today... some schoolwork!

Having just about recovered from another nasty bout of mastitis (grrrrrr!), I felt well enough to try and entice the kids into doing some school work this morning. We got a lot done for not having done much for a few months!

Math

We finished up the chapter on 'solving for the unknown' (a fancy way to say begining algebra for first graders... the way her math program introduces subtraction). Notice how E took the time to illustrate the two word problems. The first has two tennis players with the correct number of balls, and the second problem has 4 people at the table playing a game with a party going on around them. She patiently takes the time to draw all these pictures, making math last much longer than I think it should... but her 'doodles' are so much more productive than any of my schoolwork doodles ever were :-) Since having the twins, I've learned to slow down a lot and relax my expectations of life.... so math doodles are quite charming to me right now.Spelling/Reading

We are working on List E in SWR again, and she actually remember quite a bit of her spelling. I was proud of her!! She learned words like 'this, look, may, your, short'. We also reviewed all of the phonograms so far and she remembered most of them. (more than I remembered actually!)

Language Arts

We are working on memorizing a new poem and chose one by Robert Louis Stevenson called "Whole Duty of Children"

A child should always say what's true
And speak when he is spoken to
And behave mannerly at table
At least as much as he is able.

She can memorize so fast that I think she already knows the whole poem. The lesson plans in her FLL book allow a few weeks for her to learn it, so I think we will be modifying those. She also practiced her handwriting while writing the title, and then illustrating the poem:

the first drawing is a person saying yes (what's true)
the seond drawing is of a person saying "i did" (speak when spoken to)
the third is someone behaving at the table.. notice the napkin on their lap.

Cinematography (a relatively new course at our school)

Now the children are watching the 'making of mary poppins' and learning all sorts of interesting things :-) They actually ASKED for the special features on the mary poppins DVD for their weekly friday movie. (they watch it on daddy's laptop).


Now it's only 10am and I'm watching the clock waiting for daddy to come home... looks like it's going to be a long day here. Maybe we'll have to do more of our home economics class and get the laundry and dishes done.