Wednesday, Oct.30

This morning I treated the boys to bacon.

They professed their love for me when I placed this on the table.

And, yes, he ate this all...plus 1 more piece that his brother gave to him off of his plate.

Our book work went smoothly. Copywork, narration, and dictation from King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table as well as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Math focused on money for Elijah and reading scales and measuring for Toviel. He spent quite a long time with the water and beakers.

The boys made up their own game with a set of complex rules.

It was Awana tonight. After Awana and after Cris got home from his meeting, we convinced Tove to let Cris pull his VERY loose tooth out. Tooth #4. Toviel was nervous, worried, "creeped out" (his words), and it was hard for him to do this, but eventually he opened his mouth and let Cris yank his tooth out.

I love the way Tove talks now!

Tuesday - Moping At Home

Okay...so I wasn't moping all day at home, but I was at home all day, and there was a little moping.

I'm just feeling alone and disconnected. I feel as though I'm needing more meaningful connections but have no friendships that go deep enough to feel as though any real connections can be rooted. I'm hoping its just a matter of time.

This morning we got grammar and writing out of the way right away. Elijah worked on a thank you letter, got it addressed and ready to mail. We forgot to mail it though. He read a selection from King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table and summarized the selection beautifully. Toviel did some copy work, and did a short summary as well, about Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, then we talked about the different types of sentences....and more copywork.

Elijah is doing a lot of fraction work and today was how fractions relate to money (a dime is 1/10 of a dollar, etc.). Toviel and I played a longer game of Subtraction Corners than we played yesterday. By the end he was getting much quicker and grasping the concept of subtracting the tens first and then the ones from the minuend. He makes a lot of connections with numbers that confuse the heck out of. He moves them around in equations in what seems like a senseless way, but comes up with the right answers. Like 78+69...he takes 5 from the 8 and 5 from the 9 and makes a 10 out of those two 5's. then he is left with 3 and 4, which is the same as 2 and 5, which is 7. So the units are 17. He takes the 10 and adds it to the 70 to get 80. Then he takes 50 from the 80 and 50 from the 60, and those two 50's make 100. He is left with 30 and 10 which is 40, so he has 100, 40, and 7 which is 147. And he keeps track of it all in his head. I'm trying to teach him to just add it like 78+60=138. 138+9 is the same as 137+10, so it's 147. But, I also want to encourage what makes sense to him.

Here is the middle of our Corners game:

The boys also had a nice amount of time to play today. They are very loud!

We also read some history as a review, about the Turks invading Constantinople, now it's Istanbul not Constantinople...and we laughed about the song by They Might Be Giants while we listened to it several times. And we talked about the Bubonic Plague, and other icky Middle Ages things.

This evening I read them the story of Confucious, and they both dropped off to sleep with ease around 11pm. I'm hoping for earlier mornings and earlier bedtimes this winter.

Our Monday - Homeschool Club!

Yesterday was a nice day.

We started our morning with some book work and time at the table. Elijah reviewed some math concepts and then we played "Multiplication Memory" several times together.

Math games are definitely more effective for him than worksheets. 

Tove played "Subtraction Corners" with me as well.

We got to our writing and grammar stuff in the early evening because we had afternoon plans, and math games always take a lot of time.

Our afternoon was filled with our homeschool club. The group is so big that we are renting a community hall now! The fabulous moms who organize it had fun, silly games and several crafts to chose from. After the crowds around the craft tables died down, he happily immersed himself in creating something.

It caught on, because near the end of it, Elijah was ready to do the same, as was his best friend, D.

Up to this point, Elijah had been outside running around in the SNOW having light sabre duals with a few other boys.

After they had finished their crafting, the kids broke off into their book club groups. This group read "The Witches" by Roald Dahl, so here the group is discussing the book with our fabulous ever-energetic crazy mom friend, J.

The boys and I started to read "The Gammage Cup", but the way it is written is a bit confusing to them. So we are going to wait a couple more years for that one.

Wizard School

On Saturday we went to an event put on by the University of Alberta Science Department. It was called The School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. I didn't know it was based on the world of Harry Potter. My boys have not yet been introduced to the story. There were parts that were a little awkward when the university students were trying to engage my boys with questions like, "Do you remember the kind of owl Harry Potter had?"

Or, "Who's wand do you think this belonged to?"

To which I replied, "We haven't read the books yet so we wouldn't know."

The student replied to Toviel, "Well, guess anyways."  (?????)

Um...haven't read the books yet, Genius.

Anyways, parts of the event were a hit, parts were a miss. 

The boys did enjoy making a fragment of DNA with jujubes and licorice.

There were some potions to mix.

There were a couple of rooms filled with bones, ancient tools, and other archeological interests.

We were there for about 4&1/2 hours. The highlight was the presentation from a chemist. He showed us all kinds of interesting things, from how oxygen speeds up reactions, to how awesome liquid nitrogen is. He set a lot of things on fire.

