This week was hectic. We're starting back up with open houses (our house went on the market in June, got an offer in Sept, and fell through in Oct - the relocation company dropped the ball & lost us our sale). Lots of cleaning and "don't touch that!" going on in our home. I hate doing this to the boys. One plus is that, during our open house on Wednesday afternoon, we skipped school & went to the park. It was a fun, refreshing time.
History is Jimmy's clear favorite subject. He loves listening to the stories. He even makes more of an effort to memorize the History memory cards than any other subject's cards. We read another 3 chapters, bringing us up to the Israelites in Egypt. I was surprised when we read that story. I thought this was a much more secular history text.
Caleb's favorite subject is Math. We played with counting bears & made a pictograph this week. Caleb got the concept of a graph right away. (I remember Jimmy struggling a bit to keep things lined up without skipping columns.) I think Caleb is going to be a visual learner while his big brother is a thinking/doing learner.
Jimmy's math is going well, too. He now has seatwork that he does on his own before we have formal lessons. First seatwork attempt took way too long, but setting a timer seems to be helping a lot. Today, Jimmy even beat the timer by a considerable amount of time. He gets the occasional problem wrong, but they're always because he wasn't paying close attention. All of the warnings that "most children have difficulty understanding this concept" mean nothing to him. My little geek!
Spelling is going surprisingly well. Our biggest challenge is convincing Jimmy this it is OK to make mistakes. He sometimes just refuses to even try if he's not 100% sure about how a word is spelled. This week's words were home, bring, truck (repeated), sting (repeated), am (repeated & to be repeated again), and first (to be repeated next week).
In Bible, we read Psalm 5-8. Jimmy surprised me yesterday by asking some pretty deep questions about a passage that described God's wrath towards sinners. We had a good chat about how Jesus took that punishment for us. He was appropriately impressed.
Memory work is going more slowly than I had anticipated. The Classical Conversation memory cards have a LOT of information to memorize. I'm having trouble memorizing some of them, too. We'll keep working at it, but I might have to repeat a week here & there. Caleb got some new memory work, too. His Sunday School class is working on the kids' catechism, so we're helping him during daily memory work. He's up to questions #1-4. He has them down pat.
So far, everyone is still excited when I call "School time!" Let's hope that keeps up!
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