The Rhythm of Our Days

With temps and the heat index over 100, August has brought the kids inside. No bikes, no roller blading, rarely swings. I used to spend whole summers in Florida nearly entirely inside as a kid; the only other viable option is to spend it in water. Some day we’ll have water nearby again, that doesn’t require a drive, and we’ll all spend our August days pruned :-).

They’ve been watching movies, more than usual: the entire series of Christy, How Green Was My Valley, Beauty and the Beast, The Little Rascals….

Reading: The Babysitters’ Little Sisters series, Harry potter, and bunch of others they read a chapter or two of and then pick up something different the next day.

Art projects: sewing and embroidering pillows, drawing on the newly harvest butternut squashes the neighbor brought over, a series of plates on the seasons, fashion design, building design…

Cooking: learning to make grits for breakfast, pasta dishes for supper, and dog food mixtures for the puppies.

Shopping: when I was sick, firstborn took my Walmart list and did the whole thing for me, even price comparing!

A few nights here and there Dad has been doing some spelling, grammar, and latin with them but mostly they’ve done a few chores and gotten their showers in the evening. It’s just about too hot to do much of anything else.

Oh what a difference a few months makes!

He had a 25% delay by the speech tests; a larger concern by two doctor’s opinions. Not enough to get therapy though so we let it fly. Good choice mom.

Today he said his first sentence, “I can have it Mom?”

Common vocabulary words: monsters, Wheaton, sissy, idiot, baby, hurts, milk, berry, juice, cup, fork, kitten, chicken, fire, truck, car, bean, mom, nurse, boobie (yes, he still asks almost every day and he’s been weaned since after Easter), poop, potty, jeans, shirt, shoes, cheese, more, church, donkey, road, swings, bed, diaper…..

unique vocabulary words: all-ee (water), elelelelel (banana, he makes the sound by working his tongue back and forth over his lips). Dee-do (thank you)
favorite sentence structure: all nouns and verbs. As in, “Mom. porch. book. tractor. read.” Translation, “I want you to sit on the porch, rock me, and read to me the tractor book.”

Favorite bad words: bitch, stupid, idiot. Yes, we are properly mortified.

Favorite word, object, fascination: TRACTOR.

A few minutes ago, he came in my room, saw a magazine with jack o lanterns on the front and said, “pumpkins”. I think he’s doing just fine…

Firstborn and his Godfather.

W with his bamboo rod.

What was lame-o about this is that my batteries died at the fishing pond; after this we went to a river with lush greenery and shade all around where the boys caught Blue Gill. It was a perfectly serene and picturesque vision and all I got was the muddy pond….at least memories are golden!

First born:

Reading a totally cheesy horror-book called The Rage, found in a free bin at the used book store, about a dog with rabies.

Also reading:

We love this book; it’s a prequel to peter pan and hilarious thanks to co-author Dave Barry. I’m also reading this out loud to W right now.

Sunshine:

We are working through this fabulously fun book:

It has a book list, that we read together, and then do the math activities that come after. It’s a lot of critical thinking and brings out the math skills mentioned in the story. She’s getting reading, time with mom, and math, and it’s FUN. This is a good for the Living Math list!
And speaking of the books on the list….today she read Frog and Toad together, a good one for practicing her oral speed. I tootled around on amazon.com today for the titles listed in the front of the book that we don’t already have and found most of them for less than a dollar. I did have to pay shipping on them but without a good library close by or hours to search the used book store until later in the summer, this was a pretty good plan B!

W: as mentioned, I’m reading peter and the starcatchers to him. He is also reading through the McGuffey first reader with dad in the evenings and is about ready to start reading short books on his own. I wish I’d been this relaxed watching Firstborn learn to read; we immerse them in language and books and it’s delightful (at times LOL) to see how individual the rate of learning can be, and how natural a process it should be.

Books for R.K, who loves to be read to:

W: I started with him today. He built with the MUS blocks, we went over site words. We took baby for a nature walk to get him to stop crying (it was one of those mornings….). W colored a map of Canada while I read several chapters of Paddle To the Sea to the kids, the book we’ve started many times but have yet to finish and want to so badly. They love it! He watched a few MUS lessons and headed outside to play Swiss Family Robinson.

Firstborn: read from The Once and Future King, Our Island Story, and This Country of Ours. Tootled around on the internet looking for more stuff on the gold rush. He’s getting very good at “surfing”, reminding me that computer skills are caught very, very quickly and it’s okay to put this off until late, even in our day and time of computerized-everything. He copied a poem in cursive, filled in a map of Canada during the Paddle reading….this was most impressive. The instructions were to just color it in; he went the next lap and took out the Atlas and labeled the whole thing. We went over the provinces of Canada for geography. He did another Latin lesson. Then we worked on math. He wants to do it all mentally, which he’s very good at, but we are working on “showing your work” for test ability. He needs more work on borrowing. He’s very good at pre-algebra “solve for x” kind of stuff. He headed outside to be Fritz in their game of Swiss Family Robinson, coming inside only for a piece of chocolate cake.