I wasn't at the top of my game today. I was tired, feeling deserted, disconnected, left out, and alone.

Today was quiet. A lot of Minecraft was played, some videos were watched, ice cream was eaten. We woke up to snow and ice on the ground, so the hibernating feeling was dominant today.

Earlier This Week....

This week was not terribly exciting.

We finished reading Roald Dahl's "The Witches", which we all thoroughly enjoyed. Elijah has been reading "Treasure Hunters" by James Patterson. I bought it for him because it looked interesting. He said he wasn't interested in reading it. A couple days later I told him he HAD to read the first chapter. So he did. And then he was hooked, reading at the most inopportune times...like at midnight, or when I wanted to get his math started for the day. But since I feel as though his reading interests are a little fragile right now, I don't in any way discourage or interrupt it unless we have some place to go.

We did math, writing, and grammar each day this week. I love how Elijah is able to summarize readings the way he does, a skill I never developed. We are plugging on with grammar, although I'm not sure how much is getting through.

Toviel loves explaining to me how he figured out a math problem. Sometimes it takes a lot of time as he is trying to articulate, and it takes a lot of patience on my part to not rush him through it. I know that if one is able to teach someone else something, they will learn or retain 90% of it, so the best way to learn is to teach, which is what he is doing when he is explaining his logic to me.

Tove hates to be alone when I'm teaching Elijah 1:1, so he often ends up sitting at the table and finding something to do. Sometimes it turns into something fantastic and hours of fun.

This week he created a little restaurant with paper. Here he is in his restaurant kitchen.

He set the table up for fine dining.

And here is the meal that I ordered. Spaghetti with a side of salad.

Elijah ended up making collectible cards and selling them in his shop.

On Tuesday Cris and I started building a fence for one of his clients. The hope was to finish it that day, but the holes were dug wrong, so we had to redig them...4 feet deep. I say "we", but it was really "he" who did it. We got the posts cemented in and then I returned on Thursday to put the boards on the stringers, and then again on Friday to put the finishing touches on.

Ahh...what a beautiful fence. The client was over-the-top delighted with it.

On Tuesday the boys went to M's house in Devon for the afternoon. They had a blast and one of them was mad when I showed up to bring them back home. I'm happy that I never had to drop them off and leave them anywhere when and where tears were involved. That is a real gift to me.

A Post About Posts

This morning started with some math, writing, and grammar for Elijah.

Math was working with fractions, specifically halves and quarters. Dictation was from King Arthur, and grammar focused on direct and indirect quotations and the proper punctuation of the two,

Toviel worked on copywork from a piece of poetry called The Nightingale and The Glowworm in the morning. In the evening he did more work on perimeters for math.

In the afternoon I drove the boys to M's house for the afternoon. It was a long drive...there and back was almost 1.5 hours. Then I had to do the drive again to pick them up. Yes, I dropped them off and left. With them there. Amazing! So they spent the afternoon playing. I spent my afternoon with Cris, putting posts in the ground for a fence. The frustrating part was that someone else had said the holes were all ready to go, but in reality, the spacing of them was wrong, and the depth was less than half of what they needed to be. So that had to be fixed, and I'm not terribly good at digging holes. Cris is, though. He dug out many 4 feet deep holes.

We did get all the posts levelled and cemented in by 5pm. But, the person we're building the fence for decided he liked the posts so much, he wanted the fence to be longer, so we will be putting more in the ground later this week before putting up the boards.

Tove lost his top front tooth tonight. It was bugging him so much, he asked Cris to pull it out. He wanted the other front tooth pulled, top, but it didn't come out so readily, and is, in fact, still in his mouth. This time the tooth fairy had better come in the night while he is sleeping!

A Lovely Fall Day

...We have been having lots of these, actually. Warm, sunny days with the beautiful colours of fall, the smell of the leaves, the sound of them crunching beneath your feet...I love it all.

Today we did a couple of math lessons. Both boys are working on measurements and perimeter at differing levels. We left the house just after noon to head to Sherwood Park, then on to the Wilderness Centre. Whenever we go there, lightsabers get brought out and the kids engage in some sort of cooperative game where they all play a certain part, choreograph battles, and do a whole lot of running and jumping...and I mean a lot! Hours of non-stop movement is soooo good for them. Plus, they are having a ton of fun, learning to work together, working through opinions and coming to mutual understanding and agreements so they can "get on with the important stuff." The relationships that are being forged are so important. The fresh air, freedom to explore and move around, it is more valuable than sitting down and reciting all the prepositions, especially since we are on the cusp of winter and preparing for months of frozen hell (ahhhhh...can you tell how much I just love Canadian winters?)

After our afternoon at the Wilderness Centre we were invited back to our excellent friends' house. We only were able to stay for a short time. My plan was to get home and finish some LA bookwork, but by the time we got home, there was the need to eat to deal with, some tidying up, voting, and more eating. Fresh air turns on the appetite! The boys played a bit of Minecraft before bed, and then I read them the story of Elizabeth Fry.