Week of September 21

Highlights:

- Mercer Museum 

- Making caramel apples (including picking the apples!)

Devotional Topic: Aim for the Best

(Good, better, best; using time wisely; touched on pornography)

Things we changed:

- After an embarrassingly frustrating CC day, I decided that we needed to shift Circle Time to also be practice for classroom etiquette. Making that a priority has already helped with behavior.

-This week we did full math lessons again (although I often skip the "meeting," only doing some of the problems quickly. Neither of us has the patience for setting a bunch of supplies up for easy review questions!)

- We started experimenting again with copy work. This next week we will jump in with it. I ordered Writing with Ease, and think it will be a great fit for Henry. 

- We also tried practicing our memory work while we were outside playing soccer.

Things to work on next:

- I'd love to give some more focus to practicing soccer or other sports. The boys love them. We could do memory work with it again and just make it a little more engaging.

- Continue working on classroom etiquette and attitude.

- This week we will start implementing Writing with Ease, doing copy work twice a week and dictation with handwriting pages the other two days.

Week of September 14 - CC begins!

This week we jumped right back into the swing of things! We added full math lessons back, which has gone really well this time. We had backed off to just doing the worksheet for the day, but now instead of being stressful, the lesson is actually some really nice one on one time. We still have just done a page from Handwriting Without Tears each day, but next week we will get into more actual writing.

We did try doing a math lesson at the library this week, which was kind of a fun change of scenery! The biggest news this week was that Henry made flyers for their caramel apple sale and we started getting orders in. One lady at Jimmy's work might want them for her wedding! If these boys are willing to put in some work, they can make a ton of money! Plus we went and picked some preliminary apples, which was wonderful, of course. For the flyer, I "drove" in Publisher and Henry told me what to say and where to put things. He was the artistic designer. We will work up to him doing it all on his own!

The other fun event this week was Henry and his friend started our mummified chicken! Not as gross as I thought it would be, and it hasn't started smelling too bad yet!

Oh! I almost forgot! We started our co-op, Classical Conversations on Tuesday! The kids did great. It was a really horribly long day, but they learned a lot and got to be with friends and do presentations and have a great time. The memory work is crazy. It is just incredible how fast they pick things up! Henry and Archer already know the classifications of living things and the Latin noun cases, among other things! And it seems easy for them!