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.