The Land of Nod

They both started the day well with Maths. We had intended to start at 9am and the kids were up, breakfasted and we were ready to go when my parents dropped by and ended up stopping for a cuppa so that put an end to that. We eventually got started at 10am. J whizzed through Exercise 1.1 and 1.2 from his GP Junior Maths 2. He then moved onto doing Exercise 2.2 from GP Junior English 1. Ellie was a bit slower with her maths but I was pleased with what she did. Today she grasped subtraction with borrowing quite easily and got on with her Number Book 5. She hasn’t worked as quickly as I would have liked today and has been easily distracted for most of the day too.

They then each wrote a letter to their penfriends which I will definitely make sure I post tomorrow. They were thrilled to receive a letter each off Callum and Clark so they were eager to write back straight away. It is also great for them to practice writing as recently dh has been on about how he thinks they should do more writing. As it happens this is going to be a heavy writing week for J anyway with where he is at for the rest of the week in his English book but I am also looking at doing a writing centre for both of them too as seen on Kris’ blog at Weird Unsocialised Homeschoolers. I am thinking of having them do a daily writing task perhaps.

We stopped for Lunch for an hour and then got back down to it. We did a review of lesson 9 of First Language Lessons 3 which we covered last Thursday and they both totally blew me away with them both remembering the words to ‘The Land of Nod’ by Robert Louis Stevenson. I have been dithering for ages over whether to go ahead and buy FLL3 and have been making good use of the samples but today I have made my mind up to get them after they each recited the poem brilliantly. I couldn’t have done it and I wasn’t expecting them to be able to do it yet but I had decided to just have them read it perhaps twice more today but J decided that he knew it already and he recited it brilliantly so then of course E had a go and again did great so I am going to spend more money on homeschool books.

Actually I have been very good of late and not spent much on homeschooling books for ages despite seeing lots of great recommendations on the forums I have restrained myself but dh got a nice windfall from some shares he had forgotten he had which he has now sold and we got a nice cheque on Saturday so I am already spending it ;)

I am still totally torn over whether to go for Writing With Ease. I think I will probably buy the Teacher’s book and then look and see if we need the workbook too and if so what level to put them on as at the moment I am not sure what level that would be. I was thinking of putting E back onto FLL1+2 as I was worried that she perhaps would start to struggle with it but after hearing her recite the poem I have decided to carry on with FLL3 and slow it down if necessary for her.

Anyway back to this afternoon, I read to them ch 3 from The Story Book of Science about Ants and they were quite interested in it and we discussed about Ants. Next we did Exercise 1.3 from GP Junior Science 1 where we took each other’s pulses and then talked about factors that can affect why some people’s pulses are higher than others and they came up with age, weight, fitness amongst others.

Next I read to them from the Oxford Book of Bible Stories about The Cities of Sin about Sodom and Gomorrah. J gave an extremely detailed narration of it without being asked so I was very pleased as I hadn’t been 100% certain that he was listening to it but he obviously was. I was going to try and write it down but I soon admitted defeat as he was going way too fast for me to keep up. I think though it might be worth getting a tape recorder or perhaps video him on my camera so I can type it up later as his narrations are lovely and it would be nice to have some kind of record of them, like his own storybook based on the book he is narrating.

Then we did Chapter 12 and 13 from SOTW and also the map and colouring pages from the Activity Pages. Then they both read a page at a time each for Chapter 1 of Tut’s Mummy Lost… and Found and that was that for the day. E never got round to doing her English as she was very slow with her maths and daydreaming but I will just add that to tomorrow’s work and hopefully she will daydream a little less then too!!