Sunshine: started the morning working on the piano. She is only doing it by ear but has learned to pick out some pretty melodies and chords. I’d love to be able to provide her with lessons now that we are about to be debt free!!! She wrote a song about a cell phone and made her own American Girl catalog. She did a map while I read Paddle, watched the MUS lessons with W. She is Bertie in Swiss Family Robinson and she served the boys their cake!

They all have tutoring this afternoon; emphasis on math.

Yesterday we visited and went to church. The kids had tutoring with a new emphasis on math per my request.
Today started with retribution. The kids are getting into nightly games of hide and seek and flashlight tag and I guess last night W kept turning on the light during “hide and seek in the dark”, which frustrated Firstborn and Sunshine. So while he was sleeping they covered his face in red ink hearts.

Some people would find a prank like that funny. W would not. So the first order of the day was sentences:

“I will never do anything to disrespectful to someone’s face. And if something isn’t funny to everyone, it’s not funny.”

Onward.

Firstborn: wrote the above 15 times. We read about Harrison’s short presidency in This Country of Ours and the arrival of Arthur in Our Island Story. The artist we covered was Jan Vermeer. We looked at several of his paintings and talked about elements in them all; also read a short bio. Firstborn then painted a watercolor that was supposed to incorporate elements Vermeer used. The end result was “not so much” but I did like his use of perspective.

bad blur on photo is due to sticky stuff on the lens.

He worked on another Singapore placement test and I think we determined which level I need to get for him. Maybe. He’s not testing well. He understands concepts but not terms well and so he struggles to understand what the test is asking. Once explained, he often can solve the problem correctly. And we really need to get into fractions more.

A chapter in Crispin.

Sunshine: read a chapter in the Magic Treehouse book she’s been working on. A long hour was spent on a painful math placement test. Yikes. I know exactly how she feels and I’m without ideas on how to best help her.
W: read a chapter of The Boxcar Children with him.
RK: watercolored and made hand prints with Sunshine. We read several books this morning and after a recommendation on the Trisomy 21 board where I’ve been doing a little reading about how to help with speech delays, I ordered a DVD of Signing Time. I think all of the kids are going to find it interesting and hopefully it will help with the frustrations he has over not being able to communicate well. I’ve tried a few books on signing and we’ve had very limited success with them.

“Strewing” is something I’m stepping up a notch too. My very favorite items for strewing are Painless Learning Placemats. We have them on the table where we eat breakfast and do school and the kids love them. I’m glad there is such a large variety of them; I ordered a few more of them today and they still have some we can go onto next. They are good for rotating as well.

Yesterday I got National Geographic flashcards on state trivia, presidents, and spanish vocabulary. Every few days we’ll rotate them in a bowl I set in the middle of the table, letting them free-grab and explore as they want to. They usually do it the most when they are bored or when they notice something new is in there.

Thursday. Needing a hard house work day, I let them settle with movies this morning while I got started on a deep clean in their room. Firstborn though, used to the “computer after school” privilege, thought I meant to do school today and went and did it himself! Jaw droppin’ I tell ya.

He: read both history lessons, did a half hour of Multiflyer, selected a new Rudyard Kipling poem and copied it beautifully.

They all watched a documentary on Henry Ford. Firstborn read a chapter of Crispin; Sunshine read two chapters in the Magic Tree House book she’s on, and W went through site word flash cards.

After RK went down for a nap, we did a plaster/paint craft.

Halfway through, RK was up and ready to “help”.

Firstborn: started geography with him today with Goode’s Atlas. Pulled several vocabulary terms from the text in the beginning of the book; got him talking about cartography. Read about Druids in Britain and the war between America and Britain at the Canadian border in history. Spent time looking up vocab terms. Played several math games on line and also more RuneScape. A chapter in Henry Huggins. He goes back to tutoring this afternoon.

Sunshine: Read more from The Princess Academy, she and I alternating paragraphs. Pulled spelling words from the reading. Practiced those three times. Worked on her cursive; she is struggling with going backwards. Learning cursive has been good for both she and Firstborn with their letter reversals but they both at first try to do the same thing with cursive letters until the links force their hand to go the other way. She spent a long time with an online game that gives the amount of money paid, the cost of the item, has the child figure the change due, and then the make up of coinage to reach the amount. She also worked with subtraction and borrowing with this. She also has tutoring this afternoon.

W: read 3 letter words, played blocks with RK, played in the ditch outside, and has tutoring today. He’s been begging to do some written work so I’ll sit down with him for awhile after dinner while Dad works with Firstborn on his Latin.

RK: got into the cinnamon again today…..seems nervous about my attempts to wean him and he’s not at all in favor of the idea.  Will walk with him in the glorious sunshine while the kids are at tutoring, so thankful for the resplendent day and God’s good mercies upon us!