Playing catch up

Phew! Not too busy this week, comparatively, but we did have some catching up to do from last week and we have reached the end of the week feeling pretty wiped! 

A few habits have fallen by the wayside and I worked to get the kids back on track. We have stopped keeping careful track of chores and I think this is ultimately because I have not gotten around to paying them. I need to get myself to the bank and take out cash in 5 cent pieces so they can see materially just what their work amounts to. 

They are still doing chores of course. Depending on her mood Georgie is either very quick and efficient or extremely unhelpful. Theo continues to help with unloading the dishwasher almost daily and this is a major load off for me. However, the practice of getting up, getting dressed, and making their beds each morning has disintegrated. Too many rough mornings out of routine. So I have had to be quite strict about not allowing them to go downstairs before they are at least dressed, which has proved to be a big fight. However, if I take a relaxed attitude about it it is even harder to get them to buckle down in the morning. 

Work this week has been fairly good. We got caught up in science from last week. We learned about more animals and did two science experiments, including one which illustrated how polar bears walk on the ice without slipping. Theo finished his first cursive workbook and has been working quickly through the next book. He is now using cursive in his history portfolio. 

I have been trying to get out secondary sources for his history work. All he wants to do are the maps. We are nearly through the lap book for his learning about the Jewish people and ancient Bible  lands though. He has finished the poem booklet he was working on for First Language Lessons. This week we learned about adjectives and did a review of all the other word types we learned about. 

He has also taken up writing and drawing quite a bit. His punctuation is really, really good. His spelling is also impressive. His grasp of how to tell a story needs work, but I have no desire to curb his enthusiasm. 

And I am pleased to say he has been finding his math more enjoyable lately. He did two lessons once this week instead of the usual one per day. So something has clicked. 

The thing need he most needs to work on is without a doubt his narration. I know the information he reads is locked in his head. He will come out with it randomly here and there and when I ask questions carefully he can usually give me the correct answers. But explaining things in his own words is really burdensome for him. Even if he can remember more about a story he will usually only give me a short sentence to narrate part of a reading. I am thinking it might be good to get him doing one story narration per day.

The other issue this week was plagiarism. He knows he has to use his own words but the trouble is that he has a nearly photographic memory for this kind of thing. He can recite poems easily. This morning I asked him if he could remember that poem in his cursive book about whether to use "you're" or " your" and he rattled off the whole poem. He has maybe read it two or three times. His 24 line poem " The Year", which he made a booklet out of for copy work, was memorized after having read it maybe twice. He memorizes so easily and quickly that it can be really hard for him to rephrase information in his own words. A problem we ran into when doing his science this week. He felt really discouraged and I had to help him with rephrasing information using different words than the ones in the text book. Hopefully that will come with practice. 

At the end of the week they got to have a fun Sunday school day with daddy at church. They made advent calendars it seems. And learned about St. Dimitrios. Hopefully next week will bring us just as much fun.