimmy had a lot of fun learning with her. So I made our official lessons a little light today so as not to overwhelm him this morning.

We read our book (NotMJ) and discussed the boat's name, Periwinkle. The name is in italics in the book (as it is here) & Jimmy learned that boat names should be printed in italics. We'll be discussing other uses of italics at other times this year when they come up in our other books (Storm in the Night is one).

For math, we started our October calendar. I'm going to have to jump around in the Saxon teaching manual a little - it is set up for 12 lessons per month, but I am doing a lesson every weekday (except for a few breaks during holidays). When he gets better at understanding the calendar, I may perhaps just do 12 calendar lessons a month. We'll see. After the calendar, we introduced a new math tool - linking cubes. This was a big hit with Caleb (I'm sensing a trend... he likes manipulatives), but Jimmy really enjoyed these as well. After they got a chance to play with them on their own, Jimmy & I worked on making a tower of 5 cubes. We counted them as we put them together, we compared two towers of 5 cubes (his tower & my tower) to see that they were the same size & had the same number of cubes, and we counted them as we took them apart.

Jimmy reviewed his Bible verse today. He is definitely improving. He remembers last week's verse perfectly, too. I'm hoping to keep building on these verses, but I'm not sure how to handle it when we have quite a few verses to review. Perhaps we will just review a few past verses at a time instead of the whole lot. After our memory verse, Jimmy wrote 4 more big B's and 4 more little b's. His big B's are still very good and his little b's are showing definite improvement. The breakthrough of the day was him learning which two lines (plus one dotted line) to use as a guide for how tall to make the line & the bump. We tried the sight word flash cards, but he was too mentally tired.

After our official lessons, Jimmy read a few 1st level readers with Grandmom. He was still drained, but Grandmom got him to read a few of the words with her. I think readers & sight word flash cards may be the way to go for Jimmy's reading lessons.