Week 17, Day 1 in ECC

Yeah, I remembered to get on here and write about our day.

We started with the Pledge. Rabbit has really been insisting on it, even though we had let it slide toward the end of 2008. Then, we went through the next 4 sections in her T-n-T book for Awanas. It is really only 2 new verses, and lots of questions to answer. She will be doing the questions as part of her seatwork every day. We read about our country from Window on the World and prayed for them, and then worked on our memory verse.

For our geography lesson, we just looked through a page of German words. It is interesting to see the German words spelled phonetically, but sometimes I'm still not sure we said them right. In science, we read about the "deciduous forest canopy" - the main focus was insects. Rabbit did her science page on the life cycle of the butterfly. She dictated a whole paragraph to me.

After snack time, we tried the next thing in Spanish - which was to try to tell the Three Bears in Spanish as much as possible. She really didn't want to. Trying to decide whether to move on tomorrow, or just let it go.

Since it had snowed this morning, the kids went outside for 15 minutes of recess.

After recess, Rabbit got started on her seatwork, and it was time to work with the boys. I read to them from their Cubbies book, and then we worked on their verse. Then we spend a few minutes at the calendar. The boys finally know the first 6 digits of our 10 digit phone number. It shouldn't be long now and they'll be able to say the whole thing. I've also just been working with the letter "a" with them. We've played a few games. Mostly, I'm trying to teach them that if they see an "a" all by itself in a sentence, it says "uh." Even at bedtime, when I read their Bibles to them, we look for the "uh."

We did writing eights today. Rabbit said she wanted to do them by herself. I said, "No way." She still isn't having a very good attitude about them. Then, our English lesson was to copy a letter (you know, letter you send to someone through the mail) from her English book. Instead of doing that, we just worked on the format. I had her put the date on the upper right, then the "Dear So-and-so," on the left, we drew a box where the paragraph would go, and then signature on the lower right. I wasn't so concerned that she copy the letter as much as get the format right. After that, she read some books from the book basket.

After lunch, we did Spelling. We've been doing the study-test method. Today we looked at the words and found the common sound, looked at the different ways that sound was spelled, counted each way, and then she copied them into her Spelling dictionary. Unbelievably, she thinks this is fun. It is good, because it really makes her look at the words and think abou them.

Then on math, we're still working with times six. I had her build the problems with the blocks, write them down, say them, etc. She finally has 6 x 3, and maybe even 6 x 4. I put all the times six right-brained flash cards that she is havign trouble with up high (I don't really have a wall, as much as some drywall around a support beam) for her to look at. I also had her trace over all the times six problems as part of her seatwork.

Then we did reading, poetry and music, and we were done. A good day, with no fussing. Oh yeah, we read another chapter in the George Muller book. He sure traveled a lot!