And, what's more, I decided that since this is kindergarten (although who knows if we'll "skip" a year later on - St. Nick is six - first grade age, but with a December birthday, he'd be in kindergarten if he were in school), we'd take it easy. Not that we hadn't been - we had been, but I'd been feeling badly about it. Now I'm going to give that up.
So, what did we do? We did our usual language arts of reading everything in sight (McGuffey's 1st reader, XXIII-XXV and Wind on p. 279 of Reading Reflex), learning about telling sentences and exclamation points, and a very little bit of writing.
We're still doing ordinal numbers in Singapore Math - working through some of the intensive practice. Not sure if St. Nick just doesn't want to turn his brain on, or if this is really that hard for him. He gets first, second, etc., and can even tell me which item in a line is third from the left or fifth from the right. But those word problems in the Intensive Practice book ... brutal. "Maria is fourth in line, Juan is after Maria, there are two people after Juan. How many children are in line?" To which St. Nick says, "What are they all waiting for?"
Hmmm.
Excitement for the week was catching our caterpillar, trumped only by St. Nick's first Lego Engineering class, which is two hours long every Monday afternoon. He absolutely loved it, and it's held at the library, which is super-convenient for me. As is Photoshop, which I've used for years and years, and just this week I opened up a new window, showed St. Nick the basics of selecting a paint brush and color, and half an hour later came back to see a really cute "painting" of Jonah being swallowed by a whale (sigh, okay, okay, a "big fish"). It's on the desktop, but I'll upload it when I'm over there next.
Ah, here it is!
Fencing on Tuesday was fun too. "Mommy! I got five points against that really good fencing guy!" The "really good fencing guy" is actually a boy whose been in his class since last winter, and has a tactic of running straight at his opponent while waving his foil madly in front of him. More often than not, he goes sliding onto the gym floor just as he's about to get hit. Methinks the child needs a little less sugar in his diet. I find it interesting, however, that St. Nick equates spasticness with being "really good."
We did a good bit of reading - about a third through Charlotte's Web, read Madeline five or six times (and discussed surgery, what your appendix does [i.e., not much], and boarding schools - heeheee), a sweet story about a thunder storm The Way the Storm Stops - also five or six times. And Our Nest which has a sort of Creation theme. In a strangely New Agey way. It's a cute book, though. Oh! And we got on a Patricia Polacco kick (thanks to our home ed group!) and read the strange Native American (sort of) story of Boat Ride With Lillian Two Blossom. Cute. Strange, but cute.
Anyway, we are so so so SO BORED with Egermier's Bible Story Book - painfully so. So (just so I can work the word 'so' in one more time), I broke down and purchased a Comic Book Bible and two little story books - one on Gideon and one on Samson. Those are for next week, technically, although St. Nick can't keep his hands off the Comic Book Bible. "I just LOVE the Bible, Mommy! It's my favorite book." That's what I like to hear!
We gave the sickie's immune systems one more day to recover from a nasty, nasty illness (Little Fish coughed so hard he vomited - several times - sort of like a cat with hairballs, only more fluid volume and less hair), and opted for a nature walk instead of church. It was great fun and we climbed some very steep hills. The coming back down was a real strain for the kids, but I think this sort of hiking is excellent for their physical and even emotional development. Nothing like scaling a mountain to develop persistence! Not that we have any mountains around here, but hey, when you're three feet tall, every hill is a mountain.
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