I knew today was going to be rough when BigBoy woke up with a very croupy cough. Luckily I saw this coming last night, and had his cool mist vaporizer running already, but still. Nothing can derail a homeschool day faster than a sick baby kid. Thankfully, a dose of Robitussin seems to have helped tremendously as he is currently rolling around on the floor playing legos, with very little of that nasty cough.
thePinkDiva kicked off our school day by asking to play with the Math-U-See blocks again. (See, I told you it was a big hit!) I have to watch her like a hawk though, because she has a tendency to take little pieces and run off with them. I don’t mind her playing with them, but… We are still missing about half the counters we got with the K12 curriculum a few years back, Candy Land is missing most of it’s cards, and the rest of our kiddie board games all have pieces missing. There is a reason why I got Family Game Night & Monopoly for the Wii. And that reason’s name is thePinkDiva.
So, Diva and Geekboy ripped through their math lessons in record time. They ran off just in time for BigBoy’s Robitussin to kick in. He walked into the kitchen declaring he was now “good enough to leave my room.” He snuggled up on my lap and whipped through MUS Primer Lesson 4 (the one on rectangles). He ran off, and thePinkDiva came back for her phonics lesson.
This is where the drama started. You’d have thought I asked her to read War & Peace, instead of HOP book 7, The Fog. She screamed at me, and got sent off to her room for a 20 minute fit of temper & rage. When she finally settled down, we compromised and only worked on sight words today.
Then GeekBoy continued the drama when I asked him to come back to the kitchen and do his language. We started going over Prepositions yesterday and I realized that the “book” I have to use with him isn’t so much a grammar book as it is one of those testing review & reinforcement type books. So, the two pages we did yesterday were obviously not enough. Today I used this site to find the nine most common prepositions, and listed them on the board. Then we talked about how to tell if the word was being used as a preposition (if it comes before a noun). I pulled one of his favorite mystery books off the shelf, picked a page at random, and we looked for prepositional phrases. He seemed to really catch on after that. Then we looked over today’s workbook pages and found a review of punctuation that he ripped right through. Until we came to the writing part.
I know writing is his weak point. He has struggled with it for years, and been officially diagnosed with Dysgraphia. The main strategy for overcoming Dsygraphia is to practice writing. So I made him think about the things he wanted to write and tell me. Then I dictated his sentences back to him, and let him write without thinking too much about what he wanted to say. This is when I noticed the way he curls his hand over his page. It kind of reminds of the way the lefty kid in high school used to write, except, my son is a righty. Our new goal is to help GeekBoy re-learn his writing technique and use a straight wrist. I’m hoping that once we get a good writing technique into his muscle memory, writing itself won’t be so much of a pain.
History today was just a review of the continents and compass direction. We are working on American History this year using Heritage Studies 1 by BJU. Should be a fun year. I’m looking forward to taking advantage of the area’s rich history with field trips to various locations we’ll be studying.
Believe it or not, I’ve gone 2 days without picking up my camera! So no pictures yet. I’ll have to try to remember to take some tomorrow.