New month, new school.

Well, we're four weeks in now. I have ceased to feed myself properly and forgotten about vitamins. Several of the chores have been neglected, though Theo has more or less owned the responsibility of emptying the dishwasher which is nice.

And we have decided to put Georgie in a better school which she started at today. It's double the price, but snacks are included, it's an afternoon class, the learning environment is better, and it's a three hour session rather than two. I was wary of getting her into an afternoon class because I was afraid it would make us lazy in the mornings, but as it happens the morning routine is pretty well established whether we are having a preschool day or not and to be honest, getting out the door by 8:30 was way too hard on her anyway. Hopefully this way our mornings can be productive and relaxed, and as a bonus Theo and I will actually have about an hour longer to spend at the library than before. Of course this will mean that three days a week Theo will be doing school for the morning and the afternoon, which I had wanted to avoid, but the reality is that he is doing it anyway. Most afternoons and even on weekends he has been pushing to do more and more school work. And he isn't just focusing on one subject either. He wants to do everything he can in every subject.

This week we started a copywork project for language lessons in which he copies out verses of a poem called "The Year"- one couplet per page into a booklet, which he then illustrates. He is supposed to do one page per lesson. He has done four since Wednesday and only because I wouldn't let him do more. We also learned about comma usage, although it was mostly review for him.

He is enjoying science as well. We continued learning about animals and mammals this week, doing narrations and drawing pictures of the animals we learned about. We also did an experiment to find out why a cat's eyes appear to glow in the dark. We have not got around to our diorama as I had planned but he did do a pretty good poster of a desert scene which he insisted on drawing hairless mole rats in even though we didn't actually read about them. (David Attenborough documentary about Africa.)

He has now finished learning the lower case cursive alphabet and is eager to move on to upper case.

Math is slowly progressing. We did two horizon lessons and two kumon lessons. We also had a discussion about how many minutes were in an hour where I showed him how multiplication worked.

Holding him back on Story of the World is proving a daily battle. He wants to move ahead on all the student pages and projects as quickly as I will let him. We took out a book on the history of the written language to supplement our Egyptian history work which was really informative. He made a "secret message" in hieroglyphics which we are still making a paper towel tube scroll for. Mind you the message isn't all that secret since he wrote the English translation right next to it. He also finished most of the ancient Egypt pages in the portfolio, including the lap book, and we made tin foil and paper mummies, which we will make painted coffins for next week.

Another pretty full week. Hopefully Georgie's new school schedule will help us do even more work but at a slightly more relaxing pace.